The VQ covering is not a monokote but more like a printed vinyl or plastic, pretty weird stuff. Mine lasted for a while, but eventually is starts to wrinkle and shrink and putting heat to it with a gun does not do a thing to fix it, and can actually make it worse. The material itself starts to shrink back over time where there are seems, and it gets bad to where bare wood is exposed on the wings, the fuse, control, surfaces, you name it. My Macchi lasted two season, but now I have to recover it because it was getting "unsafe" bad. Mine lasted two demanding race season before I pulled it out of rotation to recover. It took its fair share of heat and weather abuse before it got to that stage. So right now I am prepping the Macchi for recovering, which can be a little labor intensive, but the plane is worth recovering since it flys so well. To me this is the only real negative about these planes. Other than the hardware, it is a good plane. Just ditch the crappy stock pushrods and get some good stuff in there.

Like Terry has mentioned. The VQ Zero is not a good one to fly stock for silver. The wing is not fully sheeted, the airfoil is too fat, and the wing is too long for the higher speed demands. I could see that long wing snapping in a high speed pylon turn .