I think a well designed all balsa./liteply plane can be built in arc form for 700-800 bucks.

This would include built up plug in wings and a built up fixed stab.

If weight seemed to be the determining factor, one could "shrink" the plane to 72"X72" and shave off a few ounces here and there but honestly it can be done.

If we can take a wood kit such as the Black magic and Insight/Pentathlon series and use standard weight wood everywhere except on wing sheeting and built to 10.5 lbs painted, why can't it be done?

On one of my latest planes I noticed that the side sheeting was quite heavy and instead of tossing it, I traced the frame of the plane on the sheeting and milled the 3/32 sheeting to 1/32 from the wing tube back and removed a significant amount of weight, esp aft of the cg.

Cored foam wings and stabs would also help. Using a lightening core that runs from root to tip instead of honeycombing reduces labor and can be cut while making the wing cores initially.
To increase strength in the correct areas.. you trim the core that would be removed to glue back in. Doing this I was able to build wings rtf at 14oz easily.

i think the pattern community is long overdue for a competitive plane all the way to and thru masters sequences for under a grand in arf format and around 700 in arc format.

This plane would be viable for glow or electric as well.

Chuck Hochhalter
Builder of Organic Fiberous Compound Airframes

cheers.

as a side note, one place that cheap arfs traditionally fail is the canopy/chin cowl. With CA models, they have mastered a light strong canopy that can easily be made from a plug. Heck, you could modify a design to encorporate the existing canopy plugs that they have and reduce cost of production. Same with chin as well I suppose.