ORIGINAL: RV8ER1

Hey guys. I've been flying R/C for 40 years and always said I would never fly an ARF. They used to to be heavy lead sleds made of foam core wings plastic coated and the fuselages were some kind of blow molded plastic. However I've now been flying modern ARFs for 4 years, all electric powered. The last 2 years or so things have really improved and the performance of these new models is fantastic due to design improvements and their very light weight construction. However there is one major flaw in ALL the ARFs I've seen and that is the lack of proper glue joints. The laser cut parts fit incredibly well but the problem is they only use thin CA on all joints. Most of the important parts in the front of the fuselage are plywood and THIN CA is a poor choice of glue. If we were building these from kits we would use med. or thick CA on heavy load bearing areas like firewalls, landing gear blocks, wing/fuselage through tubes etc. I've seen ARFs have major structural failures and have had motor cages and firewalls of my own planes pull apart during high G loads.
What I do on all my new ARF builds is re-glue all these areas with med. CA . In the hard to get to areas I drip the CA (on target) into the joint and hold the plane to make the CA run down the length of the joint. Some areas I use 30 min. epoxy and use a thickener like Cabosil (to keep it from running) and use a chopstick (or dowel) and dot the epoxy along the joint and then smear it into a nice fillet. The stick allows one to reach down inside the structure. A fairly slow epoxy like 30 min. allows some to soak into the wood. This operation adds very little weight to the finished model.
I've found that an hour or so of glue reinforcement is well worth the time spent. I haven't cracked a firwall or motor cage in 2 years and I logged over 1350 flights in that time so it seems to be working. I hope this information is useful!