ORIGINAL: carrellh

The blue PT-60 was my first kit. It was pretty easy to build, and it is a tough bird. I used a Thunder Tiger .61 for power. My plane was pretty heavy (I never weighed it) and I do not think a .46 would have been powerful enough for it. My plane needed some nose weight with the .61 so using a lighter engine probably would not be an advantage.

In most cases of a person building a first kit, following the recommendations in the manual is a good thing. But, I disagree with the GP recommendation for building the wing. With instructors and buddy boxes, my opinion is that the "trainer" wing configuration is not needed. The recommended dihedral of the "trainer wing is 6.5 inches and the "sport" wing is 4. When I joined my wings, everything fit great with 3.5 inches, so I stopped sanding and glued it together.

The white PT-60 was built by my brother after I killed the blue one. It had zero dihedral. We both think it would have looked better with an inch or two. There was not a lot of difference in flying the flat wing versus the dihedral wing. The dihedral wing did help the plane to "self level" the wings more than the flat wing but not as much as we would have guessed.