Hi all,
I have had an idea. It goes like this: You see a plane that you like, and so you search out the magazines to find a write up about it. The write up's are nearly always complimentary - you are sold on the both the idea of the plane and the 'reality' of it presented in the magazine. You may even search out this forum for build threads. So you commit your hard earned cash and buy it.....

All too often in my experience one ends up with so may bad experiences - not always, but often enough. I have just read the BH Gilmore build thread, and seen the sorry results of an engine failure and to quote the pilot: It flew like a carboard box!

So I reckon what we need to do is to collect everyone's honest experiences of 'living with model' - good and bad, and the perhaps we can be all the more wiser before we commit to spending on something that later we may wish to regret...and you ask yourself: why did the reviewer not point these all too obvious things out????

I have had three recent experiences, and reading the BH Gilmore thread brought my experiece with the BH Ryan ST 180. It looks so beautiful - classic lines etc etc.

1. The components and the construction design are very poor.
2. Wheel spats are flimsy and split when easing over the undercarriage. (It seems that they have used the same wheel fairing design as on the BH Gilmore. Mine were split when they arrived, and even the replacement ones were split)
3. The sheeting of the fuse and the wings is soft 1/32 balsa - press it just a bit (like when pushing the wings together on the joining tube) and the balsa splits underneath.
4. The tube in the wing is cardboard and swells when damp. So you cannot get the alu tube down it. I actually broke my wing this weekend - the card had split, but I did not know this, and in pushing the tube in it caused the card to buckle and the the tube shot through a couple of wing ribs inside. This was the final straw for me, because to rebuild the wing around a resin tube would be too much work.
5. It was way to nose heavy and a major amount of lead had to be put in the tail to balance it. This meant carving into the tail and fair amount of work to patch it all up again.
6. The firewall was cr**p, I had to glass this just to make it rigid.

Presently I am assembling an Advanced Scale Models Cessna Skylane (10' wing span). At the double the price of the Ryan and twice as big it also looks wonderful....

1. Until you find that the ABS fuse has a shade of white that changed between the tail half anf the front half (both join together on some alu tubes). Then the Oracover is another shade of white, and the ribbed flying surfaces are yet another shade. The red painting has been badly masked and bled under the masking...the result from a looks point of view is dissapointing...
2. The instructions don't match with what is detailed in the kit....
3. However build quality looks good...

I will provide my 'living with...' experience once I have it in the air...with a Saito FG57....

Now an ARTF that is great is the WOT 4 XL - the giant version from Ripmax. That was a pleasure to assemble and it flies beautifully. I have a Saito FG 20 in it. It was half the price of the BH Ryan - but so far has given me twice the enjoyment. So far I cannot find anything wrong with it...maybe not very attractive - but hey it flies superbly...

So who else has any 'living with..." experiences to share?