Anyone familiar with or have built/ flown this ARF ? My wife gave me one for the X-mas holiday as a lil' something to play with as she knows I love the Bucker, but the covering scheme is pretty lame.
http://www.flyboymodels.com/servlet/Detail?no=51
I think I'll strip the plane and give her a more fitting covering scheme.

I've contemplated changing out the cowling fpor the radial engine version i like better per the pic above, but i know one with opposing cylinders had a scheme similar to the one above as well, so the factory cowl gets to stay.

Over the weekend I experimented with removing some of the stock graphics that came with the ARF.
I was hoping to simply peel off the rediculous overlapping pinstripes, and blue bands with stars. As it turns out, whomever did the covering really had them on the plane for keeps.
You can see from the pic here, that all arrived in good condition and I started to attempt to remove the covering only on the elevator, I was able to get the protective "clear" film off the specialty covering, but the colors remained, I then tried acetate (which you can see merely smeared the blue). After this I attempted to paint over the covering as a last ditch effort to circumvent the need to re-cover the whole stinking plane. As you can see by looking at the opposite half of the elevator, that didn't work out all of too well either.
FYI, this plane is very light weight and seems to have been made with the electric flyer in mind. (More and more ARF's are comming this way which concerns me as I'm no electric junkie). On one hand it's greats as the plane will be quite light, but it's bad as the planes aer much more fragile, and don't typically like the induced vibrations from nitro/ gas engines.

...And here's a few pics with her stripped down.

Note- the rudder was sanded and primed vs. recovering that, and the cowl was sanded, primed and repainted.
the plane had a few broken wing ribs I found after taking the covering off.
You can see all the lightening holes and quality of construction in these pics
I don't think I'll use the supplied bubble canopy either, I'm a sucker fol the old open cockpit.

Here's the re-worked cockpit "turtledeck" ...Quite easy to do really~
Here she is recovered in TopFlite yellow & silver (on bottom).

Finally !
She's almost completed...
Here she is after the recovering & detailing.
The engine is a ST45 w/ pitts muffler. std servos, I put larger wheels on her to help handle the grass. .
I must say, she looks much better than the way she came from the factory.[8D]
After adding the turtle deck, I cut the bubble canopy to make it look more like a vintage Bukker windscreen. The throws as listed in the instructions seem really extreme (upwards of 60+mm for most surfaces), so I have them set much lower right now & adjust as I go. I need to set the angle up incidence for the top wing, then glue her in place, as a cover for the base of the cockpit and a pilot to finish her off.
Will keep you posted of the first flight.

Well done.
Good luck and enjoy your maiden [8D]