I recently crashed my balsa trainer and opted for a foam wing and aluminum replacement in and attempt to ease my worries of crashing. I started to build the Hobbico Sturdy Burdy and completed the wing as shown in the instruction manual. On to the question....It appears to have a much greater degree of dihedral in the wing than the previous plane. Can I have too much dihedral? What are the flight characteristics than can be expected? and finally, should I attempted the separate the wing in an attempt to straighten it? How do I do that if needed? Thanks

more dihedral means more roll stability. The higher dhedral angle used to be typical of trainers... most often 3 channel (rudder, elevator, throttle) trainers...

The result will be a model that WANTS to fly straighter and won't be as aerobatic. Inverted flight is harder to learn when dealing with large amounts of dihedral (it wants to fip back upright)

A model can have too much dihedral... but it takes a LOT of dihedral to be too much. Go ahead and fly it. The Sturdy Birdy is a good trainer. (a bit heavy... but not awful)

MOST trainers are designed to fly their best with the amount of dehideral shown. FHHuber is right on about the stability the dehideral (or lack of) causes.

Once you learn to fly, your second plane will most likely have little if any dihedral and a different shaped airfoil that will perform better for aerobatics.

The Sturdy Birdy does have a fair amount of dihedral. As long as those ply formers fit into the slots in the wing ok, you know you've put it together correctly. Incedently it's the SB II that has ailerons, the original didn't, maybe they added the ailerons to the design without altering the dihedral?

As for flying characteristics? This thing is a brick! Not ideal as a first trainer, but if you've already got some flying experience it's a fun plane to fly; a bit faster than your average balsa trainer....

A couple of other points:

The ground handling is terrible! Make sure you fit a tail wheel, the Dubro will do, just mount it in place of the skid and put the wire through the elevator gap to the rudder. Make sure you hold full up elevator on the take off run until you're almost at flying speed.

Engine: The instructions will have you believe that a 20-30 size is fine. A 25LA barely flies it. A 46LA is the ideal engine for this plane, a BB 40 would be too heavy. Remember there's not a lot of scope for moving stuff around on that channel....

Well... the .46 LA makes a good .25[&:]