These threads come up regularly. In most cases they are nothing more than an attempt by kit and scratch builders to make it seem like there is something wrong with people who choose to fly ARFs and RTFs. When you read them you'll find the following comments come up in every one of them:
1) People choose ARFs because they need "instant gratification".
2) ARFs don't save much time because they require significant re-engineering.

The fact is that ARFs have brought more people into the hobby and allow them to enjoy the flying aspect of the hobby with a smaller investment of time and money, and in many cases with a better looking and flying plane than if they built it themselves. It's not about instant gratification, it's about maximizing the aspect of the hobby one enjoys most. Some people just need to accept that spending hours in the shop building kits or from scratch is a right of passage that's long gone.

There it is right there! Right on the money Chuck! I have several ARFs, all of the upmost quality. The one thing I have yet to see any of the ARF's were junk guys, the it came apart in the air guys, address or agknowledge is the fact that there is still a significent amount of work to be done to get a quality ARF airworthy. If YOU don't assemble it well & correctly, guess what? It is gonna come apart on ya![sm=idea.gif] Before ya assume the poor little chinese guy did it, take a look at yourself first & see what you did wrong when ya rushed the thing together. I know this to be a fact in my own case. My first ARF while being built of the upmost quality was slapped together by me & now I need to go back & redo alot of things on that one. With each one of done since they become better, straighter, stronger, & truer, not to mention much cleaner looking & better flying! They have progressively gotten better with each attempt primarily from things & tips I've learned in here by people like chuck, Ken, Bill, & Mike who has several detailed how to posts from CA hinging to covering to smoke systems & god knows how many others. If your ARF is coming apart in air you probably didn't assemble it right.

I do intend to build a kit when I can because I do want to know the satisfaction of watching what I build completely take to the air.

Call yourself a scratch builder? Why don't ya try doing it the way my Dad did for years. Go down to the store buy a bunch of balsa & ply stock, some tissue paper & dope. No plans & have at it. That my friends is scratch building in it's truest form! Not to mention they were all original designs right out of his head. He's forgotten more about avaition than most of us will ever learn, and when I brought an ARF to his house so we could do it together he absolutely loved it, & was amazed at the quality of the workmanship involved with that "junky little ARF"! He's 80 yrs old now, scratch built all his life, but he has enough sense to see that ARFs are a great innovation for this hobby. Some of us could learn alot from that ornery old man!

---and it's tiresome, self-agrandizing & generally obnoxious.

I've done the whole gammut, from designing & building my own, to buying & flying RTF's. They are all fun & they all have their place in the sky. I like ARFs & I buy & fly them.

I don't have much patience with the arrogant attitude that only real modellers build their own -- what bull*****[:'(]

-- and then there are the omniscient types who know that the ARFers (new word/[8D]) are just plain lazy because they have time to watch TV, instead of doing the "pure" modelling thing. How in hell do they know what people do in the privacy of their own homes, or how much time they can access -- and what god-given right do they have to criticize someone else's use of their own time?

Go & buy/fly your ARFs & enjoy them as they are meant to be enjoyed. If anyone criticizes your choice, you know just what they are -- self-important fundamental orifices.

roflmao! Yea, what he said.

man oh man, it looks like I opened a can of worms responding to a 2 year old thread, hehe.

Like I mentioned before, there are alot of grey areas in between them these days, I should elaborate upon the advantages and purpose of building these compared to dragging them off of the shelves.

As a builder, even one that can just grab raw materials, no plans, and just make these planes from scratch with plain old fashioned balsa, paper, and even fabricating my own hardware, I personally enjoy the building process alone, even if the plane never flies, it's just fun to take raw materials and turn them into something cool, it's a different venue and aspect all together that should be apprieciated along it's own similar to someone making a painting compared to taking a photo. The advantage of going that route, I don't have to make everything perfect on the first round, ie. it just needs to function, then fine tune, then if it holds merit, another can be created for show, but if I have a kit that needs revisions, or an ARF that does, or if one breaks something through flight, instead of being at the mercy of the manufacturer to find replacement parts "if the parts even exists", I can do it for pennies on the dollar and don't have to wait. Anybody ever see an ARF that had 100% of the replacement parts at "ANY" hobby store? To expand upon that, some of these are just complete, you just assemble the prefabbed components, which in itself is a task in some of these, and it's also fun to put those together as well, you just progress faster and can't customize it as much, or at least shouldn't until you get a feel for the flight characteristics, but those in the end can be just as time consuming depending upon how much customizing you do and alot of fun in the raw building aspect. Recent example, I have a jet that needed canards since it is a total dog to launch, it took 10 minutes with a foam cutter, 10cents in raw materials, and wallah, I now have a jet that actually has a chance at taking off. I broke the canards during test flights, I'm not out a whole lot to replace them, it's that liberation of not being at the mercy of the original designer and manufacturer.

Now I'm not knocking kits, I grew up painstakingly building those traditional all balsa/paper rubber powered free flight models, spent countless hours on it only to find the original plans were flawed, or the materials or instructions supplied were insufficient. You'd spend 1000 man hours on something only to have it crumble on it's maiden flight, it's dismaying but a learning process none the less. What I learned from those kits were the fundamentals I naturally inherit while I build from scratch, ie. I don't need a wind tunnel, the aerfoil doesn't need a digital micrometer and I don't have to master quantum airplane physics just to make a plane, the basics are good enough for me and keeping things less complicated, found it's actually easier to throw out the book and build without the kit. I then look at some of these grey areas, such as a zaggi kit I opened up at the local hobby store. You might as well just buy the raw components and build it from scratch, that particular kit/arf hybird was so crude, I just laughed that someone would spend 150.00 extra just to have some raw components shoved into a box, the foam was particularly bad, full of pits, it didn't even look like they used a foam cutter. Then there are the kits where they have you cut out aerloins that are symmetrical out of a flat sheet of balsa, you painstakingly cut each one out, sand it down to the proper size, and move onto the next. When I wing a design, I just cut up the stock into rectangles, clamp them together, router and/or sand the whole lot into the desired shape, and I now have a stack of these all perfectly symmetrical all at once, taking nearly the same amount of time it would take to build one.

These skills I picked up from these kits and building from scratch directly correlate to what I now build in the real world. The jigs I use for the carts, the procedures and their nature of profiles are right out of any airplane fabrication plant, this is what has my competitors realing over trying to duplicate my designs and this is where I have to look back to those early days building those little airplanes. Everybody else is building these ugly boxes, or on the rare occassion they have a rounded profile, they find it nearly impossible to produce cost effectively, and I do intentionally elaborate upon the designs to make it hard for anybody to reproduce for that purpose, so intstead of a 1" component, it's 8', similar plans, same concept, different materials and sizes.

We should finally create a new terminology for ARF's, and classify a nomclature of RRF, "really ready to fly", which means off the shelf, charge the battery and away you go. Like I said earlier, there are plenty of RC guys that have a few of everything, and in fact, I like buying the off the shelf designs partially because I just don't have time to build from scratch all the time, partially because I don't want to have to worry about destroying them since I'm still fine tuning my flying skills, and partially because when you break down the costs of hardware and components, in some cases, you aren't paying much more just to have them complete and ready to go, I'm a big one on recycling parts and in these cases, I don't feel bad for spending 100.00 on a plane that has 60.00 in hardware I can reuse should I destroy the original. Going that route and combining scratch building skills, I can reproduce anything from the ground up much more easily if I have the real mccoy right in front of me. Another aspect of these RRF, in many cases they have materials that are proprietary to the manufacturer, that jet I mentioned for example is using a foam that takes such abuse, I'm amazed how easy and how back to the original form it was to put back together after some serious crashes, that material alone merited the purchase and in fact, I may recycle the foam itself into critical areas on the build from scratch foamies, it if it reaches a point where the jet is unusable. So, I spent 100, received 60.00 in hardware and have plenty of lightweight, strong stock material I can use for the other planes, so don't consider it a bad trade.

One element the RRF's lack, they need to include instructions upon what areas need to be reinforced, remounted, or just gone over since their consumer base described problems, I'm learning alot from these forums about several different lines, the parkzone j3 cub for example, my first 3 channel plane, needs foam to be added into the nose of the plane to prevent the fuselage from crumbling upon impact, the stock prop shaft needs to be replaced with a heavier after market shaft the cowl should be removed until you get better at flying, where the rubber bands attach the wings need some tape between them to prevent them from biting into the wings. The first flights should consist upon just taking off and landing, after you are comfortable with that, then keep it up in the air longer and get used to slow circles, then progress further as your skills build.

I picked up my first chopper, again, another RRF, I'd never have the time to put one together from scratch and fine tune it to fly correctly, this particular model has plain old fashioned basswood blades, this means if I break them, I can just go back to my old scratch building phase and replace them for pennies on the dollar, if I want to upgrade to flat blades for acrobatics, again, back to the shop, no need to buy their upgrade kits.

All in all, I enjoy all phases of this and do not look down on people that are only into one type of the other, to each his own, as long as you are having fun, that's all that counts.

That is a fully acceptable discussion -- your technical views on the subject, without casting elitist aspersions, or implied criticism, or even insult to others who don't hold your views, or who execise their right to buy & fly what they please.

I wish every post on this topic was like that.

first of all let me say i really don't think the quality of arf's rtf's are that great they have come a long way over the years.but,that is just me i enjoy building my own models,and i own a few arf's myself.i think that a lot of the older modelers and folks that build kits and scratch built,because of the time and effort they put into them expect for everyone to have to crawl before they walk,i myself think that everyone should at least build one kit.but i really could care less what a person fly's scratch built,rtf.arf,if it makes you happy then go for it thats what this sport is all about having a good time.i get my children involved in my kit building so that is another reason i enjoy kit building.kit building is time consuming and scratch building is even more so.i wouldn't want to think of how much time it would take to design and build a model.i have just done kits and arf's myself.the other beef i have with aff's or foreign labor in general is it takes away from American jobs,but thats another argument.and last as with anything you always get what you pay for.so whatever you are flying if you enjoy it then thats the point isn't it.you can get up and running a lot faster with an arf then maybe decide later on to build your own kit.the more people we can get interested in this sport the better,and if it takes an arf to be the first bug to bite to get you started then thats good,if you decide it isn't for you then your initial investment isn't that bad.there is so many pros and cons.i would estimate that to supply yourself with the necessary tools to be a kit builder it would take around 500 to 1000 investment.minimal tool investment to do an arf or rtf would be around 250.you can spend a lot more depending on the type tools you purchase.

Here is something that has one of those grey areas covered with arfs, it's using balsawood construction:



Here is a photo of it in it's package:



It looks pretty old fashioned in it's nature, I may purchase one soon, just would hate to break it just as I would hate to break any balsa based plane. Not sure of the quality, will have to experience it in person and let you know.

Here's another way to look at this...

Model building is a hobby by itself, and flying model aircraft is a hobby by itself.

Some guys really enjoy model building... so they'll be the kit builders and scratch builders. As Espresso said... many of these guys are happy if they never even fly it... they enjoy putting in several hours to build a nice looking model.

For those of us who enjoy flying model aircraft, but aren't into model building that much, ARFs and RTFs are for us.

I am a Senior Citizen, retired and have just returned to the hobby after 20+ years away. First ARF's were junk. But now most of them are quite well constructed. I used to buy and build from kits but now i purchase arf"s due to arthritis in hands and fingers. I would "kit build" if i could but see nothing wrong with ARF's.
I enjoy flying with my old cronies and the young ones as well and our club runs the full spectrum of types and sizes. Some scratch, some kit and some ARF. We all laugh and enjoy.
So what does it really matter. The hobby is improving each day. How many of you remember the reed radios, kraft radios and the Ace radios that you built from itty bitty pieces and parts. So we evolve as all things do or we cease to exist.
May all you landings be soft and gentle.

I hope I am not outwearing my welcome, am going to keep my mouth shut on this thread "for the most part" from now on, I just have to put in one more comment in reply to Gramps here. I have to say, unilaterally, we, this forum, all contributors, and the field of RC and model airplanes are the legacy of what your generation has pioneered. We should all be grateful this was a priorty and we have very much alot to learn from you old timers, especially those that were into this in the early days. I'm keeping my ears open, hoping the rest of the posters/readers do the same.

Thanks for updating me on the terminology with the RTF's horace315, I'm learning plenty in this area as well, there is a whole new set of lingo I've yet to even grasp, also glad you pointed out the fact that building these should be addressed seperately then flying them, that clarity should inspire people to go both directions in confidence.