<span style="font-family: Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size: medium">very nice plane. is that red or like a dark orange?</span></span>

Wow, the sandbox. Can only wish safe passage. Yeah if you can get to the internet, you got friends here for sure.

ITS dark orange over yellow. The large blank area on the fuse sides are where the tail numbers are to be painted which were mandatory 12 inch numbers at the time.

A sign painting friend did the numbers for me in an artsy/craftsy way with layered colors deliberately to make them hard to read The tail number is N3380. I sold the airplane after several years of active flying to make way for another.

And yes indeed let me also take this opportunity to thank you for your service sir.

John

<span style="font-family: Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size: medium">well, the trip to the dirt has been put off til the middle of march. so far, anyhow. i still haven't received my miniplane from Sig yet. not sure how long it's going to take to get it, but hopefully by the end of this week or sometime next week i will come home to it on the porch or something. i'm not sure i'm going to rip into it straight away or try waiting til i get back home this fall, but i'm planning to at least rip the box open and take a couple pics of the contents and stuff and start the thread for the build. but it's probably going to start off slow unless someone else is building at the same time, the same plane. at least slow for me. but anyhoo... the new thread is going to be titled simply: "sig smith mini build", in the kit building forum. like i said, hopefully in a couple of days. i'm kind of tinkering with a scratch build of a Rich Uravitch extra 3.25 in the mean while. just cutting out the wing pieces. </span></span>

http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_87..._1/key_/tm.htm

see yellow plane in the first post

<span style="font-family: Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size: medium">oh my God... so i guess it's good the trip is post-poned for a few more weeks. i received an e-mail yesterday afternoon from Sig customer servicethat my smith mini is back ordered and is "expected" to be available for shipping sometime in March. ***??? couldn't they put something on their website stating that the products are currently out of stock or back ordered or something? i need the prints and instruction manual by march to take to the desert with me so i can figure out anything i would like to do differently while i'm there and get cracking on it when i get home. makes me wish towerhobbies had everything. or someone else sold the plane at least. i'm going to contact Sig, if i can get through and talk to someone instead of a computer, and politely ask if they would at least be able to send out the prints and instructions before then, so that i may take them with. we'll see. other than that... has anyone else checked the "yellow plane in the first post" of the above stated link? i can't begin to even think of where to look in a dictionary to find a word to describe that plane. simply amazing. someday i could only hope to be that patient and meticulous. a beautiful plane.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size: medium">wow... so much time has gone by. i'm expecting to be back the first half of july and can't wait to get started on the sig smith mini. i actually had to write them a nasty-gram to find out what was going on with my order. after fighting with them over the phone for the last little bit i was home, they kept telling me the order was going to be bumped out. 6 E-MAILS LATER, i had to tell them that if the order wasn't in the mail by 15 june, i was going to cancel and take my business elsewhere. why the heck should it take 6 months to process and cut a kit and ship it out? ***??? so i talked to the wife a couple days ago and she said there was a big box on the porch when she got home the other day WOOHOOOO!! so anyhoo... not sure i will be ordering anything from them unless i have a few months to wait for it. like maybe a christmas gift going to be ordered in february or something. so i just got access to this site and am happy, because i have a lot of reading to catch up on before coming home in a week or two. the weather over here hasn't been all that bad. the temp in the day has been reaching about 120 or so, and at night somewhere closer to 100. so not too terrible. at least not yet. but i can't wait to get home and start back into the shop. the wife did some "picking up" in the garage and mentioned a yard sale while i've been over here, so i told her she needs to do some heavy praying after all that, hoping she didn't "accidentally" sale or "clean" anything of mine. she mentioned a garage door opener too, so i suppose she thinks she'll be parking in there now.

the name of the post for the mini is going to be "the Invisible Smith", (in thekit building forum)and i'm going to go ahead and get it out the for any pre-emptive strikes or comments before i get home to work on it. i have some pretty good ideas for stuff i want to do to it, having a few months to do nothing but stare at the prints and instruction book. i think the prints now have more red ink on them than black ink. but we'll see how it all goes.so happy reading and comments and will "see" everyone when i getback in a couple of weeks. </span></span>

Playboy pylon highwing OLDTIMER.
Clear wings and tail feathers, solid red on the fuse. It used to be all clear red but had to recover after crash and used what I had handy

SIG had problems getting decent balsa so pretty much everything went out of stock. Recent threads say the finally got decent wood and are cutting kits again. It would be nice if their web site had a 'status' so we'd know what is in stock. They do have a phone and email address, so we can find out by asking them.

Stay safe in the desert.

Great decision for this project, beautiful flyer and not seen often. Hopefully your headed for the Deid. Great base and getting better every year. Balads getting worse, but still better than Afganistan. Good luck on the trip and don't forget your wingman.

<span style="font-family: Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size: medium">yeah the plane's beautiful. i love thecarcass look before covering a plane and other planes i've built are cool looking, but justsomething about the sticks and looking like a skeleton and very little sheeting...the deid's great, too. alot to do, decent weather and lots of time for the gym. just can't get past the "newbies" who don't care to be here. got a couple trips up into Iraq also to fix some jets. you been here before?

can't wait to get home though. 3rd time here and still not sure it's a charm, yet. i need to get home and get to working on the mini. i brought the prints and instruction manual with and can't seem to get my mind off that, lately. but i do enjoy the break from home station every once in a while. just not 6 months at a time every year. it puts a damper on the aerobatics training and such.</span></span>

One to the Deid and two to Moraritaville. I'm avionics on the F-16 so that limits the bases available somewhat.

I don't know whether it's been mentioned, but transparent coverings can lead to pretty serious orientation problems.

Ive found that that is only a problem if you have issues with orientation. I used to fly camouflaged aircraft in southern California with the drab hills in the background and never lost orientation.

<span style="font-family: Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size: medium">it should be fine. i usually fly at a small field out in the country, so i really don't go too high or too far away. i just kind of putt around in a make-shift pattern right now anyhoo. maybe do a couple of loops and rolls, but that's about it for now. this plane will be a little smaller than what i'm used to, but i'll just have to put some kind of markings on the bottom of the wing. maybe throw a tail number across the bottom or something to distinguish top and bottom. i just want it to be as "invisible" as possible. i might do some kind of contrasting colors and see if that does anything for me. i've been reading a thread (.60 300s extra from GP)in the kit building forum from, i think Andrewmc, (so many pages to the thread), but i think someone covered the top in one color clear, and the bottom in another color clear, and he could see just fine which way the plane was oriented. i'm just curious about the "yellow and blue makes green" thing, making it look all the same color then. but it was white overall, with blue on the top and some other color on the bottom. i don't know...we'll see. i may be getting ready to recover my trainer here pretty soon after i get home and put a little more beating on it (it was pretty beat down when i got it from a friend), and i may do a little creative covering experimenting and see how it works.</span></span>