Does anyone have experience with the Aerotech kits from the UK. I'm looking at getting one of the twin warbirds. The kit description has the following info..."obeche veneered polystyrene wing panels." I'm guessing that's a styrofoam type covering?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Tim

http://www.atimanufacturing.co.uk/

Obeche is a West African wood used to make a variey of veneers. It is heavier than balsa, but harder. It is commonly found as sheeting on foam wings in European kits like Graupners, 1mm thick. It makes a very decent, if a little heavy wing skin. Not directly connected, but did find this interesting link on covering obeche skinned wings:
http://www.scalesoaring.net/ultracot.html

I have three of these kits and I sold a friend another. Their design is to build a box fuse of balsa and glue the shaped sheeted blocks to it. The veneer is about 1mm thick and is quite smooth. The bond is good to the styro. The kit includes hardware and is very attractive.
The down side is that the blocks may not match perfectly when assembled. The sheeting is too thin to fill and sand to match the blocks so you must find another way to adjust fit. The best way seems to be adjusting the seam or slicing and removing a section elsewhere to adjust the mating edges.
Using the right methods these make attractive, light weight planes fast without all the carving.

Take care, this brand has a dreadful reputation and most people in the know avoid it like the plague. If you are lucky you will get a kit that has all the parts, and all the parts sort of fit just enough. In many of the kits the parts are no-where near matching and despite promises they will never send you the correct parts. On another forum is the information that the firm has just gone bust yet again.

I have an Aerotech Sea Fury. I'm lucky in that all of the parts are present though the middle section of the instructions are missing. No biggy though as it's a very simple build. I'm not even going to try to get the rest of the manual. The control surfaces had me scratching my head for a while. They are WAY too thick. The obechi is too thin to allow for any sanding to get the fit and I don't really feel like carving or building up new surfaces. What I ended up doing was cutting the surfaces in half, lengthwise and sanding down the foam then glueing the top and bottom halves back together with ProBond. It was a small amount of work compared to building new surfaces and worked quite well. It's too bad they couldn't have been correct out of the box.

John