I am new to the hobby and I am getting tired of flying my trainer. I do not know much at all about r/c plane construction, so in your responses, be as clear as possible.

I bought the Extra 300S kit from nitroplanes.com. I am now realizing that the savings are not worth the frustration of assembling this crappy kit. The directions say I need to glue the two wing halves together with epoxy glue. There is a 1" hole in the center of each wing, but no wing tube in the kit. Is a wing tube required for this kit? Should I find a wing tube to fit and insert it into these holes before i glue the wings together?

Also, there is a smaller hole near the rear of each wing. I've seen some other planes that will have a small wooden dowel that is inserted here, but the two dowels that are included with this kit are too big for the holes. The directions don't even mention the two wooden dowels anywhere in the kit build, so i have no idea what they are supposed to be used for. I am hoping I catch someone on here who has built this particular kit before. I will upload pictures and get more details when i get back from class . Thanks for any help, I am just clueless as to how to assemble this thing.

It doesn't look like that NitroPlanes has the manuals up on their site, so the answers are going to be a guess.

Does the instructions show a wing tube?? If not, one is not needed would be my guess. It standard to holes in the ribs to cut down on the weight as well as providing a path to run servo wires through. I would follow the instructions and do no more, or no less that instructed.

When gluing two wing halves together, there is usually a dihedral brace of some sort though near the main spar. Those kits that use a dowel to provide alignment of the trailing edge, should call it out in the instructions. The dowel only provides alignment. The dihedral brace provides strength to the wing. If the kit didn't provide either a diherral brace or a tube, I would be concerned

These are questions I would send directly to NitroPlanes. Without having the instructions avaiable, and without having built one, I can only address what I have run into with other kits. Hopefuly someone who has built one will jump in. but even if the do, contact Nitroplanes.

Don

Since your plane is an ARF, you may find a few people over in the ARF forum who've assembled and flown it. I believe Nitro Planes also has a support forum there. I've never owned one of their planes and never dealt with them so I can't say for sure how they are to deal with.

One thing that I really would recommend is sticking to the more mainstream manufacturers such as Great Planes, Hangar 9, Sig, Goldberg, etc. when you are just starting out. They tend to have better instructions, quality control and technical support. Once you have a few planes under your belt, you'll be better equipped to deal with the issues often found on the cheaper ARF's and kits. I'd also consider something else besides an Extra 300 for your 2nd plane. Look at something like a Sig 4-Star or similar. RCKen put together a good list of trainers and second planes in the kit forum. I'm not being critical, I just don't want to see anyone make the types of mistakes I have in the past.

I just got to inspect A Nitro Planes ARF for the first time last weekend. It was A 30% YAK. For the price I was impressed. What I did see was it was built so light there wasn't A lot of wood in there and what there was they used mostly light ply and some balsa. Not much of either. You see that A lot in the ARFs designed for 3-D flying. The only problem the owner has had so far with it was the landing gear block fell out after A couple of landings. Dang fine looking plane!!

Here is the link Nitromodels support forum:
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/forumid_456/tt.htm