So my 3DHS Extra SHP came yesterday and I went over to my friend Chad's house to work on it. The only word is ... "wow"! It comes triple boxed, very secure. Pulling the parts out of the box, I saw that the photos of it don't do it justice! The covering design, color depth, everything, looks as awesome as it does in photos!

Working on the assembly, both of us were blown away. We've got about a dozen or more ARFs between us and this is easily the best designed, easiest assembling one. Hands down.

Many ARFs use a wire bracket to join the elevator halves. On some of them, you even have to cut the channel and drill the hole yourself. It sucks. And you have to be "dead nuts" precise when doing this, because your elevator halves absolutely must be completely exactly aligned, or the plane will not fly right! Well, on this model, the elevators are joined by a thick fiberglass bar. The slots are precut. All you have to do is put it in and glue it. There's no way to mis-align it, as the bar forces it straight. It's amazing.

Everything else is similarly easy and quick! The only step that really requires any "skill" or "care" is installing the horizontal stabilizer, but there's really no way to engineer that work out. You have to slide it in, and make sure it's both centered and square with the main wings. Just has to be done manually and carefully measured. But we got it dead nuts straight.

The only thing left to do is install the servos (which are coming today from Tower and do final setup of the control throws and then maiden it! I'm super-excited!

I was so excited and blown away by the quality that I forgot and left my camera at Chad's, so I can't leave you with any pictures, but I'll post them soon along with shots of the completed model!

3DHS FTW!!!