One of my hobbies is building and flying radio-controlled model aircraft. Not the small foam ones from Kmart but larger 2-m wingspan craft. It is a lot of fun and usually very relaxing.

My birthday was a few months ago, and for the first time I was given a plane. Somehow my family read my mind, and I ended up with exactly what I wanted.

I have not spent a lot of time on this hobby during the last year or so. These days you can buy the aircraft in what they call ARF (almost ready to fly) format where the plane really just needs final assembling, fitting the control gear and motor, and it’s done. The process should take about 4 hours or so. This was the type of plane I was given, and I was really looking forward to spending the day assembling the kit and making it ready to fly the following weekend.

I wanted to fit an electric power setup and started to look through the plane to see if any modifications were required. There were a few mounting holes that had to be relocated; nothing major, I thought.

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