fellow club member demolished it in a mid-air collision. As the flying qualities were so good, I decided to build a replacement and by now Duncan's Mk.2 kit was in production, being redesigned on CAD and parts cut using CND equipment. This Mk.2 kit goes together very well, though I would only recommend it to a modeller with some previous experience of scale models as certain parts require a little beefing up and modification for regular grass field flying. Typical of this is the hopelessly soft balsa fin-post which I replaced with l/4" liteply. Also the rudder design is extremely flimsy and prone to warping - however, a stronger unit is very easy to construct using the basic shape on the drawing. From previous experience of the Mk.1 kit, I altered the undercarriage to position the wheels 3/4" further forward to prevent constant "nosing-over" on landing on grass. Incidentally, the undercarriage is rather crude (but effective) but if a more scale-like unit is required, the more sophisticated undercarriage from the Flair Tiger Moth can be purchased separately and fitted.

This model is powered with the recommended Laser 150 which is very satisfactory (though no more so than the OS 120). The inside of the engine cowling has to be fitted with baffles to direct the cooling air around the engine cylinder, as the air inlet opening is not particularly large. (My previous Tiger was occasionally prone to over-heating due to lack of such baffles).

The drawings show a single elevator set-up with the elevator horn out of sight in the centre of the fuselage, operated by a very long and flimsy pushrod. However, I opted to fit separate elevators each driven by its own servo. The advantage of this, besides being a much safer set-up for a large model, is that the elevators are operated in true scale manner, with the push/pull cables emerging at the correct point on the fuselage side, via internal pulleys. A nicely moulded cowling and top decking complete with anti-spin strakes are provided, which save a lot of building time.

wire length and tension. I found the best way to fit all these wires was to stand the model with the wings fitted but minus the undercarriage, on a flat surface and pack up the wings into their correct position, noting that the dihedral and sweep of top and bottom wings are different. When everything looked right by measurement and Mk.1 eyeball, the various wires were cut to length and the ends brazed on. The only problem I have experienced in both models was breakage of the cabane cross-wires which are a bit flimsy and break at the top ends after the first few flights and are near-impossible to repair. The left-hand top and bottom wings remain together as a pair once constructed and similarly the right-hand pair of wings. This very much simplifies transport and rigging at the field, as only 6 small bolts have to be fitted after sliding the pairs of wings on to their rods.

An on-board glow plug battery and switch unit is fitted to operate on low throttle settings only. As on all my larger models, two 6v x 1500mA batteries are fitted, wired in parallel via diodes, with separate switches and charge leads for safety.

This model flies very nicely and the only problem I have had is with "glitching", eventually traced to some of the rigging wires touching and creating metal-to-metal noise (cured by fitting heat shrink tubing to the contacting parts).

In conclusion, once all the minor snags have been ironed out, this kit builds into a very nice looking model with pleasant flying qualities and the cockpit can be well detailed with a little effort. An excellent instruction manual is provided along with accurate drawings and any modeller with a few scale models under his belt should be able to tackle this kit with confidence.

In all a great winter project !!

Many thanks to Kevin Routledge for the review.

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