Well I've almost finished building the Apex, all the fins are on, the mmt in place and parachute built. The chute supplied with the kit is a rather shiny Mylar kit, with tape rings and cotton shroud line. This is my first experience with building one of these, it went pretty easily. The kit has 12 fins of different sizes, they take a while to get aligned and glued! You are given a couple of balsa sheets and some fin templates, and you cut the fins yourself. I had enough balsa for all the fins but one, which was a minor setback. I'm not sure if this was due to me not laying the template on down in the most space-saving way, or if there just wasn't enough balsa included in the kit. Maybe including a little diagram showing the best way to draw the fins on the balsa would be useful (I think Fliskits do this, I'm not sure though). Apart from that, thebuild is fairly straight foward. A tip I got from Cydermaster, was when the instructions tell you to sand the dowel into a point at one end, put it in a pencil sharpener, and sharpen to get the basic point shape, then sand it smooth (Use a metal one, Plastic =17p, Metal = 55p - not much in it, worth the extra!
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The actuall instructions are clear and full of 3d drawings, which look very good. A paint scheme is included to help you get your kit looking like the package art. A couple of problems I found was that the tube marking guide was printed on the back of the prep instructions sheet. Now I have a great big gap in there, and no prep instructions. Perhaps putting it on a seperate sheet would solve this. The instructions are all loose bits of A4, folded inside a card cover. When I opened the packet and saw these originally, I thought they were in a Semroc style booklet, but they were just loose. Stapling them together would probably make it look more professional, and stop any sheets going astray.
Thats all for now, heres a pic:
https://homepage.ntlworld.com/paulhandley/apex.JPG
Full review will be on EMRR when I've finished and flown this bird!
Phil
