It came 26th January, my birthday.  I knew I’d said I’d like the new E-flite Extra 260 to replace my E-flite mini Funtana as it has had its wear and tear with the poor design of the balsa which the undercarriage screwed to, this had been carboned several times but  I knew it was a problem.

Later on in the morning of my birthday Granddad (John) arrived with a 3ft long box wrapped up in wrapping paper, sitting down and opening it revealed the Extra.

At first glance on opening the box everything looked sound, quite frankly everything was huge, the cowl, fuselage, spats, rudder. On further inspection it was noticed by me that the surface that the elevator stab/section sat on was cracked on the inner side, no worries, the delicate hands of powerful soon had that fixed with long nose pliers and a drop of cyano.

First step was the Motor and Esc installation, with me having taken the equipment from a previous model everything was already wired up so it was just a simple screw on of the motor using the supplied X shaped bracket onto the Balsa box,  all angled at the thrust line needed. The Esc was just a simple piece of Velcro onto the underside of the box construction, feed the wires through and that was that. Also on the same two spread page was the cowl fitting. This was very hard, fit the cowl, screw 4 screws in, oh I’ve done it.

Aileron hinging, this was suggested by the destructions that the builder should use 5 yes 5 cyano hinges. Now I thought this was a little over the top so I used the conventional 4 hinges which I knew would be sufficient. All the slots were already cut for me but just to make my building life easier I pinned all the hinges so I could just push the aileron onto the hinges, both ailerons went on like a dream.

If you think back to when Trev was building his Cularis he mentioned that he found building an ARTF high stress because if you did one stage wrong you just couldn’t get a stick of balsa out and build another piece. The stage now was hinging the elevator and to cyano it into the fuselage.  Well I don’t know how I came to the conclusion but I decided to cyano the elevator stab in first before hinging it and not until I had done it and we tried to push the elevator up to the stab did Granddad (john) say “OH CHRIST” and I thought oh god we (well I) had glued it in upside down but we were supposed to hinge it first.................... First word I thought of........... KNIFE , so me on one side and John on the other we busily got to trying to cut it out before the ZAP-A-GAP thoroughly dried......................... After 15 minutes we really had got nowhere until we happened to catch out the corner of our eye a 10inch long piece of brass stripping .................. so quickly but carefully slid it in the back all the way down the topside then the bottom and it fell out on to the work bench ................. “Thank God” I said . Well the hinging was exactly the same as the ailerons but a lot slower as we were reading the magical book (instructions) every 10 seconds.

Rudder well there’s nothing to say about this as it was just 3 hinges, slide the tail wheel in and epoxy, the stab fitted bang straight so cyano it was, DONE.

The day came Saturday 9^th February , Maiden flight. I always have and always will hate maiden flights. Anyway it was onto the nicely mowed White 2 runway where I placed the model in the middle opposite me. I slowly increased the throttle and after about 15 yards was up in the air. She was very stable and had plenty of “PONIES” as Gary put it so trimmed it out did a few roll reversals and all that then realised I hadn’t set my timer, I had only had about 4 minutes but with a being a new model didn’t know how long I would get, so LANDING was called “GULP” over Barry’s tree and lined up on finals, settled down on two wheels and then the 3^rd ,“LOVELY”.

Since then it has had several flights, well over 20 in fact, is a lovely model and is extremely good at high alpha knife edge and high alpha in general. There really aren’t enough words in the world to describe this model and I would recommend it to anybody.



























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