I purchased the GWS Pico Stick-S kit ($29.00) which is a stick plane with foam wings and includes the motor, gear box and prop, cool wheels and a bunch of nylon control arms. It's a great kit for many reasons, and I have seen webpages (nyblimp.com ) (ezonemag.com) that show flying clubs formed around these neat lightweight planes in all of their different iterations.

I flew it as the kit only about 2 minutes total airtime before the modeler in me said "enough" and I began to make serious modifications. For one reason, the foam wings were never straight and.. I'll just leave it at that, no real reasons needed to make experiments anyway.

I salvaged the drivetrain and the landing gear, as well as the recommended servo package made by GWS and built this plane around them.

For the fuselage boom I used an Easton P/C 4.5 1290 carbonfiber rod. I built a body from balsa and carved specific holes for the battery and the two servos. This prooved to be a small mistake because it's a good idea to allow the battery to be moveable to adjust the balance. Instead, I just moved the body back to get it to balance correctly. This produced a plane that is quick to react to control movement and for the beginner (me) this makes for a very exciting way to learn to fly RC.

Whatever happened to that original wingset that came with the pico?

This is the first version of the rudder that I made, it matches the shape and size of the original kit, but since the plane flew a little tail heavy, I changed it.	This is the new lighter version of the rudder, somewhat styled after a Tiger Moth, it ended up still being a little bit tail heavy.	Here is the body with slots cut for all the controls, on landings, everything stays right where it should. There was no room inside for the receiver, so it got stuck on the outside, you can kid of see it there on the back of the body.