It's Friday October 11th, 2013 . I thought I'd show a picture and add a few tips about the slightly troublesome Flyzone DHC-2 Beaver bush plane with pontoons.

Firstly, you'll immediately notice my personal changes if your familiar with this plane from Flyzone.. Some changes are simply because I always personalize most of my planes in any case, but many times certain changes are necessary because of poor choices made by the factory during construction.

Here are a few tips and what to expect on arrival of your new Beaver. This plane is deceptivily huge, pics don't really give the full picture of its overall bulk. I'd place it only about one or 2 clicks below the Nexstar Select size wise.

1. Transporting to your field needs consideration because you will most definitely not want to take the wings off after the build. They are a snap in 'pushbutton' affair that is quite tedious to remove. Couple that with the metal wing struts and the pontoon struts (The pontoons are 26 inches long by the way) and you'll also soon realize that if you build it with the pontoons instead of the included wheels, you'll probably decide as I did that this is overall a water or snow lander only. Its at least a 20 minute job to change over to wheels from pontoons.

2. Break the seal around the windshield,add your own type of wire or foam slide in rails and make the windshield removable. It's truly the easiest way to get any part of your hands inside the cramped interior. One pic here shows the windshield detached and just lying near the opening.

3. For stabilizer (gyro) lovers who also know that they are best situated pretty close to the center of the entire plane radius, cut out a hatch as I did right in front of the red led light tower at the trailing edge of the wing dead center of the fuselage. I have an OrangeDS version 2 hanging in the front facing direction from a support rod hanging into the plane from the underside of the orange mono-koted hatch I made. In my opinion, larger servos are more tolerant if you like your pots turned up all the way and in fact the Beaver seems to love the full potentiometer setting.

4. The factory black painted underbelly as the plane arrives with is simply a horrid total fail. After only an hour of handling the plane with clean hands, and especially while trying to support the plane with a long lipo inside, your grip alone ... however lightly and carefully you try, will lift ,slide, and peel off this super rubbery latex finish. It is inevitable. Instead of trying to constantly fix, (that never looks good) I took Gorilla brand duct tape, stuck it to all black rubbery painted areas and lifted the tape up as if doing a cosmetic hair removal. The black paint will adhere to Gorilla duct tape for a total removal. Gorilla is expensive tape but nothing works as well to remove factory latex. Why they continue to spray on that continual total fail paint is beyond me. I added a second foam bottom as well, with a fiery comet pattern .

5. The orange wing work as well as all of the orange paint applied elsewhere is not that same rubbery latex as the black paint but is super thin and a bit grainy or flat looking. I repainted with a matching orange spray paint dusted on from over 18 inches away to allow for propellent burn off in the air. When that 'salting' is slowly done several times, you can then do a satin or high gloss with no foam 'poring' , melting, or any type of foam destruction or veining.

6. Unless your're a veritable genius I think I can say in complete confidence that you will also find as I did, that it is nearly impossible to try the trick of adding wheels to the pontoons to eliminate the need for changeover. There are plenty of photos on the net of real Beavers with these pontoon/wheel combos but the pontoons on the RC plane are hollow ... very sturdy overall as a whole unit ... but weak if you try to isolate only a small section of pontoon for any type of sturdy attachment of wheels. Hefty wheels are included of the quality of the Hobbico Nexstar select, but would be really tedious to change over in the field ... and a 20 to 30 minute job even at home the day before your outing in the field.

7. One of the pics should show the large toggle I added to the underbelly to eliminate having to flip the plane over in the field every time I wanted to start another flight session ... changing batteries, especially what I call the 'long cand bar' type is annoying because the lipo loads into the hatch that is shown in my picks as orange. I usually add a battery on/off toggle to all of my planes.

8. Gorilla brand duct tape has a beautiful sheen to it and imprints on it that looks like faux carbon fiber. Made a beautiful leading edge trim.

Would love to see your other threads. Can you link them. When I google your name all I get is Wizard of Oz links. =)

I recently got one of these planes and I'm interested in the mods you did.

[B]I'm not really proficient at these blog sites Manderson ... but this one site has all I have written since 2011 ... I'm not sure what you mean by other links ... all my pics seem to be here with the exception of the Beaver pics ... as I said at the end of my Beaver post, I couldn't get the Beaver pics to load yet ... had to find a photo resizer program to simplify the pics for uploading ... they will appear as soon as I downsize the photos ... UPDATE : Ok, the photos are all here now ....