My first biplane. It is all made out of Depron and uses a geared speed 300 (some GWS?) from the Protech Tojeiro. I put a Hacker into the tojeiro, so I was left with this engine. I went with a simple flat plate wing and added the struts between the wing so as to create turbulances along the plate.I do not know if this helps the plane or not
It flies very well, but only with the engine running. It has a glide angle of a Brick/Manhole. But it looks neat , well I think so ,and flies ok

Very nice kestrel2003. Biplanes are pretty draggy anyway.

Interesting looking. I wonder why the glide is poor? Maybe the CG is too far forward?

that is a good point. I will ad 5gr. near the tail and see if it helps. That is when it finally stops raining. I did not calculate the CG, I just used my "intuition". It seamed ok and it flys well powered and did not need much trimming. Thanks for the tip

Just to help you out, might consider the following changes, depron and fff are stronger than you think, balsa reinforcements not always needed, hot glue and kabob squiers, work great as wing stiffners, also can replace the depron you have between the wings, way less drag, 2 depron formers spaced 3/4 " apart and motor stick hole cut into them is fine, no balsa needed, bread plastic closers can be used as control horns and work great and less work, and it looks as if you could reduce the size of both the horz. and vert. stabs by about 1/3. Might want to go to az chuck r/c and look at his cheat sheet for slow fliers parameters. Keep building! It's really hard to spend $40/200 on a kit once you build a sucessful airplane from scratch-Best of luck!

Thanks for the tips. I agree that thier is nothing as cool as seeing a scrathbuild plane fly well. But I still enjoy building a kit from time to time, as I have almost always learned a lot from building them. I will certainly reduce the Stab and play with the cg

I think I can help ya with the glide a bit. to make as efficient use of the biplane setup as possible you have the two wings as far apart from each other as the cord of the wing. so if your wing has a cord of 3 inches the two wings should be at least 3 inches apart. my guess is you are fowling the top wing without the power on.

Kestrel I too built my first own design this week,though "design" would be overstatement.Just took some packing foam from my last computor and cut and shut it a little.She looks a lot like a sister of your plane,the ugly one though.Put my ailerons on the lower wing,made her all moving tail ,same Gws type power on 3s 700 li-po.Flys great though like yours ,mine does not like power off,I think revkev6 nailed that one;still,live and learn.Jimkirleys post included lots of other stuff I wish I had known sooner.Had five flights out of her and really regretted having to take the bits out of her today but my second attempt at an indoor foamie needed the transplant.Didn't try the first attempt indoors,too fast,too heavy and that brick like glide.Mk 2 is more of a flying plank,went for a sort of space ship look and ended up with a wheel barrow.Maiden tomorrow,weather willing.Regards all,Al.

Well weather was sort of willing for the test flight of my second attempt at an indoor foamie,bit windy.Made the elevons big,thought it would help indoors.Well looks like another failure for indoors,though I'm sure she will be fine outdoors,once tamed a little.Just took off and went into the start of a big loop[thought a little up might be wise,wrong] just had time to shut off the power before the floor rearranged the foam a bit.Next time less control throw,plus a test glide first, if she is still a handfull a smaller motor.Regards Al.