Paul,
Doesn't surprise me at all. The Chinese are very frugal, to put it kindly.
I debated building or buying a flight box for several weeks, before finding a ready built Hobbico, in something other than the Red and Yellow I'd seen up to that time. Tammie's hobby shop (the one we visited while you were here) had one assembled and finished with white paint, so I bought that one.
Kind of sorry I didn't go for the kit now, as the box and drawer were very poorly assembled. Parts were made of cheap plywood, and many of the major parts were made of pressed wood, which I consider a paper product! Staples were used to hold the larger parts together, but several staples had one or both tines hanging out in the air, when they missed the part they were supposed to anchor to. Wouldn't you know, they even patched the cheap thin plywood drawer bottom! Evidently they used only one drop of adhesive to hold the plywood layer they patched, because it fell off in my hand! Gaps in the joints were big enough to lose parts in, and the drawer has a peculiar banana shape when viewed from the top!
I beefed up all the joints with thirty minute epoxy, filled all the gaps, and waterproofed all the exposed pressed paper, and unpainted wood parts with thinned epoxy. The drawer was painted inside and out with thinned epoxy, but still has that peculiar banana shape!
Guess we can be thankful that the factory workers tried to patch the more obvious stuff, and even some of the hidden defects. I'm sure they are given the cheapest material to work with, and no one that I know of has figured out what kind of glue they are using.
Bill
Topic: Patched wood in ARF TUT 2 (Read 1413 times)
