Ty,
I've built the Knight and the Sheik. The Sheik is plenty strong. I originally covered it with monokote, back in the day when I didn't know better. It held up just fine. I eventually stripped the monokote off and refinished it in silkspan when I found out there was no strength added with monokote. Glad no one was around to see the monokote version. It's a sin to cover an I-beam with monokote. I crashed at Brodak 2004 I believe it was and rebuilt it for the 2005. It's pretty much a hanger queen these days.
I'm an avid builder of Jack Sheeks planes. Built (3) Spirit of Saginaws which was designed by Jack (per Jack..he gave the design to someone else to publish, Puchini (sp) was the guys last name) it's a great profile, not Classic legal unfortunetly. A future project is to build a full fuse version of it. I've also built (2) of his Hurricanes.
BTW, the Knight plans show the landing gear mounted on the fuselage but if you look at the pictures in the construction article the main gear are wing mounted. It was difficult to get the wing mounted gear to track well, so Jack changed the drawings. Man... I wish I could make it to VSC.
Dave Reyes