How difficult is it to make one of the kits? Do they give a novice adequate direction to successfully put one together? I see they don't include the wire. Is this easily obtainable? Radio Shack perhaps?
It isn't particularly difficult, but they really don't provide much information. Even though I bought the Scorpion kits first, I didn't wind them until after I had wound some smaller motors first. I relied on the Electric Forums of RCGroups
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/index.phpespecially the Motor design and construction forum. The small motor kits came from
http://www.gobrushless.com/shop/They provide some help. I would recommend the very simple (and cheap) GBv1 motor. It comes with wire.
Now all that being said, and that I really like fooling around with these motors, simply buying the Scorpion makes a lot of sense. You certainly don't save any money buying the kit--the stock motor comes with connectors and a prop collet (and prewound wire of course!), so by the time you buy the extra stuff that isn't in the kit, the kit ends up costing almost what the ready-to-go motor costs. And I have to admit, they have come out with more models with different winds (=kV), so there is almost no reason to wind yourself unless you want something really different or you just enjoy the challenge.
I ended up buying wire from
http://www.alltronics.com/ . The shipping charge started out at $8, so I bought quite a few different gauges to amortise the total cost. The tricky part of winding is that you want to fill the stator with as much copper as possible, and you don't really know what gauge will do that with the number of turns you want. I have wire from 18 gauge to 28 gauge in increments of 1!. Yes it is obsessive--so I gave you fair warning!
With the 30xx Scorpions, I wired with the 19gauge wire for 16 turns. I could probably have made 18 turns with that gauge. Anymore turns would require a higher gauge wire.