Ready for some good news.... Allen Goff proposed an urgent rule proposal to revise the line diameters for CL scale to some more reasonable diameters and it has passed. The link below is to the proposal and the AMA website has also posted the voting results. By the way there is a separate CL scale and a RC scale board now, we no longer have RC scale board members voting for our rule changes.

Not sure when the rule book will be changed but this is good news in terms of the line diameters that we can fly with. I am hoping it will be officially published in the rules before the Nationals.

Also remember if you are willing to put up with solid lines they also have different diameters that are lower than the braided lines. You will need to wrap the lines if you decide to use solids just like they do in Stunt. I have been flying a Fox 35 stunt speed model with solids and they are not that bad. They just need a larger diameter reel and you have to keep tension on the roll when you unroll and roll them up at all times.

Fred

https://www.modelaircraft.org/files/CLSC15-03Urgent.pdf

Under the existing rules some of the line sizes were excessive.

Under the quite recently adopted rules some of the line sizes were excessive.  You could make a counter-proposal to go back to the 2012 sizes.

If a person thinks the new lines sizes are too small, you don't have to use them.   As long as they pass pull test, they should be okay.  I remember when evry one was going to .015 in combat that I stayed with .018.  The rules says minimum size not max.

If line sizes are determined by what the owner feels is right we don't need rules at all.

For the safety of the sport we need minimum standards to protect us from those would jeopardize safety to gain performance advantage.

The Speed and Racing categories have done a good job of scientifically calculating safe line sizes.  
Other categories have yielded to the will of those who would temp fate to gain performance.

If you are an AMA member, then rather than expending your energy (and ours) in complaining, you can put it to good use by writing a counter-proposal.  Here's the relevant page:

http://www.modelaircraft.org/events/ruleproposals.aspx

Frankly, if you feel as strongly about it as you express, then you should file a counter-proposal post haste.

Note that 5G pull tests have been the norm in Scale for years, and there haven't been reports of people getting chopped to bits by runaway airplanes.  So regardless of what your opinion may be, reality's opinion seems to be that it works.

I agree with what Allen said, and an engineering analysis was done and the resulting factor of safety (even with a 20 lb model) exceeded 2.0 in every case. In fact as the airplane gets smaller the factor of safety climbed to 3.8 or higher.

bottom line with a factor of safety of 2.0 the lines are only being loaded at 50% of their load limit.

Fred