Anyone bought an Acrowot Foam-e Recently?

[Nigel Heather]

I have just bought an acrowot foam-e.

To be honest I have had problems out of the box which had to be resolved by the retailer - Ripmax customer services are difficult to get in touch with - either 'not working today' or 'he is coming in later'.

Anyway initial problems are resolved now so I have progressed with the construction and have come across a strange problem.

The colours on the tail sticks are the wrong way round - different to the instructions, box art and every single web photo I can find.

From the top mine go red>orange>yellow rather than yellow>orange>red

Pretty minor but the tail sticker pattern is meant to follow on from the fuselage stickers forming a continuous flowing pattern - mine don't.

Hard to imagine that mine is the only one like this - but so far Ripmax are giving me the 'oh, never heard of that' which I find pretty hard to believe.

They are meant to be ringing me up later when the customer services guy turns up for work - but in the meantime, anyone else seen this issue.

 

Cheers,

Nigel

Edited By Nigel Heather on 06/09/2018 10:34:14

Edited By Nigel Heather on 06/09/2018 10:35:15

[Nigel Heather]

More searching the internet and I have found the odd one or two like mine.

Cheers,

Nigel

[Nigel Heather]

Ripmax customer service - good grief.

So he didn’t return my telephone message or my email, so I called them toward the end of the day.

When I spoke to him, he was very coherent, claimed that he had never heard or seen such a thing and suggested that my example was a one off printing glitch. I tried to reason that it seems impossible that a printing print run of stickers would suddenly use a different graphics source for just one sheet in the middle of the run. But he was impervious to reason and insisted that was exactly what had happened.

Eventually, I convinced him to go and have a look what they have in their spares and kits. He seemed confident that they would all be correct and woukd send me some replacements.

I asked that whatever he found, to let me know by email.

He did send me an email confirming that all the spares and kits have the incorrect tail stickers like mine - no s**t sherlock.

Still find it very hard to believe that I am the only one to notice.

Cheers,

Nigel

[Alan Gorham_]

Perhaps he didn't think the colour of the stickers was very important?

Edited By Alan Gorham_ on 06/09/2018 18:26:18

[Nigel Heather]

 

I would have been fine if he had said

"Yes we are aware of this issue, sorry there's not much that can be done until they are reprinted"

or

"Oh yes you are correct, never noticed that before, I'll feed that back. But I'm sorry, not much more that can be done until they are reprinted"

All I wanted to know was whether it was a known problem and whether there are replacement stickers or there are going to be replacement stickers.

Instead I am ignored, and told BS that can't possibly be right, stuff that no sane person would believe.

And this is off the back of other problems that I haven't described here, like the fuselage halves at the front not glued together and a big dent in the wing from the undercarriage that just rattles around in the box. Ripmax were absolutely useless and unhelpful - fortunately, the retailer, Inwood, were excellent and sorted those problems out at their cost.

As you say, the colour of the stickers is not that important, does not affect the flying but it is irritating, because the fuselage sticker and tail stick are meant to combine to form a flowing graphic and latest batch does not do that.

Cheers,

Nigel

Edited By Nigel Heather on 06/09/2018 19:13:52

[Former Member]

[This posting has been removed]

[Nigel Heather]

Posted by Ikura on 06/09/2018 19:15:42:

That's a lot of writing for a reversed coloured sticker.

Maybe best to build it, fly it and enjoy it.

You just have to accept that very little in this world is perfect, especially model aeroplanes made from foam.

I am building it and hope to fly it at the weekend. As I said it'd not the sticker so much, that is the last of a string of things. Should already be finished but delayed because I have had to fix things that were wrong out of the box.

The sticker is minor, what irked me is the way Ripmax dealt with my enquiry (on top of the way they had dealt with the previous ones).

Anyway, Ripmax have now confirmed that it is wrong and there are no correct ones so I can move on - it is all I needed to hear rather than the BS.

Cheers,

Nigel

[andyh]

what if yours is right & all the others are wrong?

[simon barr]

I had one a couple of years ago (just passed it on to a new member), and my fin stickers were also the "wrong" way around. Didn't bother me nor did it affect the flying qualities.

[Richard Ashworth]

It's not just foamies.

A year ago I put an ARTF Acrowot together, and decided when installing the tailplane that it would be easier with the fuz upside down. Senior moment, didn't reverse the tailplane. As it happens with the main fuz yellow I think a yellow tailplane looks good! You don't notice when it's flying.

Went to put on the elevator horn and found that the elevator reinforcing was correct (right hand side) for the pushrod.

The elevator covering had been put on upside down.

You win some and lose some!

A club mate recently did an ARTF WOT4. Elevator pushrod exit holes in both sides!

Common factors - Ripmax, China?

[Nigel R]

Ultimately, you get what you pay for, with foamies.

Quadruple the cost and we'll talk QC.

[Steve Houghton 1]

I bought one recently and TBH I haven't paid so much attention to the stickers to notice if they are wrong or not, and personally I wouldn't really care as it's a foam sport model and not a scalie, and I wouldn't notice the difference in the air anyway as it's flying past inverted or on knife edge. But I had no issues with my model, it appeared to be perfect straight out of the box, so I think you may have just been unlucky, or was I lucky?

[John Stainforth]

I bought one a few months ago, and I was not impressed. The fuselage was slightly twisted, so the plane flew badly. The shop I bought it from kindly packed up the tailplane to compensate for the twist in the fuselage, after which it flew better. Generally I thought the construction was rather cheap and nasty, more like a toy... except it wasn't cheap, though it looks like about 20 quids worth. This was my fourth foamie, and I remain underwhelmed by them.

[Tim Flyer]

Seen a few over time at our club. The foam Acrowot is s very poor brother to the ARTF. The balsa ARTF can be well put together to fly well and be quite durable . A well built kit balsa Acrowot is the best though as quality bits and construction can be used throughout . The fomie Acrowots I have seen at our club don’t seem to last long at all.

[John Roberts 9]

Hi Nigel,

My AcroWot is over 4 years old now and the tail stickers are the same as yours! It has always flown pretty well but the previous one I owned (which gave me many hundreds of flight before I ran out of talent one day) was always a little bit nicer to fly...………..so maybe the reversed colours do have an effect after all?

Have fun with it anyway!

[Nigel R]

"This was my fourth foamie, and I remain underwhelmed by them."

They work alright on low speed stuff where the construction is strong enough.

The bits that come with them all seem to be cheapest of the cheap.

And durability is not their strong suit.

Commercially quite a good prospect, as they seem to be ubiquitous now, and they "wear out" quite fast, and are cheap enough that most folk seem to just buy another when they do.

I always feel they fall somewhat half way between a kids toy and a "proper" model.

Ideal for beginners though.

[Nigel Heather]

All right I'm over it. Stickers all applied, starting to apply a varnish coat and will fly Sunday.

I feel I must comment on the 'you get what you pay for' comments.

Agree it is cheaper - but not cheap. More expensive than a kindle or some Ikea furniture. If you opened your Ikea bookcase and one of the shelves was a different shade to the rest. Sounds like everyone here would say 2oh it was cheap, what should I expect" and put up with it.

Or if they had ordered the black kindle, opened it and it was the white one. Guess everyone here would say "it's just a colour, makes no difference to how it works" and put up with it.

Personally, I don't think foamies are particularly cheap - I suspect the manufacturer makes a very tidy profit on them, more perhaps than they do on their more expensive conventional ARTFs.

Being cheap is not an excuse for a sloppy job.

[alex nicol]

I agree completely.........The way I look at it, is it might only be a sticker that's reverse printed but the fact of the matter is its wrong and should be changed in a heartbeat with no fuss.........trouble is most of us seem to just accept shoddy or slapdash quality. If anyone from Ripmax is reading this thread I'd be very interested in hearing your response

[Nigel R]

Our toys have Small production runs and are bulky. Consumer electronics have orders of magnitude more invested in making their manufacture more efficient. Plus lots more competition. Our stuff is almost hand made. Complete Apples and oranges.

Us lot are tiddly little fish.

I don't disagree about ripmax fixing it

[Piers Bowlan]

I bought some micro Hitec servos at a show, put them with the model (MPX Libelle) and promptly got on with another project! A year later when I assembled the Libelle I found one of the Hitec servos was faulty. I couldn't remember which supplier I had bought it from so I wrote to Ripmax the distributer, enclosing the dead servo and asking if they could do anything as I had lost the receipt? By return post I had a replacement servo with a with-compliments slip from them. Thank you Ripmax.

A while ago I bought a Futaba FF9 off a friend but I didn't have the instruction book. I wrote to Ripmax asking if they had one available that I could purchase. Within days I was sent a new manual free off charge. Credit where credits due.

Nigel's right. Models are produced in tiny batches and considering the overheads involved in shipping them half round the world I consider foamy models to be generally very cheap and good value, even if you do sometimes have to 'fettle' them a bit. The alternative is to build a 'proper' model from Balsa, also very satisfying.

[Former Member]

[This posting has been removed]

[Bob Cotsford]

I think that these Wot sized foamies are a different market to the nicer flying balsa and ply models. I have both sorts, but I treat the foamies as much more of a semi-disposable airframe to throw in the car (quite literally on occasion) and sling around doing antics I that I wouldn't risk with a model in which I'd invested time and effort building. If something goes wrong then a kettle of hot water, a squirt of gorilla glue, a wrap of g/f tape and it's back in business.

I've also had a couple of larger, much more expensive models and been deeply disappointed with their perfomance in comparison to wooden models.