As you may know from my website, my building experience is somewhat limited to ARF's and foamies.
Due to personal reasons I don't fly on Saturdays, so I am limited to flying on Fridays only, and the odd day I can take time off and not spend it with the family...
A rubber powered free-flight model however, I can fly on Saturday!
I had to get some balsa to make new elevons for my Unicorn, and got inexplicably drawn to a stack of Guillow kits, at the LHS close to my office. I'd seen that name a few times, and from surfing the web had learned that it was a well established company with a rich history, starting in the late 1920's. They manufacture quality free flight (and static) wooden kits. Many of these kits can be modified to rubber, electric, or even glow powered RC flight. Guillow obviously caters towards a large audience. From starter toyplanes, rubberband catapult all balsa toyplanes, all the way to complicated multi engined scale models.
I don't know how it happened, but when I got back to the office I had the balsa and this box of a Guillow Cloud Buster! The Cloud Buster is rated at "skill level 3", and seems to be a few steps above the all balsa plate wing models.
This particular kit includes virtually everything you need to build the model! All the necessary wooden parts, a small bottle of Elmer's Glue-All All Purpose White Glue, a prop & rubberband assembly, covering tissue, water slide decals, and 1:1 plan with instructions.
It's the kind of kit you'd pick up while on holiday somewhere, and are stuck in a hotel room or B&B with the kids because it's raining anf they are climbing the walls out of boredom.
All I used, in addition to what came with the kit was:
-a pair of scissors to cut out parts of the photocopied plan (could've used the X-acto...)
-an X-acto hobby knife
-greaseproof paper to cover the plan with, so the wooden parts wouldn't get glued to the plan.
-pins from my wife's sewingbox to pin the parts onto the building board
-a scarp piece of 4mm balsa wood, to be used as building board
-a little paintbrush to brush on the glue to cover the model with tissue