Earlier, wrote:

Slightly OT:

Bob, I applaud your effort, and wish you the best of luck with the
Hp-24. However - I'll never buy one, unfortunately, no matter how
inexpensive and high performance it turns out, because I have
absolutely NO interest in a kit. I want to fly, not build. And I've
got a sneaky suspicion that the majority of pilots in the market for
high performance gliders feel the same way.

I do hope I'm wrong - I'd love to race against a nice shiny new hp-24
some day soon!

Nothing wrong with that point of view; you're probably in the majority
of sailplane pilots in that regard, and I respect it completely.

However, I'd observe that what we're talking about is a matter of
degree. There's kits and then there's kits. When it comes right down to
it, the glider you are flying right now is probably a kit - you do have
to get the wings out of the trailer and put them together, right? So
there must be some sort of threshold value of "kittishness" that you
won't cross, and it sounds like you draw the line at well under an hour
of assembly. That's fine, but still a far cry from "never."

And it's worth noting that the kit glider I'm developing, like most of
the current crop of kit sailplanes, bears almost zero resemblance with
the kits of the 1960's and 1970's or even 1990's. What you get is a
complete fuselage shell, with the right and left halves already bonded
togther. The top and bottom wing skins come pre-assembled, with the
spar installed. There's still a lot of work for the builder, but the
major part of it is systems installation and bonding together
pre-indexed parts. I figure that it'd run on the order of 350 hours or
so, maybe less. That's still a bunch of time, but it is less time (and
much less finnicky work) than it takes to refinish an old ASW-20.

I prefer to think of it like IKEA furniture; it's not really a kit,
there's just some assembly required...

Thanks, and best regards to all

Bob K.
http://www.hpaircraft.com/hp-24