With the sale of my Wot-4, I was left with some vacant hangar space, and a spare engine. I wanted a nice pattern style ship, not ARTF and not kit, somewhere in between. Looking at YT International, they had  the VASP on offer and it was available in ARTC - almost ready to cover, this seemed ideal, although there was some debate over whether my spare engine, a GMS 61 would be too big.  It was duly ordered and arrived a few days later.

On opening the box. I discovered that I had been sent the ARTF version that was already covered, I'm not sure whether this was a mistake on the part of YT or some mix up when I placed the order. After giving it a good look over, I decided that the covering job was probably better than I could do myself and it where I could see wood there was plenty of signs of glue, so I decided to stick with it. The color scheme wasn't too bad either.

The kit comes with a very substantial hardware pack including spinner, wheels, spats, tank, clevis,  pushrods and many more bits. Most of it very usable, except for maybe the plastic clevis' and the foam wheels which will probably need to be replaced with rubber ones.

The control surfaces are already hinged and their counterparts pre-slotted, although I would have prefered to have seen pinned hinges rather than the hairy-cyano type. The fibreglass cowl is pre-painted, and the general finish of everything looks very good. Already this appears to be a much better kit than the Merlin detailed elsewhere.

Construction
This was pretty stright forward, I decided to go for the retract option, so quite a bit of time was spent getting that correct. For the engine, I finally opted for an MVVS 49 with full pipe, turns out to be quite a lump and required about four ounces of lead on the tail. The overall weight came in at just under seven pounds which put the wing loading at about 26-27 ounces/foot. I was a bit concerned about this at first, but it appears reasonable for this type of model, only the flight would tell for sure.
The engine was run in following the instructions, which includes a tank or two at full throttle, apologies to the neighbours one more! I had to have a custom manifold made up since the standard one was in line with the wing. As yet no attempt to tune the pipe have been made, initial tests have shown it to rev at 12000 rpm on an 11x6 MA prop. Once it has run in a bit more, then I will begin tuning the length of the pipe.

Maiden Flight
Martin took her up for the initial trim out, it took quite a bit of the patch to get airborne, but then she climbed away steadily. Very little trimming was needed, and when I got control found her to be a very accurate and not to daunting. I also found out why not to turn too sharp too slowly, there's a bit of a snap/stall in there waiting for you which is something I haven't come across before - must remember that! The landing was a bit heavy, more of an arrival nose first, a bit too slow of an approach and I cracked the cowl. She wasn't as fast as I had expected, probably just as well to begin with, plus the engine still needs more running in.
So that was it, need much more air time to find her potential, but very pleased with things so far.

Follow up...
The retracts are crap, and bend on every landing, often causing it to nose over which ends up damaging the cowl. The engine doesn't rev quite as it should, but this is probably more down to tuning the pipe than anything else. The trim (profilm) has lasted well and the structure has stood up to my landings. In flight, it performs well in all winds and executes manouvers clean and precisely.