05/23/2019 Updates on this Project and Big Decisions

A lot have happened in the past year and I have barely worked on the RV for months.

Having a new baby at home has taken away pretty much all my free time. And even a couple months before the baby was born, I have very limited time to build because I need to take care of my wife towards the end of her pregnancy. I’m on a couple weeks of my remaining paternity leave now and I get to work on the plane a little bit during week days when baby Krystal is at daycare.

However, while I have no time to work in the garage, I do have lots of time thinking about the project and browsing through Internet looking at all the other gorgeous home builds(and some photos of very poor workmanship from forums) . I have even squeezed out enough time to complete my CFI-I written exam using some spare time studying Sheppard Air on iPad between feeding and changing diapers. I digressed. Back to the topic of building. I have a couple thoughts about building an airplane at home after getting more than half way through the empennage and reading online:

• Building a good airplane is hard
  • People said if you know how to use a hammer, you can learn how to build an airplane. They didn’t say how hard it is to learn, and the saying make it sound as simple as using a hammer. I should have known better since I’ve been telling similar lies that learning to fly is like learning to ride a bicycle. I had no idea about how steep the learning curve would have been when I decided to build. As someone who has only assembled IKEA furniture and never worked on his own car, I’m terrible at using tools. Everything is a struggle: drilling, riveting, and even just spraying a can of auto primer. I had no idea it would be that hard to apply an even layer of primer coating as thin as possible. Working on actual airplane parts is also much more difficult than practicing on a few pieces of sheet metal, as in actual airplane, parts will have angles and flanges that blocks my view on both sides of the metal, and in actual airplane there are much more tight corners that are hard to reached.
• Not everything online is correct.
  • I know there are all kinds of wrong info on the Internet in general. But when I’m a newbie in this homebuild area at the beginning, everything I read sounds cool and valid. As my project goes on, I have better understanding and knowledge and have my jaw dropped more than once on the big errors that some builder would tolerate, and the unnecessary or even dangerous diversion from plan that someone would introduce just to make their plane look nicer. Well, at least it killed most of my desire to buy another experimental airplane. Who knows what kind of crazy modifications or unsafe works are on those planes.
• I really really like tandem seating and fighter like cockpit.
  • When browsing through Internet, I become more and more attracted to planes like Sub-Sonex jet and Titan Mustang. I was so interested that I started to think if I had made the wrong decision to build a RV-7.

My initial “decision” that I had actually made many months ago was that I’m going to re-order at least the RV-7 Horizontal and Vertical Stabilizers so that I can build them with better quality than the 1st attempt. Many builders said the tail of the plane is for learning purpose so it’s normal to screw up here and there, but I really don’t like the idea of flying an airplane with 10% of its structure built by the worst beginner builder. I’m more than willing to spend an extra thousand dollar to buy a piece of mind.

Recently, as I grow more and more fond of tandem seating airplane, and I know it’s impractical to build Subsonex(engine way too expensive and range way too short) or Titan Mustang(auto engine or under powered Rotax). I started to revisit the idea of building a RV-8. While the side by side seating is usually preferable for passengers, I should satisfied my own need first :). My wife is not interested in long xc flight in small plane anyway so either RV-7 or RV-8 won’t make any difference to her. I still have a partnership in multiple Cessnas for anyone who wants to fly side by side, and a partnership in Christen Eagle II for anyone who wants to use rudder in the passenger seat.

Since I have previously decided that I was going to build half of the RV-7 empennage again, which is going to cost about $1000 dollars for the parts and shipping. I figured I should just use this opportunity to order a RV-8 and build the RV-8 instead. I’ll continue to use my current -7 tail kit as practice project. A $2000 practice kit is not bad in my opinion, because otherwise I would never have the chance to learn how to build actual airplane. $2000 is about the cost of only one full day of customized aerobatic training at Tutima Academy in 2019. I’m sure glad that I learned to fly competition aerobatics a few years earlier when the cost is less than half of that.

Once I complete the RV-7 tail, I’ll start my RV-8 journey hopefully as a slightly above average beginner. At that time, I’ll update the build log site name to RV-8 from RV-7.