We started thinking seriously about building an airplane in July 2019. It was a crazy idea, but it might just work. Paul would enjoy the project as a sabbatical from his normal day job. I would get an aerobatic airplane and I knew that I would learn a lot from the build process. We’d get to build it out exactly how we wanted and (even more fun) flight test it ourselves. I’d never planned on building a plane, though I’ve always loved experimental aircraft – but with Paul on board, it seemed like something we could do.
Our time at Airventure ’19 was spent wandering from vendor to vendor; pricing out components, trying to wrap our heads around the potential timeline, and agreeing on the major design decisions. After all that we took another 6 months to decide if an airplane build was how we wanted to spend our next couple of years together. In the end, Paul asked me a simple question: “Do you want to build an airplane?”. My answer was an easy “yes”, but it was such an important question that I turned it into a laser-cut hangar decoration. We finally pulled the trigger in Dec 2019 for an RV-7 QB Kit.
Now we wait. I’m traveling for work for another month, so the empennage is set to arrive once I get home in February. Based on the Vans shipping schedule the wings and fuselage will be delivered in May. In the meantime, we’ll be doing even more research, ordering tools and cleaning out the garage.
I’ve set up this blog to track the build, follow on maintenance and flying adventures once it’s airworthy. We’re hoping that it will give us a decent build log to look back on and help us gain and share insight from the RV builders who already tackled this project. We’ll be posting some of our research, design decisions, and early tool acquisitions between now and when the kit arrives. I make no promises on a publishing schedule, we’ll do our best and post when we have something worth posting. We look forward to sharing this adventure with everyone, hopefully it will be entertaining and help future builders as well.
Cheers,
-Kacy