Welcome to the Insanity!
Welcome family, friends, fellow builders, and those trying to decide which you are! 😉
Some time ago, I caught the bug of building things that fly. Whether it was my Aeronautical Engineer for a Father, my WWII pilot Grandfather who inspired me to fly, being around the Air Force most of my youth, or just flat out loving planes, I caught it bad.
Fast forward to today and I am still very sick…I have to build a plane. I tried to medicate my sickness with building RC planes, High Powered Rockets, and the occasional RC Helicopter if I really wanted the challenge of building something with 3000 parts all revolving around a single fail point. All these medications did was make the sickness worse.
So, what is the cure? Well, perhaps it is a sickness never meant to be cured, however the medication I have chosen at this point (after consulting fellow patients), is to construct my very own, very real, person carrying aircraft, in my own workshop, with my own hands.
This site is intended to document my construction of my eventual Van’s Aircraft RV-7. Some more savvy readers may note that I [used to] keep appending a (a) to the number. This is because the RV-7 can be configured as a tail dragger (aka conventional gear), which is sooo slick looking, or as a RV-7a, which moves the third wheel to the nose (aka tri-gear). I have not decided on which I am going to construct at this point, and frankly, I have some time before I have to make a choice. Once that decision has been finalized, I will remove the extra characters to denote which configuration I settled on. In the mean time, I will be getting some real good tail dragger instruction so I can be best informed when the decision point is required. [Update 03/05/2014 – After some considerable thought, discussion, and training, I have decided to build a tail dragger tip-up. I am pretty dang excited.]
I hope you find the information here useful, entertaining, educating, and interesting. I will for sure as the project develops. In a “nutshell”, I intend to take the mess below and turn it into a plane.
Photo Courtesy of Van’s Aircraft
Come back often to see how the treatment program is progressing, see if it is helping, or to keep me on track. This will certainly be an adventure if nothing else.
Now…let’s get BUILDING!
Picture of the Moment
Finally, the serious legal stuff: I do not make any claims to know what I am doing. If you find something useful here that helps in your build, great! However, you do so at your own risk. I cannot be, nor will I be, held responsible if you try to do the same things I do and it does not work and/or causes you loss, injury, or even death in the process.
