Starting Vertical Stabilizer, Tracking Hours and Paint Booth

The plans are set up in a manner where the actual building starts on Section 6.  The earlier sections contain a lot of reference material and I assume will be used quite a bit during the build.

Vertical Stabilizer

Section 6

Starting Build!

Rear Spar 

I felt I was at a place that I might as well jump in and start building something.  I have anticipated there's a steep learning curve to both reading and interpreting the plans as well as implementing the various building techniques.  Knowing the end result is going to be an actual flying airplane I'm reading through each step at least five times and then visualizing what I'm going to do before I drill/cut anything.  I'm also searching other builders logs to look at pictures and make sure I'm doing it right.  I have confidence that throughout this process a lot of activities will become second nature but being the first part of my first build... it's going to take a while.

Tracking Hours

The main purpose of this site is to document, track and display the build in an electronic format.  The big part of documenting and tracking that is recording the hours.  I plan to keep a running tally of hours broken out by each section and manually updated occasionally.  I'm not going to record typical man-hours and will only relate to the time I spent working on constructing an actual part. So, if someone helps me I'm not going to include their time, I'm also not going to include the time I spend inventorying, working on tools or organizing my work-space.  For example, yesterday I spent 30 mins modifying my 6" grinder to remove the wheel cover.  This allows me to more easily debur long pieces and not end up inadvertently running the part across the other wheel.  So out of the 3+ hours I was in my garage last night I'm only calling 2.5 hours of actual building the part above.

Paint Booth

To be honest I'm dreading a bit of the painting process.  In the past I've only used rattle cans, brushes and rollers to paint with. The idea of priming adds another level of discomfort to me since there seems to be an endless debate on if you need to prime at all... and if you do then the process used to do so.  Even though my 1977 Cessna doesn't have any priming, for peace of mind I'm going to take the extra time and effort to do it.  I'll post about the process and materials I use when I have that all figured out but for now I need a place to paint.

What I did is take the box that the kit came in and re-purposed it to function as a paint booth.  I'll put card board on the bottom, hang some chicken wire to act as a shelf and spray away. I can also place a bar over the top and hang the substructure parts if I decide to paint them that way. When not in use I'll move it inside the garage and my kids use it to store their bikes, scooters, ect.