Starting at the back

The very first kit to build is the empennage (that’s the tail end of the plane) and straight away I was thrown into learning new skills. It’s all very well having read the book, watched the you-tube tutorials, and owning a bunch of shiny new tools, but its al the more daunting when you start to get to work building on your own plane. After all this thing is going to take you several thousand feet above terra firma, and so it needs to be build right and the Kiwi mentality of “it’ll be right’ just doesn’t cut it in the world of aviation, where safety is everything.

The first thing you get to build is this :-

They might look like a couple of small parts to you, but it involved separating, deburring, priming, and then assembling with my first ever solid rivets, so felt like a minor accomplishment and milestone to actually build my first airplane part.

From then on it was onto building the other parts that make up the vertical stabilizer (that’s the tail fin thing that sticks up at the back)- repeating my new found skills and also adding to my CV the art of fluting, countersinking, dimpling, and what will become 2nd nature as the build progresses of clecoing, final drilling, de-clecoing, deburring, priming, re-clecoing, and then riveting parts together. The weekend and a few evenings later I had my first real part that looked like it actually belonged on a plane! The instructions are (almost) idiot proof and make a lot sense to the first time builder, though I did find myself reading, and re-reading everything in the section just to be 100% sure of what I was supposed to be doing (that goes against my normal mentality of only reaching for a manual as a last resort). But in the end it turned out pretty good!