The complete kit is sold in four subkits:  empennage (tail), wings, fuselage, and finishing kit (canopy, wheels, engine mount, etc.)  I ordered the tail kit in October 2001.  It consists of the horizontal stabilizer, elevators, vertical stabilizer, and rudder.   Click here to see a view of these parts.

With no aircraft construction experience, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to take a class.   The Alexander Technical Center, south of Atlanta, offers a weeklong class specific to the Van’s RV series.   The idea is that Van’s ships your tail kit to the class where theoretically you can finish it during the 7 to 10 day session.   I had only scheduled 8 days and finished all but the vertical stabilizer which took another 10 hours at home.

This is me squeezing the final rivets on the horizontal stabilizer.   The pneumatic squeezer is nice but it is easy to accidentally punch a hole where you don’t want one.  Ask me how I know.

Ed (on the left) runs the class.   Typically there are two or three other builders in the shop at the same time.  John (on the right) had come in a few weeks earlier.   He was working on an Quickbuild kit which is more expensive but cuts the build time down to about 700 hrs.   His plan was to stay at the shop for the 3 or 4 months that it took to build his plane and then fly it home to San Francisco.   He was working 12 hr days, 7 days a week.   I haven’t heard how it went.

Me on the last day of my stay trying to finish the rudder before catching the flight back to Colorado.   Ed is serious about getting tail kits finished.   Usually we worked from 8 in the morning to 7 or 8 in the evening.   We finished the rudder a couple of hours before my flight.

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