Stjohn's RV-7

Rather than order a $1500 box of frustration, I decided to order the practice kit from Van’s aircraft. This is a piece of control surface designed to get you familiar with the basics of stressed-skin aluminum construction. I figure that if this process totally sucks, I’m out $35 and I got some bitchin’ new tools to make avant-garde aluminum ornaments for the wife’s garden. But for now, armed with the new tools, I’m planning on going forward with it as soon as time allows (crunch time production sucks).
But first, here are a couple of tools I forgot.

This is the laptop, or as I like to call it, the craptop. it’s an old Dell Inspiron 8100, good enough in its prime to finish Return to Castle Wolfenstein and run such wonderful music apps as Reason and Cubase SX, but now relegated to be the logging/blogging machine with occasional duties as a Serato Scratch Live platform.

This is a fuzzy, low light picture of some clecos and cleco pliers that are part of the ever growing collection.

And this is the practice kit itself, with plans and parts inventory. Parts inventoried, kit ready.