Workshop

Back at it (almost)

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Yesterday I had the rare day where I could get away and get into the garage. After spending about 5 minutes looking at everything I realized I needed to spend the day cleaning the shop before attempting to do any work on the fuselage. 

Over the last 6 months or so, more and more junk started piling up, and it became more difficult even walk around. Now that the wings are done I decided to move everything out and do a full clean sweep. 


With the plane in the driveway I got out the vacuum and broom and swept and cleaned all the leaves and junk out of the garage. 

Also organized the benches and put everything away, I have a bad habit of leaving my tools and everything out on the tables, so I decided to clean those off as well. 


The end result, plane back in the shop with plenty of room to begin work. Plan is to store the wings in the other garage to have nearly the whole garage to work on the fuse. Just need to build a fuse stand and then I’m good to go.

I’ll be doing more updates moving forward, I’m going to be working a lot more often on the project. 

Back at it (almost)

Wing stand

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Tonight I spent sometime cleaning up the fuselage crate and cutting the wood into manageable pieces for clean up. I also got my wingstand built. It needs some modifications but it’s done. I’m going to add some casters to it to make it mobile and to raise it up a bit too. 

Wing stand

Finished (95%) the workshop and Vans Practice Toolbox kit

George, 1 Comment

It’s been a few weeks of cleaning the garage and organizing everything onto some new shelves we got so that I can finally finish setting up the workshop.

I also got my Isham Toolkit delivery last weekend and spent a little while checking out all the tools that come with it. But today I put those tools to good use and finished the Vans RV training Toolkit.

It’s a small toolbox that demonstrates some of the building techniques used in building their planes. It took me about 3 hours to knock it out, I had to take my time with the first few rivets, but once I got the hang of it it went pretty quick.


Using the pneumatic squeezer really helped. I got consistent and straight rivets, both flush and the button head rivets.


Even though it’s just a toolbox, it’s still the first step in building my plane, and I think it was a nice preview into how much work this will really be. I look forward to every minute of it!


Pretty soon there will be a plane in here! (Hopefully)

Next time I post I will be doing the more difficult practice kit for the control surfaces. That will definitely be a fun one.

Finished (95%) the workshop and Vans Practice Toolbox kit

Finished One Work Bench

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I spent the day getting a bunch of wood and tools together to build a couple EAA 1000 Workbenches. These things are great! It will end up costing me about $60 a piece for both completed benches and these will last me a lifetime. Check out the plans here if you’re interested: EAA 1000 Workbench

Heres the wood after I cut it to the correct sizes

Wood And here is a complete Table!  I haven’t done woodworking a long time, so this was a great exercise to get back into building stuff. I’ll build the second table tomorrow, you can see all the wood on the bottom shelf.Bench 1

Finished One Work Bench