Quoted:



You'd be surprised at how many kits are bought "on a whim", especially when you can buy one sub-assembly at a time.

I have been asked to look over a number of homebuilts under construction.   The quality of workmanship was mostly appalling.   But, these guys had been successful in life and felt they were so smart they couldn't possibly fail at building an aircraft, so they bought a kit same as buying another car.  They ignored my constructive criticisms, and I was trying to be super polite with them.   I once wrote a three page letter detailing all of the obvious problems with a half-done homebuilt project a friend had purchased.   Since he was a friend, and not wanting him to burn up in it, I was blunt and went into great detail.   I ended with the words "if you try to fly this aircraft, you're going to die."   Didn't stop him from wasting hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars before he finally scrapped it.   I wasn't about to touch that disaster.  

I am amazed at the shortcuts and substitutions these guys take.   One guy picked up .100 sheets of phenolic for free at work and decided to use them instead of dimpling .019 sheet aluminum.   He tried to countersink the 100* rivet holes with a 90* drill bit.   Another guy built a two seater and decided he could double his range by replacing the 2nd seat with a 30 gallon plastic soap barrel and plumb it into the fuel system using garden hose and Ace Hardware valves.   I asked him what happens when he has a hard landing and that old dry rotted barrel cracks and pours avgas down onto the super hot exhaust directly underneath him.   He just gave me a blank stare.   I wished he was with me when I watched, up close, a "Grizzly" homebuilt crash land at ABQ and the pilot struggle to get out but was burned to death. It was a fibreglas aircraft and burned hot and fast.   By the time the crash crews got their shit together and drove the three miles to the crash site, the only things left were the engine, some steel and charred meat.

Riveting is the area where most shortcuts take place, using junk pop rivets from the hardware store, or any solid rivets they can get cheaply, shear strength be damned.   Their installation of solids gives one perfect examples of every riveting mistake known to mankind.   It ain't easy to begin with, and even though many kit manufacturers have gone to great lengths to make it easier, builders seem to think they are going to do great riveting from day one.   I suggest they rivet up a toolbox, a doghouse, anything, to get some experience before tackling the airframe.   And the tool suppliers are not helping by selling that crappy hand squeezer as God's gift to homebuilders.    Bucking bars and a riveting hammer will do a better job in many places.

When I do a large structural repair, word gets around and I get lots of visitors, homebuilders and potential builders, curious to see an aircraft opened up and looking for advice.  They are blown away by the vast array of tools I'm using at that moment.   5-10 pneumatic squeezers, 15+ hand squeezers, 30-50 bucking bars, and lots of home-made tools.   I'm happy to talk with them, but I've had some tell me I don't need that many tools to do the job.  I swear, some of these guys would buy a do-it-yourself brain surgery kit.   A good friend, Gene M, had a shop with lots of homebuilders on the field that constant pestered him for free advice and free hardware.  His favorite phrase was "Homebuilders are the only people on the planet that can screw up an anvil".

I know there have been some really nice homebuilts completed and it is not impossible to build one, but my experiences with these builders has left me picking my jaw up off the floor numerous times.   I am absolutely convinced that many of these aircraft/car/boat projects are started mainly as an excuse to get away from the wife for a while, with no serious intention of ever completing them.  Oshkosh is a great place to see many beautiful homebuilts.  The flip side is the hundreds or thousands of homebuilt projects collecting dust in garages and hangars that will never be finished, because the owner lost interest, ran into financial hardship, had medical problems, realized he was not skilled enough, or screwed up a big assembly and refuses to redo it.  I could probably find 20 or more of them at my local fields if I wanted to.

I have all the Tony Bingelis books and lots of other homebuilt data.   I am not impressed with most of it.  These authors try to reduce the build process down to something as simple as building a go cart, giving builders a false sense of hope.   Some of the videos on youtube are okay, but I find many of them are the blind leading the blind.

Well, now that I have royally pissed off every homebuilder on arfcom, I'll say goodnite.

Quoted:


Well,


Ya gotta give him some credit.  At least he used sheet aluminum.
As opposed to cutting up the nose of your aircraft to install a huge landing light, then using foil tape to try keeping everything from coming apart.




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