Captainphx's build

[Av8r3400]

• Good lights
• Clean, bright floor and walls
• A decent drill press
• Sufficient heat/AC appropriate for where you are located
• A wall of peg board or shelves to keep organized all the small parts
• Camera
• Good WiFi to keep us in the loop on your progress

[captainphx]

Great advise. I did just get my garage floors re-epoxyed and some new cabinetry. Dave mentioned a band saw would be handy.

[aviator79]

A bandsaw is handy, although not required. I have a cheap one, and it has been sufficient.

You can build wing rotisseries prior to the kit arriving. There are many ideas on the forums, the critical dimension is 27.5 inches between spar centers. I built a fancy fuselage rotisserie.... that didn't work. I then switched to a "tic tac toe" frame on the front, with the tail suspended from the ceiling by a bolt and fender washer in one of the rudder bosses. This worked well. Easy to rotate with one person. All of this is searchable on the forums to find more info.

Buy some extra clecos, and a bunch of cobalt #30 and #40 drill bits.

[Dusty]

Great score on the rego

[efwd]

Welcome to the Forum. Add to the list an air driven rivet gun. HF has some.
I would not have been able to pull all those SS spar rivets by the time the adhesive set up.

[Av8r3400]

I used a pair of $50 Harbor Freight engine stands for a fuselage rotisserie. Works great!

A pair of PVC "wishbones" spaced to fit into the spars and then strapped to a pair of sawhorses works great for a wing rotisserie.

[captainphx]

A bandsaw is handy, although not required. I have a cheap one, and it has been sufficient...

Yes, I think the rotisseries will be coming up soon.

[rosslr]

OMG! that workshop is stunning!! What a beautiful space for building your Kitfox.

All the best for the build and I look forward to the updates.

cheers

ross

[airlina]

Thats not a garage, thats an airplane factory , have fun Bruce N199CL

[captainphx]

Got back from a little vacation and got right back to work on the Kitfox. Got the ribs installed on the H Stab and Elev. Got the end caps installed. I used Balsa. Ordered some Superfill and will finish them off with that here in a few days. Everything's going pretty well so far. I am really enjoying this. I'm really anxious to move this thing along. As you may know I had my metal parts shipped unpainted. I took them to a paint shop. My plan is to do a paint scheme similar to the Factory Sti. I emailed Kitfox and asked them exactly what color their a/c was and they told me it is called Rancho Silver. So I had the paint shop paint the struts that color. I was thinking about using Oratex Silver, but it took so long for their sample to arrive and I just went ahead and painted the struts. Turns out that the Rancho Silver has a bit of a gold flake in it. I don't remember that when I saw the factory STi. It is absolutely beautiful, so it looks like no Oratex for me...polyfiber and paint. Anyway, what follows is a few pics of the progress.

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