Joe Ruscito's Kitfox S7 Build

[Bryan]

Welcome aboard Joe. You will love it. These are great kits and the build is so much fun. Enjoy every minute of it and the forum is sooo much help. Keep the excitement going.

[Frontier Fox]

Hey Joe
Good to see another Kitfox build in the works. I started in October and am having a blast. It is so fun to see things start to take shape.

[aviator79]

Welcome to the fun part, Joe! I look forward to following your progress.

[Flyboy66]

Here are some things to acquire if you don’t already have them.

If you bought the tool kit from Kitfox, I would get an extra #30 and #40 drill bit (12 inch)

Amazon- 60 cc syringes (15 to 20)

Ace Hardware/Home Depot- 2 gallons denatured alcohol (cleanup of Hysol)

Harbor Freight- spring clips (to hold ribs and other stuff in place 10 small and 10 medium)

Amazon extra #30 and #40 drill bits (10 each- regular length)

Amazon- food scale. One that will do grams. Sometimes Hysol is needed in small quantities and a scale that does ounces isn’t precise enough in my opinion.

A couple hundred Dixie cups (small and not wax coated)

Amazon. Hose clamps to fit a 3” hose (for holding the lift strut brackets in spar while setting sweep, dihedral and washout) 4 of these.

Extra clecos. 20. For the #30 holes.

Order extra rivets from Kitfox. Feel free to message me and I will tell you which ones and how many. You will probably have to drill out a few rivets because they didn’t seat properly.

Aircraft spruce- AN3-4, AN3-5 bolts and the nylock nuts to fit them (20 or so of each). AN960-10, and AN960-10L washers. 50 of each. They are used for everything and it is nice to have extra hardware. Spruce charges about 8 bucks or more for shipping even for smaller orders so get a list together when you need stuff and order it all at the same time.

There are other things, but I can’t remember them right now.

Steve

[aviator79]

Here are some things to acquire if you don’t already have them.

Amazon extra #30 and #40 drill bits (10 each- regular length...

You can get Cobalt #30 and #40 bits cheap from Spruce. 3/16 is a good idea too.

I have tons of rivets left over. Hopefully there's not something I forgot to put them in...

[Flyboy66]

I had no rivets left over (so far) and had too few for the lift strut attach brackets. And I had to drill out 3 of those because they didn’t seat right when I pulled them. There are a few sizes I would recommend having some extras.

And if you order the Butt Rib close out option, it needs some rivets to secure them that are not included in the kit.

[jiott]

Maybe they changed the quantities in the newer kits, but I also had oodles of extra rivets left over, also had many nuts and washers left over. Bolts very few left over.

[efwd]

I'm like Brian, nail biting at the thought of not having used some somewhere I needed too. Plenty rivets left over. Of course, when I needed a rivet of a certain type, It was never the kind that I had remaining in my stock. Wouldn't want any new folks to be mislead, I had all the stuff that was required for the build. The extra rivets I was needing were for modifications or custom work like mounting Auto Pilot Servos.

[JoeRuscito]

Thanks for all the advice guys!

I now have an airplane in my garage!!!

Picking it up was easy and Brandon and Heather were super helpful.


I completed the inventory check today and got the garage mostly sorted.


I did have to raise the mounts a bit. They were 33" from the floor, not the cross bar.

I plan to really get started tomorrow!