After about four years, I am back at building a plane. Life happened and I had to move four times, which impacted my progress on the RV-7 aircraft. I sold that empennage kit and my tools. I have since moved to Cupertino, California.

This time, I am going to start building a Van's RV-8. I thought if I were going to build a plane, it had better be a tandem. The RV-8 has a tandem seating arrangement where the pilot and the passenger/second pilot sit one behind the other, in a single-file line along the aircraft's centerline, rather than side by side.

Van's RV-8 (Picture from Van's RV-8 website page)

The Van's RV-8 was designed by Richard VanGrunsven. It is fully aerobatic-capable, able to perform loops, rolls, and other maneuvers. It is offered as a kit. You get thousands of small parts, blueprint drawings, and build/assembly instructions.

Some empennage parts as I inventory them.

I have started inventorying the empennage kit parts and setting up my workshop, which for now is mostly in the living room. The empennage parts are not that large, so the living room should suffice until I move on to the next section, which will be either the fuselage or the wings.