EAA AirVenture 2024 & Fiberglass Work

It has been too long since I’ve been able to work on the airplane. Kids’ activities (and the volunteer work to go with it), church service, my school work (I’m now working on my MBA through WGU), and trying to spend more time with the kids has taken alot of it from me. I hope to try to swing more time with my kids while building the plane as they showed interest in continuing to build with me while we were at AirVenture this past week.

AirVenture was a blast as always! We plan to return in 2026 and make our avionics purchases then. We are going to purchase the quick-build fuselage next year along with the finishing kit and firewall-forward kit. So hopefully we can pick it all up at the same time around the same time as AirVenture 2026. We plan to drive to Oregon to pick it up as it will be an opportunity to see their facilities and plus it will be saving quite a bit of money in freight costs and it’ll be a good time for my wife and I to spend time together in the car.

My wife and I visited the new display plane that Van’s had for the RV-10 model. It was very well done and I even got a chance to sit in it. It reminded me of what we are shooting for and is giving me more desire to want to finish the plane!

While as AirVenture I did two fiberglass classes. One was the short snippet of the fiberglass for RV’s class put on by the EAA. It had some great tips for how to cut the fiberglass, how to work epoxy into it, shape it around difficult shapes, etc. I then took the fiberglass 101 class, which had a hands on practical at the end. It was great to get some very basic experience and it gave me the courage to finally start tackling my own fiberglass work at home. I had also taken their fiberglass 101 class online back in January and I ordered the practice kit, but that did not arrive until early July because it was on backorder so I just decided to wait until I could take the class at AirVenture to have someone there with me. I want to do the practice kit at home now to solidify more of what I learned.

The one RV-10 that stood out amongst all of them (of which there were many super great builds) was this one – N2816M. I’m not a fan of the paint job personally, but the level of detail on this plane and how well things were done was superb! I didn’t take a picture of this but he put a wedge on the left side of the rudder to tune the yaw in the plane. It was very nicely done and almost invisible to see. Better than having to put a trim servo in or some other mechanism. He also had fiberglassed all of the open control surfaces so it looks very smooth and didn’t have the open weight reduction holes.

I started working on shaping the foam block to back the rear portion of the horizontal stabilizer tip fairing. It took a long time just to get where I am now but I’m still not satisfied with it. It is close but it is still protruding too much on the edge. I hope to get that shaped appropriately tonight when I have some time after church.