Since our last blogpost (almost two months ago… apologies dear readers!) we have made a lot of progress, mostly because our friends were helping us a lot along the way! We put in wires, fuel lines, installed side skins and the passenger floor. Another exciting bit of news was receiving our engine!

In this blogpost, we visit Rotax engine workshop, Sling Factory in Torrance, and describe our progress towards engine, wiring, and avionics.

In our last post, we said we are planning to sew our own upholstery. In this blog post, we’ll share our progress towards the said goal.

Happy Independence Day readers!!! It’s been a little while (almost 3 months) since we wrote last time, but rest assured, we have been hard at work. In this blog post, we describe our latest progress, as well as our plans for avionics and upholstery.

In this post, we go to EAA Aircraft Electrical Systems, Wiring and Avionics Workshop, as well as connect the rear fuselage and the center fuselage together

In this edition, we make good progress on the center fuselage and start on the undercarriage!

Merry Christmas dear readers! Since our last blog post, our rear fuselage started looking like a part of a real plane!

In this month’s post, we receive the rest of the kits (finishing and canopy, undercarriage, and firewall forward), and run into the first set of issues with rear fuselage.

Hello dear readers! In this blog post, we start putting together some rear fuselage ribs and prime a lot. Sasha also finally earns an IFR rating!

Hello, dear readers! Yes, it’s been over six months since our last post, but progress is still being made!

Since the last post, we closed skins on the right wing, practiced carpentry, and got ourselves some craft beers from runway-side brewery in Auburn.

This week, we finally catch up to blogging and airplane building! We start closing the right wing! We meet new builders!

This week, we focus on wiring and indoor activities as CA goes from wildfires to frost faster than this airplane “crashed” into our front yard.

In this week’s blog post, our friends Holly and Eugene visit for the first time, our primer gun overreacts to some jack-o-lanterns, and we prepare airplane and holiday parts!

In the last several weeks, we test the right fuel tank several times and try not to cry be discouraged.

These last two weeks, the tank sealing quest continues and we get some nice nomex suits from Sasha’s work as wildfires cast an eerie, blood-orange glow on the Bay Area.

In this week’s post, we start work on the fuel tanks, find our first cracked rib (on the bright side, before it gets on the plane), and make first contact with the GOOP.

In this week’s post in our increasingly intermittent blog, we feel good about progress made and bad about (shock!) corrosion found.

In this (now biweekly) blog post recounting Sasha’s and Peter’s struggles - Sasha and Peter have help from their magnificent friends yet again, the rudder and VS are finished, and some wing spars are counter-sunk!

This past couple of weeks - we moved into a new house! Sasha starts work at a new team! Cher (our cat) returns to her rightful family home! Finally, some airplane parts are built :)

This week we were once again joined by guest stars Katya, Zina, and Claude, who were all ridiculously generous with their time - Claude even made these (delicious) brownies!

This week was super productive! 41.75 person-hours is a pretty good week! We assembled so much!

This week, Sasha and Peter emerge from quarantine to continue work!

This week, Peter works a lot on the plane while Sasha works a lot at her job. Sasha also decided to take a break from California to go to Munich for work.

Last week, the euphoria of riveting our first pieces together was shortly followed by the pain and disappointment of our first rivetgun jam. Plus, our little sister Zina visited and we’ve also expanded to YouTube!

We sprayed primer! Some of our parts are primed! Excitement and merriment was had!

Dear readers, this post will be on that most contentious of subjects: priming.

Today we finished preparing all horizontal stabilizer parts!

Eventually, we’ll need a relatively large flat space to work on wings. We decided to bite the bullet and build a table rightaway.

Up until today, all the parts of the empennage and wing kits were sitting in our one bedroom apartment in Millbrae. Today, they have finally found their home in our new hangar.

Hi this is Katya and I occasionally help the Sasha and Peter with plane stuff. However today was a very special day. She managed to pass the check ride with her examiner, The Lord decided to bless Sasha with guidance for a price.

Time: 8 person-hrs. As a first step of working on the horizontal stabilizer, we went through and deburred all the parts.

As a 4th of July celebration, we drove down to LA, and on the next day showed up at the doorstep of The Airplane Factory in Torrance.

D-day for our airplane building experience - the kits have finally arrived!

So, much like many other builders who have not quite gotten their Sling kit yet, we’ve been keeping ourselves busy with hands-on projects. We went ahead and tried mounting Peter’s ski Marker Griffon bindings on his new skis (the ski shop guys wanted 50$ for it and we were like “nah we’re badass builders now thanks”). This was done largely on a whim starting on a random Tuesday evening.

Flying has been a long-standing dream of Sasha’s (and Peter’s, if we are being honest). As Sasha advances towards her private pilot’s license, we decided to get ourselves an airplane; but instead of buying it, we are going to build it!