We were out of town for the week, playing grandpa & grandma with my daughter's family outside of New Orleans. We got back late Friday night and Saturday I worked on one of Van's practice projects. Specifically, there's a simple aluminum box with their logo cut out in front and illuminated from inside by a strip of LEDs. I already built one and it was a good project to remind myself about how to cut, dimple, deburr, cleco and rivet things together. The project comes with enough rivets to use either the default LP3-4 pop rivets or you can use a rivet gun. I elected the latter as I have no significant experience driving rivets. Alas, the rivet gun I borrowed today didn't work for some reason, so I shelved the rest of the practice project for now. I will finish it using driven rivets whenever I get a functioning rivet gun.
Having put that on the shelf, I finally started working on the kit itself. The instructions just say "here's the Left, you just mirror it in your head when you do the Right." The user group has published a Wiki with errata & gotchas. One of the first ones is that some of the parts are mis-labeled with respect to orientation. Van's nomenclature leaves much to be desired. As far as I've been able to deduce, parts that end with -001 are the first ones designed in CAD. If a mirrored part is required, it gets a -002 suffix. Note that these have nothing to do with the left or right of the airplane.
Armed with all of the trepidation that these factors engendered, I elected to do no cutting or bending or anything else that is not reversible. Instead, I clecoed both of the aileron skeletons side by side. Even so, there were several steps that are (IMHO) poorly illustrated in the KAI. I'd love to see orientation vectors (up, fwd, outboard) next to many parts. I did, in fact, cleco several things upside down or swapped inboard vs outboard. I was very happy that I hadn't cut or drilled anything!
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