Where to start?

When I studied the plan set for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the masses of informations. For the first time I realised how much work in detail a homuit aircraft will be and I asked myself where to start with.

An aircraftdesign like a Flitzer combines a number of handcrafts. Most of the skills needed are woodworks like cutting, sanding, bending and glueing. Metalwork is also an important task. Cutting, bending, shaping and welding skills for steel and aluminium are very helpfull.

As I felt myself experienced and selfconfident in woodworks, I planned to start with one of the countless parts made from spruce. The first idea was to start with something small, that would lead to a fast result. So I thought about starting with the fin and rudder.

After several more rounds of studying the plans I finally decided to start with the fuselage sidepanels and the firewall. The reason for this was, that both groups share wood from the same size and quality. Another reason for going this way, was that these two groups are primary built from square wood sticks, glued together at mostly right angles. From my understanding one of the simplest task.

The last and most important reason forme, starting with the fuselage, was that everyof the other groups, like the undercarriage, the wings and the tailplane will earlier or later be bolted to the fuselage. Even under carefull building conditions will there always be some building tolerance in size and measurement. My idea was, that it should be easier to fit the different smaller groups to possible differences of the fuselage, than adapting the heart (the fuselage) to a number of different tollerances of the other parts.

Over the time I experienced changing building conditions, mostly depending to the temperatures. As I have to work with a glue called Aerodux, I am limited by temperature. Too cold, or too hot environment temperature will lead to poor glueing results. Thats the reason why I paused several times the building of the fuselage an started to jig and built other parts, like the elevator, fin and rudder and several of the metal parts.