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I want to build an RV-14A in my basement...

Amazon-1

Active Member
Luckily it is a walkout basement.

The doorway is 70" wide. Can anyone check their plans or built airplane and tell me if the fuse on the gear would fit through a 70" opening? My wife is a pretty tolerant woman, but she might not appreciate it if I have to demo part of the foundation to get my project out. :)

On a separate and unrelated topic, Van's quoted me about $2000 to ship the QB kit from Oregon to Virginia. I was considering picking it up and driving cross country with it to save costs. Good idea?

Thanks,

Bruce

2003 RV-8 (bought, flown and sold)
2007 RV-10 (bought, flown and sold)
2019 RV-14A (plan to build)
 
If you have a suitable trailer, sure. Consider insurance.

As for gear width, give consideration to building with the fuselage on low table or similar support & installing gear later when it goes to the airport.
 
Not going to fit

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If it is a finished basement be aware of the tremendous amount of aluminum chips and dust you will be generating. I vacuum my garage after every build session and I still cannot keep up with the mess. Once every three months or so I move the benches and tools into the driveway and wash the floor and blow out the accumulated dust and dirt. If it is carpeted you will want to pull it up or put a temp floor over it. You can never get pigtail chips out of the carpet.
 
I built my -9 in my basement and had to replace the 32" door with a 64" door.

Put your building table on extra sturdy wheels. When you are finished building, lift it up with your engine hoist, put it on the table, roll it out the door and put the gearlegs back on.

It helps if you are building a taildragger.

Oh, you will have a couple of years to figure this out.
 
If it is a finished basement be aware of the tremendous amount of aluminum chips and dust you will be generating. I vacuum my garage after every build session and I still cannot keep up with the mess. Once every three months or so I move the benches and tools into the driveway and wash the floor and blow out the accumulated dust and dirt. If it is carpeted you will want to pull it up or put a temp floor over it. You can never get pigtail chips out of the carpet.

OH, and Proseal on the bedroom carpet will never come out. Just say, should it happen to you, I know a good carpet guy!

I'm still trying to figure out how I got Proseal up three flights of stairs down the hallway, into the bedroom without getting anywhere else.
 
Ship or pick-Up?

...Van's quoted me about $2000 to ship the QB kit from Oregon to Virginia. I was considering picking it up and driving cross country with it to save costs. Good idea?

"Do it yourself" has time, insurance, lodging, food, fuel, other costs; there's a timely article in Nov 2019 issue of KITPLANES with considerations and implications.

Good luck!
 
I know people have built in basements before but deburring aluminum would raise health concerns with me if it were done in the same place I sleep at night. A lot of aluminum particulate would be in the house. No to mention fumes from various chemicals as well. I suppose you could do a lot of that stuff outside and then bring it in.
 
I'm building in my basement. The climate controlled space has been a wonderful build space but the fuselage will have to be done in the garage when large parts start coming together. I only have a standard 30" door leading to stairs out of the basement with no option to make that hole bigger. I usually open the door and run a fan when using chemicals but never gave a second thought to deburring or AL dust.
 
I would say ?no problem? if you don?t have the landing gear attached. I built an RV8 in my basement - completely - and then removed the landing gear, and wings to get it out. I know the RV14 is wider, but my opening was an egress window I installed for this purpose and was 50? wide with the window removed. The most restrictive parts were the wings, not the fuselage. If you have 70?, it should not be a problem. I built a set of RV14 wings (kit #16) and they went out that same 50? window. Your fuselage width might be a little wider, but you have 70?!!
The advantage to building at home is huge. You can go to the basement almost every day and accomplish something, even if it to plan out your next move. The quality of your build will be better. The only rule I had was, I couldn?t do noisy stuff, like pounding rivets after 10pm. There is so much more you can do. I built a small paint booth in one corner of my basement - sealed - and vented through the sill plate on my house with a squirrel cage fan scavenged from a Jennair cooktop we replaced in the kitchen on the main floor. You couldn?t smell anything with that fan running, not even in the basement. That was my first RV8, not a QB, and I built it in 2 years start to finish and flying. I could not have done that if I would have had to drive to the airport (7.5 miles) every time I wanted to work on the plane. My family life would have suffered. Sounds like with a walk out basement with a 70? door, you have the perfect situation for building at home. Good luck with your build, you won?t be disappointed regardless of which way you decide to go with your build quarters.
 
I am building my RV-14A in my basement, which has a considerably smaller door than yours. It's about 58.5" wide when open, and I was able to fit a QB fuselage in. Albeit not with a lot of space on the side. Basement has a lot of advantages such as being climate controlled and much closer by than the hangar. I make a lot of aluminum dust but am careful to vacuum it up, and wear a mask as needed. The priming takes place in the garage out back (P60G2).


IMG_2738-1.jpg
 
Building my -14A in an unfinished walkout. My plan is to remove sliding glass door and take out the fusalage sans gear and do the rest in the garage/hanger. My thought is I get a huge chuck of work done inside.
 
I am building an RV-14 (taildragger) in my unfinished basement with a walk-out French door. I delayed posting this because I didn't want to jinx myself. Tonight, we successfully removed the fuselage from the basement. The engine is mounted and the landing gear is on the plane. It would have been easier to do this before putting the landing gear on, but we succeeded.

We rolled the plane at a steep angle to the door to get one wheel out, then put both wheels on furniture dollies and slid it sideways. The idea was to be able to turn the fuselage so the second wheel rolled out and then the plane would roll straight forward. That would have worked if the landing gear axles didn't stick out to hold the wheel pants. With the protruding axles, we were basically 1" wider than the roll-slide-turn plan allowed. So we lifted the wheels off the ground with an engine crane and tipped it sideways just enough to allow that last inch of axle through the door.

Obviously, we removed the horizontal stabilizer to fit through the door, and that necessitated removing the elevators, rudder, and vertical stabilizer. I plan to leave those off of the plane until it makes the move to the airport. Narrower is better for going down the road, even on the short 2-mile jaunt I am facing.

I don't think this method would work with an RV-14A., although for all I know it would work better. I would recommend moving out of the basement after putting on the engine mount but before attaching the landing gear, as long as you have a good place to work on the other stuff like the cowling, firewall forward wiring/plumbing, and so on, and a good way to transport it between the two places without being on its own wheels.
 
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