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You know, for years (every year since '83) I have been going to
Oshkosh and have always wanted to build a plane.  I'm trying to rearrange
my life soon to make the time.

Being an engineer and a pilot I thought I would enjoy the challenge of
doing it.  However, frankly, after monitoring the e-mails back and forth
for months now, I'm not so eager to jump in.  I'm a little appalled at the
"apparent"  lack of either sufficient instructions on how to do something
or the lack of good systems design for some sub-systems from Lancair.  I
had always assumed that in those thick assembly manuals there were enough
details to properly build a plane..... naive me!  Between the comments by
some that they have never seen change pages to the manuals even though
Lancair had their correct address and that they have been sending in
"fixes" over a long period of building to apparently poor design of some
sub-systems (recently, brakes for example?), I'm rather hesitant to jump
right in.  This really is an "experimental" plane!!

I'm not  looking to have to make any big design decisions and have to
redesign some subsystems (by the way, my hat is off to Brent and others in
this regard).  I'm looking for a manual that tells me the exact and best
way to build one... completely..soup to nuts (even though I have Tony
Bingelis' and other construction technique books).  Of course, the
definition of "best way" is debatable.  I realize that there will always be
those people who want to enhance any design, and that's OK;  but there
seems to be some lack of confidence in some existing subsystems as defined
by the manuals.  What I haven't gleaned is whether the documentation and
manuals have improved so that newer aircraft such as the ES have far
superior instructions to older models.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Dick Blumenstein

(h) rcblumenstein@sysdyne.com

(w)  above e-mail address.