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So what's this thing about building airplanes that I've mentioned?
Short version: It is legal for a someone to build a airplane for the purposes of their own education, and to legally fly that airplane in the US (and many other countries too, check your local listings for showtimes and channels). The aircraft has an airworthiness certificate as an "Experimental: Amateur Built" aircraft. This is as opposed to an manufactured airplane, say, a Cessna 172, which is a "certificated" airplane, in perhaps the "normal" category.
So--you can build your own airplane. That's nice, but it leaves the rest of us who aren't aeronautical engineers and powerplant mechanics out of it. Well, the spirit of capitalism shines again, and so there are lots of companies out there that will sell you a complete set of plans to build and airplane. Some companies go farther than this and sell a kit, where some of the pieces are pre-fabricated, leaving some of the work for you. Basically, the way the tradeoff works is the more money you spend, the faster you can put the airplane together.
Once the airplane is built, then you can maintain it, which makes the cost of ownership per year less. Of course, you're paying for the kit or materials up front, rather than with a loan, unless you can find financing for buying the kit itself. And you have the satisfaction of flying something that you built with your own hands.
So...for a couple of years, I've been kicking around the idea of building an airplane. I think it would be great fun, and it would be neat to have something to fly that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg for maintainence. For quite a while, I've been interested in the Dragonfly, a composite tandem-wing aircraft. It's fast, light, and runs on an auto engine; either a VolksWagen or a Corvair. (Composite construction was made popular by the designs of Burt Rutan.)
However, I've realized that something that has an advertised build time of 1500 hours is very likely not a good first project airplane. There are an awful lot of kit airplanes that get purchased and then get sold, partially completed. I really don't want to be part of that statistic. So a few weeks ago, I went through a publication of the EAA that catalogs airplane kits and planes, and lists their performance specs so that you can compare them easily. I looked for designs that were less than $10,000 and less than 500 hours to build.
That came down to about 30 designs, which given the many hundreds in the catalog is pretty slim. I decided that for a small, simple airplane for me to build and then just sort of fly around the local area in, there's no reason to have two seats. I'll mostly be flying by myself, and on the occasions that I'd want to take somebody for a ride, I'll just rent something.
Some of those designs were pretty nifty, including a guy in Missouri that sells kits for WW 1 fighter replicas, including a red Fokker triplane made famous by the Red Baron.
However, I quickly discovered that the vast majority of the airplanes in my narrow constraints are powered by two stroke engines. Two stroke engines must be overhauled much more often, and are just not lubricated as well as their four-stroke bretheren. The reason that they're used in small, light aircraft is that their power to weight ratios are significantly higher. However, I really don't think I want to have to deal with one.
Ok, so back to the catalog, an look for cheap airplanes that are fast to build and that run on four stroke engines. This cuts the options down to about half a dozen. I'm currently look at the Hummel Bird, a very small single seat, metal airplane powered by a 1/2 VW (that's a Volkswagen engine with only two cylinders). Sitting here, right now, a Hummel Bird with full fuel and me in it would be about 3 pounds over gross weight. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's very cheap to build, and builds fairly fast. There's a fly-in in northwestern Ohio on Hummel machines and 1/2 VW engines, and so I'm going to try to attend that; to see how tight of a fit it is to sit in one, if nothing else.
More about building airplanes later...