Too much, too late

Is it me or the natural order of things that the information I need the most, I often acquire after it's too late?

In building my RV, I am falling into the same mantra that so many other RV builders have fallen into: WhenIBuildMyNextRV-itis. When I build my next RV, it'll be much better than this one, because I'll be much smarter. I'll know what mistakes not to make.

Sure, except there'll be a whole bunch of new mistakes to make.

There are many "D'oh" moments when building an RV, and despite all of the Web sites and forums and the attempts to collect these "gotchas" in one place, we still miss that piece of information that will prevent problems -- even though we're following the directions.

I have been working on the canopy frame for a few weeks now and -- as befits my puttering ways -- I've read all the usual Web sites looking for just one more grain of knowledge. But, as usual, I missed one.

It being a slow day at work and all, I visited more sits. Dignity is one of the better sites out there. And today, I found one of those bits of knowledge that I desperately needed.

Here's another internet saver. I drilled up the side spice plates, but left out this hole on each plate (they're handed). This is because the very back rivet of the canopy top skin comes through the plate and lots (aka nearly all tip-up builders) end up catching any rivet located here, or running out of edge clearance. Taking the wise advice of many other who have gone before me, I'm leaving this one rivet out, the rivet that goes through the skin will do the job instead. (See more)

Well, now. Guess what part I drilled last night?

This won't happen when I build my next RV.

Our Daily Thread: Any article by Tim Olson is bound to be a good one. And there's a good one on the RV-10 List (which, by the way, is one of the best bulletin boards out there, just in case you think I had a thing against Matronics forums in general).

The subject is instrument calibration.

It's frustrating for me to see people who don't do diligence in their avionics calibration and flight testing. I think we all owe it to our hard work to get flying to make our systems as good as we can, and I really can't fathom some of the lack of follow-through that I sometimes hear. Let me give you 2 examples that are even RV-10 specific...

If only there were more Tim Olsons.