Prebuilt Spars worth the expense?

[MichaelFarley56]

If you want to build just to build, don’t worry about any of the options.

If you want to fly and you can afford the premade angle kit, do that one first.

Then, if you can afford the finished spars, get those.

[Scott Todd]

You (We) started down this path because you want to build. If you just want to fly, go buy a flying one. Its much cheaper ;) Guys like Michael above and Graeme are regular posters that have been having a blast with their purchases. But having said that, its a lot to build.

The Spar is basically a Robot build where you just follow the directions and a week later you are done. When you get to the panel, rigging, painting, cowls, canopy, etc, a lot of decision making and such can slow you down and you will look back on that spar build and think it was a piece of cake and flew right by.

[mike.smith]

Whatever makes the most sense to you. That's probably not very helpful. I scratch built, and money was a huge concern. The spars were not difficult to build, they just took a bit of head scratching to figure out at first. I've never built from a kit, so I have no idea what it's like to have a pre-built anything (except the welded stuff). My pace was an average of 500 hours/year building. My Kitlog wing pages start here: http://www.mykitlog.com/users/display_l ... 07&row=347

[dbdevkc]

10 years on the fuselage? You might want to get the pre-built spars. With 20-20 hind sight they are not that difficult to do, but took me forever to get done because I had no confidence in my abilities with solid rivets - and there are a couple of spots in particular that are relativity difficult (IMO) to rivet. After doing 90% of one spar I had an experienced builder come take a look and he gave hit approval and basically said looks good -keep going.

Depends on money availability and confidence in riveting ability. But as it turns out, the riveting is not as hard as I initially thought.

[Darick]

Once I built the tail kit, I knew I could do the wings and fuselage. However I didn't trust myself to make the most important part (IMHO) that would keep the wings on. So I bought the factory spar knowing it was built by experienced hands. When I drilled the completed wing/spar assembly to the fuselage, it was exactly spot on.

[pappas]

Since I built a legacy Waiex and a B model, I have both built the spars and used the factory prebuilt. The prebuilt certainly allowed me to move along faster but building the spars myself was not hard to do. It just took about 10 hours per spar if I recall. Even with building the spars myself, I finished and flew the legacy Waiex in 5 1/2 months.
Trust yourself. If you can build the rest of the airframe, you already have the skills to build the spars. Buy something cool for the panel instead.

[OnAirCreative]

Thanks for all the help guys. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and experiences with me.

Kevin
1439 Sonex