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Completion %

Build9A

Build9A

Well Known Member
Vans keeps track of flying RVs that are reported to them. Currently 4219. I used to read that overall homebuilt completions were very low compared to starts. With the new techniques, builder assistance and prepunched kits; has anyone heard any completion statistics? I am sure it must be improving. Also do you know how many total Vans kits have been sold, maybe reported by Van or staff at Oshkosh or homecoming events? Or is that top secret? Just curious. thanks, Jack
 
Percentage sales of tails

I think the question might be more related to the number of Tail kits have been sold compared to say Wing kits.

I was advised when starting out, not to buy the total kit, rather complete the tail to get a feel for the whole operation. The tail might be discarded but this would be a small price to pay compared to buying all the components only to have to sell them if I became disenchanted.

The advice may yet to prove to be good but after 6 years of spare time building I am 90% complete with 90% to go (I'm just about to start the engine) On the other hand with only about 100 serious hours to go, I'm still enchanted.

So I guess your question would be how many tails versus how many wings?
 
It probably does not mean much as the RV-7 is pretty new but my tail is number 2295. There is less than 200 flying.
I am sure I have read somewhere that there have been more than 10,000 RV-6 tails sold but there is less than 2000 flying. But don't quote me on that :D
 
Just for kicks, when did you receive your tail kit? It might be interesting to see a list and determine how fast the RV-7's are going out the door.

My tail number is 1947 and I recieved it the first week of August 2004. Working on my QB tip-up canopy now.

Scott
 
My tail kit was 1748, and I received it in early March 2004. That makes 40-50 RV-7 emps a month in mid-04...

Dave
 
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I have tail kit 1664. Received it in June 2004.

Oops, I meant to write Janurary 2004.
 
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kit # & date

> My tail kit was 1748, and I received it in early March 2004.

> My tail number is 1947 and I recieved it the first week of August 2004.

> I have tail kit 1664. Received it in June 2004


mine is 1821 -- rcv'd 5/31/04
 
I have 70966, got the kit in Aug. '02 and started construction late Oct. '02. Was a QB kit, finished in March '04, flew in April '04.

Roberta
 
At Oshkosh 03, during one of the Van's seminars, Van announced that there had been over 12000 tail kits sold. That was two years ago and the number has to be much greater now.

Also seems as if the number of completions has grown steadily the past couple of years. The number should be big at the end of the year.

Darwin N. Barrie
P19
A couple of months out!!!
 
Total Tally

I have always thought kit makers should post both kits sold and kits completed. It would be interesting to see the results. Maybe it would encourage makers to see more completitions. I also think it would be very important to would be builders. Sure Van's has a lot of planes flying but they have sold a lot of kits. Sounds like the Babe Ruth story.

One of my knocks on Van's over the year is that they continue to crank out new models but we see little improvement in existing kit materials, instructions or plans despite a myriad of problems. I keep wondering how many people just get tired of all of the hassle of non fitting parts, wrong instructions and plans and give up. When I have complained to Van's in the past the guys just say "you should have seen the 4 or the 6." They were even worse. I encourage all of you to let Van's know when you have problems. I has got to help.
 
POLYCOM said:
One of my knocks on Van's over the year is that they continue to crank out new models but we see little improvement in existing kit materials, instructions or plans despite a myriad of problems. I keep wondering how many people just get tired of all of the hassle of non fitting parts, wrong instructions and plans and give up. When I have complained to Van's in the past the guys just say "you should have seen the 4 or the 6." They were even worse. I encourage all of you to let Van's know when you have problems. I has got to help.
Click to expand...

It could be worse, we could be building from just a set of plans.

Yes, I have made mistakes because of the plans and because of my own stupidity. No big deal, that is part of the educational process of home building.

Yes I would like to see Van's improve the instructions but there is no money it in rewritting them and I would rather see Van's not waste money and still be around in twenty years.
 
Scott Will said:
Just for kicks, when did you receive your tail kit? It might be interesting to see a list and determine how fast the RV-7's are going out the door.

My tail number is 1947 and I recieved it the first week of August 2004. Working on my QB tip-up canopy now.

Scott
Click to expand...

Kit number 2295 arived mid april 2005. I think on the vans site it says they are selling about 500 ish 7 tail kits a year.
 
From kit to flying in an RV-9A.

I received my RV-9A empennage kit in October 2002 with serial number 90622. The wing kit came on January 3, 2003. The fuselage was delivered on August 13, 2003. When the airplane flew on June 9, 2005 - Van's posted my first flight email and rolled the RV-9 Hobbs count to 155. I passed 467 other builders along the way to first flight.

For what it's worth, I have flown in RV-9A #16 and it has been flying over three and half years. I saw number 400 featured in front of the Flying Magazine tent at OSH last year.

Jerry K. Thorne
East Ridge, TN
N2PZ (Hobbs @ 16.1 hours.)
 
Kit improvement

POLYCOM said:
One of my knocks on Van's over the year is that they continue to crank out new models but we see little improvement in existing kit materials, instructions or plans despite a myriad of problems.
Click to expand...
Some repeat offenders have told me that there are incremental improvements in the kits. For example, the 8 tail used to not be pre-punched, now it is. Same with the wing. Technically the fuselage is not pre-punched, but more and more parts of the fuselage are now pre-punched.

All the areas of the manual and instructions that I had trouble with were my fault, in the end, for not reading closely enough. I find that these types of forums are a great supplement to the manual, and a phone call to Van's.

Since Van's provides support for free, which I find amazing, they have a lot of incentive to reduce the number of calls. I would be very surprised if they are not using the valuable customer input gained from these calls to improve their products. Judging from the number of revisions on my plans, it seems like this is happening.

One problem with "improving" your product, is that very often previous purchasers of the product tend to feel that they are owed a free upgrade to the improved product, whatever it is. This probably kills more improvement than anything else.
 
Fast forward five years from this threads original post. Do we have any better understanding today of completion percentages? One comment in this thread ties completion percentage to quality of build instructions. Have the build instructions improved significantly over the past five years for the various kits?
 
diamond said:
... Have the build instructions improved significantly over the past five years for the various kits?
Click to expand...
I don't know about the instructions as I still have my original builder's manual but the kits have improved significantly. Just take a look at the baffle kit as one example.
 
Check the numbers going back several years. At some point I saw about a 100% increase in the number reported complete. My guess is that improvement was related to quickbuild kits.
 
I compiled some data for the number of completed RVs as a function of time, as reported by Van's. The numbers after 2008 are from the RVator PDFs posted on Van's website, and numbers pre-2008 are from Internet Archive (archive.org) cached versions of the vansaircraft.com site.

The archive.org cache pages only go back to 5/1997. If anyone has data prior to 1997 (print versions of the RVator perhaps?), I would be glad to add it to the graph.

Completed_RVs.png
 
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RV7 Tail kit 2135

Hi everyone,

I know this thread is old but I will give it another kick.

RV 7 No.2135 purchase in April 2005 and 3 days ago by me. YAY to me lol!

Virtually an untouched kit. not even one rivet used. Still looks just like new.
 
RV-7A #3138 8/07

so if 2135 was sold in 4/05, that's 1003 kits started (presumably) in 28 months, or about 36 RV-7 kits/mo.

(ETA...not sure what happened to the number 36 per month, but it wasn't there...weird).
 
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When I work the numbers, I calculated about 10 completed RVs per week since 2005. Is that right? If so, where are all these RVers? I certainly don't see news of 10 completions per week on VAF. I realize not everyone that builds RVs is active on VAF, but I would have guessed a higher percentage of builders to be active on VAF than what these numbers indicate. Are there other builder websites that non-VAF RVers frequent for support, or can it be said that a good number of builders just don't interact online much?
 
diamond said:
When I work the numbers, I calculated about 10 completed RVs per week since 2005. Is that right? If so, where are all these RVers? I certainly don't see news of 10 completions per week on VAF. I realize not everyone that builds RVs is active on VAF, but I would have guessed a higher percentage of builders to be active on VAF than what these numbers indicate. Are there other builder websites that non-VAF RVers frequent for support, or can it be said that a good number of builders just don't interact online much?
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This is what I find both amazing and fun as I travel around the country and see RV's at just about every airport you find. Not everyone is on VAF - and that is fine. VAF is sometimes seen as this monolithic block - the Microsoft of RV'ing - when in fact, I see it as a place that folks can come and get news about the rest of the RV world. There many, many RV'ers (the demographics suggest that most are in their 50's) that just don't do much online, They have their local group of friends, pilots, builders...and that works for them. I so often find little vibrant communities of people that are barely aware of VAF. There are some other online communities that folks use, yes. But I think that a large number of folks are just "off the web"...and if they are out building and flying instead, it's hard to say there is anything wrong with that in my book...;)
 
Completion Percentage

I heard the average kit plane completion historically was 1 in 10 fly or a completion rate of 10%. Now I know Van's has a much higher completion rate, but part of that is with Van's kits, there are a number of people who wait for a kit builder to become disenchanted and swoop and purchase the kit at a discount and finish the kit. I have heard antidotally that 25 to 40% of Van's kits are completed, a much higher percentage. Most other kit manufacturers do not have as many people willing to pick up a "used kit" due to (my guess) the fewer number of kits and the fewer repeat builders. I completed my RV 7A 1.5 years ago and have not convinced my wife to let me buy another kit to work on. I want to keep flying and have ongoing maintenance but I would rather build than watch the 23 rerun of NCIS, Criminal Minds etc. I have reread my Michael Chrichen novels and in general would like to have a tail kit to hammer on versus watching stupid TV.

The bottom line is Van's has a much higher completion rate due to the amount of info online, many helpful people willing to help out and experienced with the Van's kits, Van's excellent technical support, and the cachet of being a Van's RV owner.
 
Poll

DeltaRomeo said:
Hi gang,

I set up a poll where you can click on what you're working on. We can get a pretty good idea (at least from the readership) fairly fast.

Vote at:
http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?t=2114

Best,
Click to expand...

Doug, You set up the poll in 2005 and we can only place our input once. The information is relatively static while the building process is dynamic.
A NEW poll with the same info would be good. :) There was one started in August of this year :;) http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?t=61305 which seems to reflect more people have finished or are very close to completion.
It also is static and the idea of running the poll once a year or so might result in some more meaningful statistics. Thanks, George
 
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