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Show us a pic of your FINISHED RV-8/8A!!!

Robert 'Smoke' Stack

Taken just west of Denton, TX in April 2005.

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Rv8

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the enclosed picture shows my recently completed RV8. A stock RV with the only modification being the installation of a dual lightspeed electronic ignition system. The aircraft flys great as per published numbers.
 
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Mark Cigal's RV 8

Here's a picture of my "Eagle Eight". First flight was Aug 23, 2004. I now have
100+ hours and am enjoying every second of flight ! UPDATE JAN 2024....... almost 20 years later with over 1,100 hours on the hobbs.DD23FEDA-A6B3-4D01-8822-6CD3B135CB78.jpeg
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Dan Frank's N808VR

Posting this pic for Dan - he took me up for my first RV ride this weekend.

Aerosport Power O-360 turning a Catto composite fixed prop.


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Dan...

AWESOME paint job! Can you provide any details on who did it, etc?

I love the scheme and colors.

Take care,
 
Painter

Not Dan, but his old hangarmate. The paint was done by GLO at 52F. Go see Grady and tell him what you need.

If anyone sees Dan, say hello from Al!
 
Here is my -8. First flown in November 2004, painted in October 2005. IO-360-A3B6D, Catto prop, Dynon D-10, Garmin 196, RMi uMonitor and uEncoder, MicroAir transponder and comm, Vans steam guages. 100 hours and going strong...

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Finished RV-8A N616LM

Completed in the last two weeks.

Fabulous plane....best I have flown.

Jay Martin

Approximately 45 hours.

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N616LM photos

Jay, Looks nice. Do you have any pictures of the interior?

Also, any close-ups of the canopy area - looks like you've done something
with that.

What's the logo on the tail? I can't quite make it out.

Thanks!
 
Mickey and Tracy,

Thanks for your comments. I will post pictures of the interior and canopy fairing soon. I have used stainless steel fasteners for the canopy and windshield for a variety of reasons. To show the detail I have to learn how to take better pictures first!

Regarding the tail art, I appreciate your sharp eyes...I hope you do not mind a somewhat lengthy explanation: In my real life I am a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the U, I direct a research center called the Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology (CREATe) (uwcreate.engr.wisc.edu for those that are interested.) We do research that ranges from advanced wheelchair systems to biomechanics to orthopedic implant research and design. As part of this group, we have a group working on movement issues, that has the name Moovability (Wisconsin=Holsteins=Moo).

One of the reasons that I built an 8A is because it seemed to be a design that would be relatively easy to provide access to people with disabilities. In this case, we have two means, one using an overhead lift, and the other using a gantry-type overhead rail system, to lift and place a person in the passenger seat. Hence, on an extension of the Moovability theme, we call the system "Moovairbility."

In case you did not already know, we like our little "witticisms" here in Wisconsin. Apparently it gives us something to do on long, cold, wintry nights.

Thanks again for asking,
Jay Martin

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Moovairbility

Hi Jay, That looks like a great project. Best of luck with it. Please keep us posted!
 
RV-8, Dynon

rv8bldr said:
Here is my -8. First flown in November 2004, painted in October 2005. IO-360-A3B6D, Catto prop, Dynon D-10, Garmin 196, RMi uMonitor and uEncoder, MicroAir transponder and comm, Vans steam guages. 100 hours and going strong...

paint19.jpg


paint23.jpg


paint22.jpg
Click to expand...
Pretty plane! We're on finishing kit and helped along by people like yourself who've completed and flown your -8. Any feedback on your Dynon? How do you like it - and do you fly IFR? Have fun. Bill Dicus
 
Nice!

Daniel A said:
here is a pic of my 8. First flight on July 4th, 2005. 96 hrs.
Dan
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Click to expand...
Dan - Love your paint job; elegant and clean. We hope to do something similar to ours when the time comes. How do you like your -8? Probably a silly question but I would really like to hear your impressions and performance, thoughts on comfort, heat etc. We're up on the gear (just) and starting firewall prep before hangin engine. Have fun! Bill Dicus
 
The Valkyrie

I guess I should put at least one picture here.....(I wonder if I can link to within Doug's site and avoid the imageshack dance while keeping from creating some sort of quantum singularity that ends up as a black hole and sucks in the entire known universe...well, here goes!

valkyrie8bx.jpg


Paul
 
Object of Desire

I've been waiting for just over a year now to post on this thread, and now I finally can. Alan at Texas AeroColor in Brady did the paint job and Amy Young in Austin did the airbrush work. I shot the clear on the cowl last week and took pictures this weekend.

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N723CT

Heres some photos of N723CT completed july 06 flew in homebuilt review at oshkosh this summer!!
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Retract RV-8 N130WN over North Carolina as seen from the Kitfox photo-ship.

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Just kidding about the retract...it looks it though, don't it? :p
 
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It is pretty fast...for a Kitfox. He toyed with me for a little while, slowing down into the 60's (knots). The AOA was all lit up and yelling at me. I didn't want to drop the flaps for photogenic reasons. Anyway, it was fun MCA practice.
 
Hey Steve,
I did not give you permission to post my ugly face in your airplane!
HA! :p
Cool pic. Must have been a first flight picture.
Hope your having fun with it.
Be nice to see you come fly with us sometime. Grab a burger, burn some gas. Have some fun.
Best,
 
randylervold said:
Ok, here's one over the Oregon countryside...
Click to expand...

Randy,
I've always liked the one over the Oregon coast better.

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This picture, plus a couple Doug took of Danny King's "Beautiful Doll" really set the hook for the desire to do an 8.

Best,
 
N908RV over York River northeast of Williamsburg, VA

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185 hours since last April and loving every minute of it
TMX-IO-360 with Hartzell 74" blended airfoil
 
Here's a photo of my RV-8A N2D. The picture was taken by RV-7A builder John Roberts in Iowa. The paint scheme is taken from the T-6A Texan II. I've got 120+ hours on it since first flight in Feb '06 and am enjoying the airplane immensely.

LIXhEAu9BpnP7pHIhf_J6sGv4KlQeKs_jJyn63f-5oVv64vwiiXnGQ4fTI08lpNwI0phL-K3Y-3yLf0-vwy0zc9_9A_EwXyZcDKLl7SmozuAV9JLfhwWEhdxxJxz0iKokLm9eG1pov2DM9vEMO7y2W7HiO-eoECJyl5_rXoGCtPT9c0z-t3GG7zw74yMDt0o2EJk-CLiJ1PHGtvkn6YeVUrx41eQO4oj-cRzeQjarB8m9a4n1nkDxxu6Km_uq05c_JE6LmQc6GbcjA6fxaXzWLHIL-X1fb25utN9a-pVPsWy7zFEs8a1eWa6izAs5PrCOSfGowIhIs3fUfnpCSM_MQjSCZX7lkC1klLzg0YMLuaEFfS_nCue5lDkXWDtlGcZW7eAyrp6GXjuihgY14rHUK3tzyT0gjIFu1iLYv93kdoCjp3DDohi4OwjYlF4WGaDq_EeoK_RgVYg6kku87l3m__4LlFLxH7pdI1dM5oKalPWzsGMtp1juC8Pbgs8iXc7Ef3XT-e-hmRXKrowFgbtSZFvtlKL-LUnmCdBitOZr14pRlWORjVfvKZPz1oHpDRMwg8nlTMuNNu0YzqEaiSJ0XoTHmuO6ck=w900-h939-no


--Mark Navratil
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
 
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Mark's RV-8A

mark,

I remember a few years back when you tried to sell your kit. Glad to see you did not. That is one beautiful -8A. What helped push you past the stage where you wanted to sell? The answer might help others!
 
For picture, see the T-6A scheme above.

I had the great fortune to meet and talk a little with Mark at Oshkosh. Couple things that Mark has too humbly left out of his post that I think others should know:

1. Mark painted this thing himself with, if I remember correctly, very little to no previous painting experience. It looks as fantastic close up as it does in this picture.

2. This won an award at Oshkosh, a Lindy, I think, which was particularly fantastic because, unlike some of the other award winners, Mark actually built all of it and painted it himself!

Mark's results have kind of confirmed to me that I will try to paint myself, though with a much simpler scheme. It may not turn out nearly as great as Mark's did, but it is possible to do and I will have done it, and learned a new skill, myself.

Thanks for the inspiration Mark.
 
Czechsix, you stole my paint idea. Now I have to come up with a new one :( Good paint ideas just don't happen every day. LOL.


Congrats on an awesome looking -8A.
 
CraigC said:
mark,

I remember a few years back when you tried to sell your kit. Glad to see you did not. That is one beautiful -8A. What helped push you past the stage where you wanted to sell? The answer might help others!
Click to expand...

Craig, thanks for the compliments. I never actually tried to sell the whole project...you may be confusing me with someone else. I did sell an empennage at one point (I got a lot of my kit secondhand from two different builders and had two empennages as a result). However, there were definitely times when I thought about selling the project, feeling like I would never finish it. Believe me, I KNOW the feeling of frustration when you can't make progress on it. I wanted to keep my priorities straight which are God/family/career before the airplane. That was by far the most frustrating and difficult part about building my RV. People talk about proseal or cutting the canopy or sanding fiberglass....there are a few tricky, tedious tasks but for me the biggest difficulty was the frustration of feeling that whenever my priorities were in order, the airplane progress slowed so much I felt hopeless that it would ever fly. If I could add up all the months and weeks where I did not even touch the airplane due to other obligations I bet it would add up to at least a couple years out of the 6.5 yrs it took me to complete it.

My only advice is the same as what you've heard before: try to do something every day, or as often as you can. Little by little and someday it will fly. You have to be a bit stubborn to finish any project this big. After your first priorities are met, be militant in defending your time/money to devote to the project...it has to be very high on your priority list or you'll never finish it. If you stick with it you will be rewarded with a superb airplane and an indescribable sense of satisfaction. And in the process you will develop character and patience that most people will never know in this age of 'reality' TV and other mindless activities that can sap away at our lives, leaving nothing to show for our short time on this earth.

Now go out to the garage and get to work!

--Mark Navratil
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
RV-8A N2D
 
alpinelakespilot2000 said:
<snip> Mark painted this thing himself with, if I remember correctly, very little to no previous painting experience.
<snip>
Mark's results have kind of confirmed to me that I will try to paint myself, though with a much simpler scheme. It may not turn out nearly as great as Mark's did, but it is possible to do and I will have done it, and learned a new skill, myself.

Thanks for the inspiration Mark.
Click to expand...

Steve, thanks for the generous compliments. Yes I did paint it myself and I have two things to say about it:

1) It was the most frustrating, difficult, tedious part of the building process. When you combine novice painting skills with a perfectionist who has high standards and expectations, it's a recipe for lots of weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Of course if you opt for a simpler paint scheme and/or lower your expectations to more realistic levels, it makes things a whole lot more enjoyable!)

2) It is by far the most satisfying thing I've ever done and even with its imperfections I'm proud of the results. I've found in life that the hardest things we do are also the things that give us the greatest sense of accomplishment, and this is no exception.

For the folks who just want to fly, I'd recommend having a pro paint it for you. If you enjoy the building/learning process and want to take the satisfaction level one notch higher when you see your finished airplane sitting on the ramp, pick up a paint gun and start learning. It won't all be fun when you're sweating over runs/bugs/dust in your paint, but you will have no regrets when someone asks "Who painted it?" and you get to reply "I did!"

--Mark Navratil
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
RV-8A N2D
 
KTM520guy said:
Czechsix, you stole my paint idea. Now I have to come up with a new one :( Good paint ideas just don't happen every day. LOL.
Click to expand...

I'm sure I'm not the first to think about how nice an -8A would look in T-6A colors....the configuration of the -8A and T-6A is very similar so the paint job "fits" the -8A really well. Not to mention that you just can't go wrong with red, white and blue and a few stars 'n' bars tossed in for good measure.

Anyway, as I was collecting T-6A paint scheme information I carefully documented all of it in a .bmp file (I used MS Paint). The Fed Std 595 paint colors, dimensions and locations of all the placards, stripes, etc are all on my paint scheme file. I have shared it with a number of other people to copy outright or use as a reference and would be happy to pass it on to you as well. I copied the paint job from the USAF, I certainly won't be bothered if other RV'ers want to use the scheme on their airplanes as well. It would be cool to have a formation photo of half a dozen -8A's in Texan II livery. If you want the file send me an e-mail off-list at: czechsix at msn dot com

If there's enough interest and Doug wants to host it somewhere on his website we could do that too.

--Mark Navratil
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
RV-8A N2D
 
Just joking with ya. I'm not sure what direction I'm going to go on my 8A. It's easy to help others find that right paint scheme but when you have to do it for yourself, it's really hard. My take on the Texan II would be to replace US AIR FORCE with VANS AIR FORCE. I also like Paul Dye's paint job. It's the best I've seen. I just don't know. So many colors, so little budget left. LOL. :p
 
N2D Paint Job

Mark, So tell us a little about the paint job. What type guns did you use? What paint brand? Are the graphics painted or decals? Go ahead and brag away I am interested in details. I have painted a little in the past year and getting it to look good is not easy.
 
CraigC said:
Mark, So tell us a little about the paint job. What type guns did you use? What paint brand? Are the graphics painted or decals? Go ahead and brag away I am interested in details. I have painted a little in the past year and getting it to look good is not easy.
Click to expand...

Craig,

I used a hybrid DeVilbiss (sp?) gun. Sorry I don't have the model number handy as it's buried away in a box in the hangar. The unique thing about this gun is that it will work with a conventional air compressor but it has lower overspray more like an HVLP (and it's approved by the state of California so it must be fairly good in that regard). I like the idea of an HVLP in the sense that it doesn't waste as much paint but really didn't want to invest in the turbine blower apparatus that an HVLP needs. So I thought the hybrid gun would be a good choice and it worked great. I can honestly say that none of the screwups in my paint were in any way related to the gun performance. I also installed a centrifugal water/oil separator designed to get rid of any moisture or oil from the compressor before it goes through the gun and ruins your paint. It worked great too....might not need it in drier climates but we have humid summers here in Iowa. After painting there's a valve on the bottom of the separator that you can open to drain it, and I would typically get a stream of water for several seconds and then it would continue to blow out water vapor for another minute or two. So it was clearly effective.

For paint I used Sherwin Williams Genesis which is an acrylic urethane. The main advantage over Imron polyurethane is that you can buff out the acrylic urethane paint. The downside is that the acrylic urethanes are not quite as tough as the polyurethanes, although the chemistry has improved to the point where I don't think there's much real-world difference. I'm pretty happy with the way the paint went on and how it looks, but if I had to do it over I might just use Imron. My thinking was I could buff out any imperfections in the paint with the Genesis, but I found if I got runs the best way to fix it was just to sand it out and repaint it. I have never buffed any of the paint on the airplane to date and probably never will. It would look better if I did but I'm too lazy...

The small graphics and placards (i.e. RESCUE arrows, tail lettering and lightning bolt, etc) are 3M vinyl from a local sign shop. I created the graphics in MS Visio and then gave the sign shop the file and they cut them out, and then I applied them. The larger graphics like the red strip down the side, the stars'n'bars and USAF markings are painted on using vinyl stencils. I probably would have used vinyl graphics for the US AIR FORCE lettering on the side of the fuselage but on the LH side the lettering goes right through the NACA vent and I knew there would be no way to make that look good with vinyl graphics so I used a mask set and painted it on.

--Mark Navratil
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
RV-8A N2D
 
Paint and Vinyl

All the red and blue strips and nose colors are painted. The roundel, letters and T-Bird emblem are vinyl from Vince Frazier at Screaming Eagle Graphics.
 
Looks great Jerry... we gotta go fly sometime! Shoot me an email or call whenever you're ready! Love that little airport up there in the mountains - very scenic.
 
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