Prior to starting the final inspection process, the project plane has to be assigned registration marks by Transport Canada Licensing. You have two options here, let the magic computer at Transport do a random pick from the available registration marks and give you something that may or maynot be pronouncable or go thru the list yourself, pick what you like and then pay Transport Canada a fee of $140 for providing this service to them.

So I picked C-FTLL, Tango Lima Lima, something I will be repeating many times over the next 10 plus years I hope to fly this aircraft.

 OK, so its not in my shop but my son’s latest business venture has made a trotec speedy 400 co2 laser cutter and engraver readily available for the RV project. Judy and I dropped over to his place for a demo yesterday. The engraver has a 24″ by 39″ work area and the front and back access panels drop down to accept larger items such as doors or large counter tops. He had a number of granite and quartz countertop samples on hand so we grabbed an image from the Vans Aircraft web site, did a bit of Corel magic on it and then down loaded it to the printer (laser). It took a couple of minutes to produce this nice coaster. The laser is pretty cool to watch in action. Its quite a step forward from the Roland graphics cutter we have in the shop for doing vinyl graphic work. I am glad I didn’t farm out all the placard work in the project. Now I can do up the art work myself and then send it over to the production shop. Its funny how things turnaround overtime. Used to be he was borrowing my tools….

Yes, this is the year the RV9A will fly. To make it so, I have booked 10 hours of transition training with Mike Seager, one of Van’s Aircraft recognized trainers. He has over 18,000 hours of flying time, of which 12,000 is doing Vans Aircraft transition training. I am booked for July 9,10,11th at his Oregon facility. Looking very forward to that trip south! While in the area I plan to attend the EAA Arlington Fly-in on the 12th/13th on the road home.

If all goes to plan, aircraft final assembly at the hanger will happen in June, transition training in July and final inspection in last week of July. Its my plan to start flying the 9A in August if it all comes together between now and then.

I’ll fill in the words shortly, the pictures say it though. All metal pieces now polished except the belly. I’ll finish that once I wrap up the landing gear fairings.