The purpose of the build log is to document and share our experience of building a Cozy Mk IV aircraft.
The Cozy MkIV is a four place, composite built, canard aircraft. It is well suited for cross country flight, with typical endurance of over 1000nm, and cruise speed of 200kts.
This aircraft is plans built, with very little prefab components. You start with foam, fiberglass cloth, and epoxy. By carefully following plans which are both well written, and about as thick as some commercial building blueprints, you build and assemble each piece.
This build log is broken down by chapter in the same fashion as the Cozy plans.
Chapter 1 is an introduction to the plans. It contains a description of the aircraft, as well as the license agreement and table of contents.
Chapter 2 is the bill of materials, describing not only what is included in the plans, but also a full breakdown of materials needed for each chapter.
Chapter 3 is the educational chapter. It covers everything from preparation, to proper techniques, to clean up. It also has you build a couple of confidence pieces, just to get used to working with the fiberglass materials. This is one of the most helpful chapters in the manual. We highly recommend making a copy of this chapter to hang on your shop wall.
It is mentioned in the manual that every hour you spend reviewing chapter 3 will save you many hours of frustration in the actual building. While this has a lot of truth to it, there is a lot to be said for getting going with the construction too. We spent far too much time fretting over things we didn’t understand. Some of it you might simply NOT understand until you get the materials in front of you and start working with it.
We had our plans for 2 years before we started building. Sitting on them for 2 years was a big mistake. We let a lot of other ‘little projects’ get in our way. We were constantly wanting to clear our project list completely before starting. The best thing we did was to simply get started. It snowballs from there. Building a plane is unlike any project we’ve undertaken so far, the project itself is fun and rewarding, not just the end goal. We can’t even imagine what it will be like to actually fly a plane we’ve built ourselves.