The Airplane Is Not Built Yet

My nine year old asked for a 747 for Christmas. Not a model kit, not a plastic one with stickers for windows, a wooden airplane big enough to be a serious object in a room. I said yes the way you say yes to a nine year old, which is instantly and with no idea what you have agreed to. It is September. There is no airplane. There are seven drawings, and I have learned more about wings than I meant to.

We drew it once and it was fine and it was wrong. We had made box art for it first, a poster of the thing as we wanted it to feel, and the poster was sleeker than the plane we had actually drawn. You can let that go and ship the merely fine one. Or you can say the uncomfortable thing out loud, which is that if we want it to look like that, we have to design it like that. So the whole airplane was redrawn to the poster. Three hundred eighty millimeters nose to tail, fifty wide, a wing three hundred forty across swept thirty four degrees, a fin tip pinned at one hundred eighteen. Walnut nose cap on a maple body, because the nose is where a hand goes.

Here is the part I did not expect to enjoy. Every drawing set gets torn apart by reviewers whose only job is to find what is wrong with it. On the first set they found engine pins that landed off the wing entirely, out in the air, holding nothing. On the second they found a wing that could not physically thread its own mortise, which is a polite way of saying the plane could not be assembled. Both were caught on paper. Neither cost us a board foot of maple. There is a version of this story where I learn about that wing in December, on the phone, from a man in a shop who has already cut the wood.

Then I printed the set and could not read it. The drawings were correct and the pages were a mess, about four and a half thousand characters a sheet with all the reasoning crowded in around the dimensions until the dimensions lost. So the text came down by thirty percent, the argument moved to where arguments belong, and we wrote a check that now fails an entire drawing set if one line of type runs over another. The drawing carries the dimensions. The tech pack carries the reasoning. A drawing you cannot read is not a drawing.

So that is the state of it. Seven sheets, a nineteen item bill of materials, and one signature standing between all of it and a shop in Wisconsin, because nothing travels to a maker unreleased. On the same bench, Max is waiting on a five volt bulb, which sounds like a small thing and is currently the only reason no wood has been cut on him either. This is the first entry in The Build Log, which will follow these two from a drawing to a doorstep, including the parts that go badly. There is no finished photograph at the top of this post because there is no finished airplane. When there is one, you will have watched it get made.