My Cheesehead Jabiru                                 by Steve Poland

It is now a little over a month since I finished the 2 week builder assist program for my J400 with Jabiru USA in Neenah, Wisconsin.  I think that the month’s time will help me provide a good perspective on my experience.

Perfect Location for Airplane Building

• Jabiru USA’s facility can easily handle over 8 airplanes and was equipped with every tool related to aircraft building.  It was quite helpful to have enough room for them to put their completed J200 right next to my J400 project for quick reference.
• Jabiru USA’s Brennand airport location is a couple miles from the town center of Neenah and Neenah is basically in the suburbs of Oshkosh.  Suburb in Wisconsin means that you can only have a limited number of livestock in your yard.  If you have an extra hour away from the workshop you can easily pop over and cruise the EAA museum.
• It was also quite nice to spend some time back in small town rural mid-west as the locals were also quite friendly.  For example, I had a problem with a cap coming off one of my teeth and John simply set me up with one of his old high school track buddies who is now a dentist.  The fee was pretty reasonable; I just had to agree with the dentist that John was the weak link in their high school 4x100 relay team.  On Fridays you also get the added color from the two 70+ year olds bickering before their weekly Friday lunch flight.  What better place to work on your “experimental” dream plane? 

Fast, Low Stress, and Exceptional Value

My top goals were to build a safe and great flying plane relatively quickly.  The builders assist was a no brainer for a number of reasons:

• I didn’t have to worry about understanding every detail of the instructions to the nth degree.  Pete and Ben have built something like 16 planes together over the last 12 years and they made sure that my dad and I weren’t going to do something that we would regret.  It was like on the job training as we learned by doing rather than learning the building techniques from the manual.
• We had a little time to kill after mounting the engine so Ben felt it was a good time to give this desk jockey some instruction in Jabiru aircraft engine 101.  In about 30 minutes I was schooled in most of the maintenance that I will have to perform.  We covered oil changes, cylinder head torque checking, valve adjustments, and a couple of other items.  Sometimes it is quite handy to have a certified A&P that is also certified on the Jabiru engines around.
• The plane went together fast and I mean really fast.  The kit looked just like a RC ARF kit and in a lot of ways the construction was pretty similar, just on a much larger scale.  We applied a pretty straightforward utilitarian approach to the construction.  We built straight, safe, minimised customization, and stuck to the original design as much as possible.  Typically, whenever the question came up to choosing a color or option my response was “How did you do it on your J200 that is complete and sitting only 25 feet away?”  A lot of time was also saved the couple of times we had problems with not having the right part or messing up the original.  Pete would either have the ability to re-make the part or scam it from the other J400 kit he had in the warehouse.  This sure beat having to wait for the new part to come in the mail.
• I know I also saved a lot of money on tools because they had everything and more that was needed at their hanger.  Also, with getting the whole basic construction done at the builder assist I just don’t need a lot of the required tools anymore.  I’m sure I saved about 50 trips to Home Depot as well although I still want to get a pneumatic riveter to hang on my peg board to impress the guys on the garage tours.
• A lot of problems that would have taken a fair bit of time were pretty much handled on the spot by Pete, Ben, and John.  I always liked when Pete had to handle the “No worries mate” issues with Jabiru in Australia.  Pete always seemed to love this part of his job.

 I’m sure I missed out on some of satisfaction of doing every single build item myself without any assistance but I think this is more than balanced out by the time saved and the knowledge that I have a safe and high quality airframe.  It was also great to do business with people that share your same passion.  The people at Jabiru USA have the same love for building and flying that all EAA members do and they have gone the next step in extending that passion to their everyday “job.”  The builders assistance showed my how to walk before I ran and from the looks of things will also have me flying my plane about a year ahead of my original schedule.  What is this, a kit airplane getting completed ahead of schedule by a “rookie?”