Building · Builder support
Built by you.
Supported here.
Buying a kit from another continent is one thing. Having someone in your own country who knows the airplane is another.
Status — this program is being built
SD Planes USA is standing up its builder support program now. What follows is what we intend to offer and how we intend to work. Services, scheduling and terms are not final — talk to us about where things stand before you plan around them.
You remain the builder.
An amateur-built aircraft is one whose major portion is fabricated and assembled by the people doing it for their own education or recreation. That is the requirement, and assistance does not change it.
So this is not a service where you drop off a kit and collect an airplane. We provide the place, the tools, the guidance and the support. The work that makes you the builder stays yours.
We would rather be blunt about that at the start than have a builder discover it at inspection time.
Support, in the same country as your project.
Our operation is in Niles, Michigan. As the program develops, this is what we are building it to do.
01
A place to work
Bench space and tooling at our Niles, Michigan operation, so a builder is not starting by building a shop.
02
Guidance while you build
Help reading the plans, setting up jigs and getting the first structures right, from people who know this airframe.
03
Technical answers
A U.S. point of contact for questions that would otherwise go unanswered or wait on a time difference.
04
Parts and materials
Kit parts, spares and materials supplied from the United States as the program develops.
We are going to build one ourselves.
We plan to build an SD-1 in-house so the support we develop is based on firsthand experience with the airplane and the construction process — not on reading the manual and hoping.
That build has not started yet. When it does, we will document it: what took longer than expected, what the drawings do not tell you, and what we would do differently. The parts of it that answer real builder questions will end up linked from the pages that describe those parts.
