The vertical stabilizer took me quite a bit of time to complete for several reasons. 

First was simply figuring out the process for how to dimple and rivet in various places, some harder to reach than others. Second and more prominently was that I hadn't decided on how to deal with primer yet. Fairly quickly in the build you have to do final assembly of parts, which need to be primed if you choose to use primer. More on that later!

For dimpling and riveting, I found that the pneumatic squeezer is a little more versatile than I originally thought. At first, I thought it was fairly useless because the most reliable/safe way to dimple or rivet is to place the manufactured head on the far end of the yoke so that the piston compresses the shop head or female die. Other than on the edges of flat skins, however, it's rare you can get the squeezer into this position since most of material that needs riveting is on an outside flange where the body of the squeezer and the material your working with gets in the way of each other. If you reverse the squeezer dimple dies but keep the material flush now on the female side, then it's really difficult to keep the material aligned such that the pilot hits the hole perfectly centered. I found this is a great way to punch unintended holes into parts, and should in general be avoided.

If you put the material flush against the female side on the interior of the yoke, this causes the squeezer to jump back when you pull the trigger because the piston is pushing the assembly forward. It wasn't completely obvious from the squeezer manual that the piston could be throttled by having a light touch on the trigger. It definitely takes a bit of practice, but it makes the squeezer useful in so many more scenarios. There's still a few cases, like in the image below, where there's not a lot of room for error and I kind of had to try my best to line it up then hit the trigger and pray. I'm almost tempted to get a mechanical hand-squeezer for places that require good control if they weren't $300.

Here is a collection of links I've found of other RV-14 builders. Kudos guys for doing a way better job at documenting your work than I'm doing.

http://rvbuild214sw.com/

http://www.kcberner.com/

http://transientair.blogspot.com/

http://rv-14a.blogspot.com/

http://www.rv14a.com/

http://ricksrv14.blogspot.com/

http://rv14build.blogspot.com/

http://www.myrv14.com/

https://n414pj.wordpress.com/

http://n626km.com/

There's an assortment of vendors that sell a pre-assembled kit of tools needed to build different RV variants. From the VAF forums, it seems like most of them have had favorable ratings. I decided to go with the kit from Isham (e.g. planetools.com), which has a specific package for the RV-14. It certainly wasn't cheap, but previous builders seem to be happy with this particular kit.

The high-dollar items in the kit includes the seemingly ubiquitous DRDT2, a rivet squeezer, rivet gun, and a pneumatic drill. I wasn't familiar with using many of these tools up front, so I didn't have much opinion on the upgrade options. In retrospect, I think I may have invested in a nicer air drill, as the one in the base kit can't be throttled at all.

The rest is (hopefully) most of the bits, clekos, rivet sets, dies, and hand tools needed for the project.

So far, my experience with Van's has been rather pleasant. The people at sales have been helpful, crating and shipping was prompt, and the empennage kit arrived very nicely packed without any discernible damage.

It took me about 3 hours to inventory everything. Everything was clearly tagged, and the included materials list was easy to follow. I had a few items that were marked as b/o (backorder), and I assume they will arrive in the mail shortly. None of the backordered items are needed for the initial steps, so this isn't a hindrance at all.

This is my Van's RV-14 aircraft build log. This serves as both a catalog for myself, as well as a potential resource for other builders to see another perspective on how problems were resolved, and mistakes remedied or avoided. I've found that similar build logs from other fellow builders have been an invaluable resource for me.

The RV-14 is the most recent design from Van's Aircraft, and is essentially a marriage between the immensely popular RV-7 and the newer 4-place RV-10. It is intended to be more cross-country oriented than the RV-7, sacrificing increased cabin size and payload capacity for speed while still being aerobatic rated (+6G, -3G). The aircraft is a traditional all-aluminum construction and available in both tricycle gear or taildragger configurations. I elected to build the RV-14A tricycle variant because they're a little more forgiving on the ground despite being slightly less efficient in the air.

The 14 benefits from several recent manufacturing improvements at Van’s, and many of the parts are pre-cut and pre-punched. After a fair bit of deliberation on what aircraft to build, this went to the top of my list for having fairly low construction requirements, very good factory and community support, and the overall mission of the aircraft fitting my interests.

More information can be found on the Van's website here.

Van's is one of the largest kit manufacturers in the world, and you see RV's everywhere. Furthermore, they have an almost cult-like following of builders and pilots, which is one of the main attractors to building one. The Van's Air Force forums is extremely active, and a great source of feedback and information.