"The Naysayers are the ones that spend all their time talking themselves out of anything."
Of course, this forum would not exist if it had not been for some dreamers. The most important thing is to dream safely. The FAA and NTSB has plenty of documentation of design dreams gone bad. As far as engineering your dream, look at my recent post (Right hand column), "Aircraft Design and Engineering" and you may have found the engineer you seek. Sonja designs and builds experimental, is a test pilot, works on projects, etc. She has a series of free aircraft design videos on YouTube and sells a series of books she has written on the same. If you don't have the patience to watch her series of free aircraft design videos and read the books, then you might want to reconsider trying to design an airplane. First off, I'd say that aircraft design does not begin with wanting to work with a particular material. It begins with a mission for the design. Form follows function. See her video #1.
For an inexpensive real-life look at what it takes to design and build your own aircraft, buy Cunningham's biography of John Monnett that ". . . includes many not generally available pictures, and numerous tidbits of the trials, frustrations and successes of small-plane design. .. it highlights not only the .. Sonerai, and the .. Sonex kit-aircraft, but also many designs in between and the efforts of many folks who worked with Monnett, including his wife, .. and ... Pete Buck."
https://www.sonexaircraft.com/sonerai/
In relative terms of chance to succeed, consider that there are about 8 billion people walking the planet right now. Add another couple or three billion who have died since the advent of aviation. Out of those ~11 billion people, the aviation dreamers have come up with a thousand or so experimental, amateur-built aircraft designs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#17th_and_18th_centuries. Out of that hundred and ten years of design, maybe two hundred or so are flying.
https://www.barnstormers.com/category-18671-Experimental.html.
While we can all dream of being the "next best thing", the reality of our dream is probably going to end on the garage floor. I do that dreaming, too, but, my wife brings me down to earth every so often, "You're never going to do it." Dreaming could be one of my hobbies. But, beyond dreaming, just building to someone else's tried and tested design is a feat well beyond the abilities of 99.999% of the people on the planet. Take a trip to a department store and think about that as you observe people trying to figure out whether they will fit into a pair of jeans that they can't sew. Most people can't figure out how to grow a potato. Give credit where it is due. The Sonerai design is one of the most efficient, economical, enduring, and lowest-time-to-build aircraft designs, that just happened to start on John's kitchen table. Just building and flying one will get anyone plenty of "attaboy" or "attagirl" pats on the back. Playing with engine options is more than enough of a Sonerai design variable. There are plenty of aluminum designs that are proven and safe and you don't have to start from scratch or risk your life guessing about whether the wings will fall off.
