Aerospace engineer here. What do you mean by "from the ground up"? Because you're opening up a whole can of worms with that statement. Being good at metalworking isn't enough to engineer an airplane. Also, what's your figure of merit for your design? Aerobatics, speed, loiter?
For your wing shape, use Tornado, a matlab script, to run a vortex lattice simulation of your plane along with X-Foil to compute all your lift and viscous/induced drag forces. Then validate it with a CFD model and ideally a properly scaled model test. You're going to want to know why wings have washout, why control surfaces are where they are and how to size your wing and tail for an adequate static margin so you don't become unstable as you burn fuel.
Use a parametric modeling program like ANSYS or NX that you can run a FEA model with dynamic loading so you don't fatigue your aircraft.
Your powerplant should be sized according to your drag model and your new weights should feed back into wing and structure design to optimize your design.
You say you want your own design, but then you want engineering tables and rivet spacing... There is no shame in using an existing experimental design whatsoever, just use a plan that's been flown and don't kill yourself.
