My kits arrived today! ABF shipping company's website said they'd be here on Monday, but when I called them on Monday morning to see when they'd arrive, they told me it had to wait until Wednesday. So I've had to practice some patience over the last couple days. But the truck pulled up at about 3pm this afternoon!
The offload was pretty easy... ABF sent a truck with a hydraulic lift so that made it easy. I got them tucked away in the garage pretty quickly.
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| The boxes finally sitting in my shop! |
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| Two big crates, one long, skinny crate |
I didn't waste any time getting started on inventorying the kits. The first crate I opened had two boxes with the empennage parts in them. They looked like they were tightly packed away.
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| First crate cracked open |
I got the cardboard boxes opened up and started on the inventory. Everything went pretty quickly. There were a lot of parts but they were nicely packed and organized which made the inventory simple. The only thing that was disappointing in opening up the empennage boxes was how tough it was to remove the duct tape from the skins. The skins come with a protective film on the aluminum skins which helps keep them from getting scratched. My plan was to leave this film on as long as possible to help protect the skins. Unfortunately though, the duct tape that Van's used is like maximum, industrial, crazy, nuclear strength. When I tried to take it off, it ripped some of the film off too. I was pretty disappointed about this but I know it's really not a huge deal. I'll just have to be careful with the skins so as not to scratch them up.
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| Extreme strength duct tape on the skins |
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| All the hardware that had to be inventoried... there's a lot of little pieces in there! |
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| Most of the empennage parts inventoried and stowed away |
I finished up the inventory of the empennage parts tonight. I still have the wing kit left to inventory. I am not really looking forward to unpacking that whole kit. I am not going to need anything from that crate for quite some time. Van's gives the builder 30 days to do his inventory before they won't pay for any missing parts. All of the parts to the empennage were accounted for, so I don't really expect anything big to be missing from the wing kit. If anything is missing, I'm guessing it's small and inexpensive. I'd hate to have something super expensive be missing though, so I know I really should do the inventory. Anyway, I've saved that for tomorrow.
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| The wing kit cracked open and waiting for inventory |
I also got my two practice kits with these kits today. I'm excited to get started on the toolbox kit! I will see how far I get on the wing kit inventory tomorrow but if I get that done at a decent time, I'll start in on the toolbox.
Today was a good day... It felt surreal to look out into the shop one last time tonight and see the full drawings of an airplane hung above my workbench. This is the beginning of something I've wanted to do for a long time. I can't wait to start pounding rivets!
