Finish Kit Arrived

At 3 PM the FedEx truck came by and backed into the driveway, dropping off a huge box containing the Finish Kit. I had organized a second furniture dolly to support the at 280 lbs rated box and to more easily move it around the patio.
The box hardly fit through the access gate - something I will have to keep in mind before building a plane too big to fit through it to get outside the backyard!


The dollies made it easy to maneuver it to the temporary storage area next to the tailcone.


The contents were in good shape as was the box itself. It put up quite a fight before I could take the lid off.


When taking the parts out to do the inventory I noticed something about the tank skin that looked odd. Does the top of the skin really have this little bend in there or is this a creased skin?? I wouldn't think so if the bend was going from one corner to the opposite corner but it just falls short 2 inches to do that... Looks a bit odd to me. Any comments? Don? You just inventoried your finish kit, did you see this too?


The inventory is still ongoing. I was too tired to go through all the bags and count bolts and nuts and washers. Maybe I do that tomorrow ...

Fuselage Kit Arrived

The Fedex guy dropped by again and had my fuse kit this afternoon. Just one crate, but boy is this one heavy! 230 lbs and the create sure had it's problems. I saw a broken up side around a knot in the wood that started building a crack. I opened the box while the guy was still there to make sure everything was ok and it was!

After removing all the paper it appears like the crate could have been smaller with all the areas that seem to be missing parts.


I finished the inventory late tonight after 6 hours of going through the parts. Boy, this is a very large kit! I don't think it took me that long before to do the inventory. The amount of aluminum parts is amazing and there's a seemingly never-ending amount of paper bags.
This sure will take some time to put together. Anyway, for now I just put everything back in the box and store under the tailcone until I'm done with the wings.
2 screws were missing from one bag and that was it. This time a lot of the bags contained extra parts, so dropping one nut or a screw shouldn't cause any problems. Good job, Van's!

Inventory on Wing Kit Done

I'm getting really professional at unpacking subkits or there just weren't that many parts in this kit. Anyway, I finished the inventory in just two hours (at 100 degF) and I came out one screw short. It's pretty amazing that they do such a great job, although it also proves my point of why they not just add one screw of each kind to make sure they wouldn't have to spend $3 on shipping a screw that's worth about a cent or two. It would also be a kindness to the builder who sometimes drops a screw and has a hard time locating it in the mess he calls his workshop.
Oh well, I guess Oregon had a lot of Scotsmen coming over at some point in time...
Here are pictures of the two boxes before I started unpacking:





The long box is a bit more than 15ft long and with a little bit of creativity I might be able to get it into my workshop for the last hot days. I'm sure though that I will have to move the spar outside to put the ribs on ...

Inventory done

Nothing was missing. The box looked fine and the content was in perfect shape. I unpacked the small parts and ordered them by units in the hope I find everything when I need it. The workshop is as ready as it can be without me knowing what I'm doing, so I think I'll start tomorrow to take a look at things.