Fuselage Kit arrival - inventory

The fuselage kit came today! I have to admit, probably like many other builders, this is the kit I've been most excited about getting since the beginning. It's going to be hard to finish the last couple weeks we have on the wings with this kit sitting here, but hey that's the way it goes. We were both able to get a little time off from work in the middle of the day to meet the delivery truck and get our friends Brannen and Mark over here to help push the crate up the driveway and into the garage. It was a pretty cold and rainy day, unusual for mid-May but that didn't get our spirits down one bit!

Somebody is excited!

The fuselage crate, fresh off the truck and totally undamaged, thankfully!

We couldn't resist taking two minutes to pop the top off the crate and get a first glimpse of the canopy! Sarah quickly poked her finger in there to be the first one to touch it :-)

One interesting note: the bill of lading sent with the kit lists the contents of the crate as "plastic parts", which seemed odd because there's hardly any plastic in here at all, unless you're counting the blue shrink wrap on all the aluminum. Anyway the truck driver seemed puzzled and mildly intrigued as to what was really in the crate and asked me what it was for. I told him, and his answer was simply an unmistakable look that told me I must be nuts. This is the third kit crate delivered to my home for this project, and it's the third time I've seen that look from a driver :-)

That was pretty much it until later in the day when we were both off from work and could commence unpacking and inventorying. First step was to break down the rest of the crate and split the contents up into the "subkits" that each kit ships with. A subkit is basically just a shrinkwrapped bunch of parts that are *not* necessarily related, but for some reason (I assume has to do with inventory at the factory) they get grouped together on the parts list that ships with the kit. It also makes it easier to tackle intentorying everything rather than going through a single list of hundreds of items.

Crate broken down, first full glance at all the kit parts!

First selfie inside the cabin! I think we fooled a lot of our friends on Facebook after posting this into thinking we were a lot farther along :-)

This is what we were actually "sitting" inside of

The steps! Had to give'em a whirl. Nothing to climb into yet, but that will hopefully change in a few months!

Even a first glance at the contents clearly told us we were going to need a better method of storing the many hundreds of parts this kit comes with. After looking around the garage for ideas, I grabbed a few 2x2's and 2x4's that we had on hand and got to work on a thought I had to "upcycle" (I hate that word) the fuselage crate. After about an hour with the chop saw and a drill, I had this very ugly and crudely built shelving unit, complete with staples still sticking out the back of the wood:

World's crudest shelving unit

It's ugly but it's sturdy [enough] and it works! We took a quick break to grab some dinner and then got back to work starting to inventory all the parts, stocking them into our new shelving unit as we went, and trying to keep some order to all the parts. We got through about 6 pages of the inventory list (7 subkits, I think?) but then we started getting tired and cross-eyed. Time to call it a night! We'll finish inventorying tomorrow hopefully, then get back onto finishing the flaps and the rest of the wing kit!

Current state of affairs with respect to inventorying. Lots more to go!

In addition to all the excitement above, we were able to sneak in just a bit of work on the flaps. We primed all the parts and started riveting the nose ribs and hinge brackets together:

The flap parts ready to start attaching to the spars

Still lots more riveting to do on the flaps, but it's coming along! Hopefully we'll be able to get them finished over this upcoming long weekend... we'll see!