OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD….IT’S HERE!!!!!
Oh man, I really need to edge the driveway.
Judge how excited I am by counting the number of truck pictures I took.
This is number three!
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Whoa. Full load today? (Those boxes look so little!)
So we picked up the larger (wider) box, and it was (I’m guessing, here) about 150 lb. No problem for the driver and I to bring it into the garage.
Then, we picked up the small (but long) box, and it was (probably exaggerating) about 300 lb. I felt stupid grunting and groaning trying to lift this box. It was deceivingly heavy.
Finally home.
Time to document some of the damage. Scroll quickly through these pictures. They are just for recordkeeping.
Some edge damage.
Whoa! What rhino tried to poke their horn through my spar box!?
Some scrapage and edge damage.
Yikes. I'm glad these boxes are well made.
Some more corner damage.
Okay, slow down the scrolling now.
Luckily, all the parts were completely undamaged. That rhino-poke through the spar box when right into a big block of paper separating the center section pieces from the main spars. I am a lucky son-of-a-gun.
Tops off, time to start unpacking.
Here's another rhino-poke picture.
The backside.
Redundant, but better light.
First thing, I got everything out of the boxes and onto the carpeted floor and workbench. That is a lot of paper. As Brad Oliver put it:
“there is $100 worth of aluminum and $5000 worth of paper in these boxes”
I couldn’t agree more.
Whoa. Paper!
The fuselage longerons, some "water pipe" (presumably for the aileron pushrods) and a few random lengths of angle.
After getting everything out and onto the carpet…
That's a lot of parts.
More parts.
Tank and leading edge skins.
One of my workbenches with wing parts piled on.
I managed to stick the longerons against the (very messy) back wall of my garage.
Upstairs, I have an extra room devoted to airplane storage (and working out, and music).
The wingtips are HUGE!
Tank and leading edges upstairs.
I also took these upstairs. These go with the fuselage, but they are matchdrilled at the factory with the spars, so they ship them all at once. Good thinking.
This is normal, but just wanted to note a few places where they used a scotchbrite pad to buff out some scratches.
Time to start the inventory. 5 pages of inventory sheets for the main kit, then 5 more for the hardware, and a few more here and there for the aileron mounting kit, and the stall warning kit.
{sigh} This is going to take forever.
Looks like the only problem was that I got 5 W-712-L ribs and 1 W-712-R rib instead of 3 of each.
Most of the ribs in the kit were sandwiched L and R ribs, but some of these sets were sandwiched L and L ribs.
Too many lefts, and not enough rights!
Drumroll please! {drumroll sound}
Tada! The beautiful (and expensive) deluxe locking fuel caps. With four keys, of course.
I decided to go with the tried and true float senders, mostly because I didn’t want trouble with the capacitive senders (which work well only with 100LL gas. If you ever change types of fuel, they won’t work correctly.)
I'm sure these are fine, but they are a little "cheesy" (as a coworker who also has them put it).
After about 3.5 hours of work, most of the parts have new homes under my workbenches or upstairs in the airplane room.
Tightly packed parts.
Next up, time to inventory the hardware.
I hope it all fits.
But first, time for some dinner.
It's Monday. Why not have steak, grilled corn on the cob, and a homemade caprese salad? (Look at those Bobby Flay grill marks!)
Okay, after dinner, I sat myself down in front of the TV and worked more on the hardware inventory. The only thing that didn’t really fit well into my sorting scheme was the AN426AD3-3.5 rivets. There were way too many in the wing kit for my smaller sized container.
In the background, you can see one of the 5 (?) hardware inventory pages.
After another hour and a half, almost all of the hardware now has a home in my fancy hardware cases.
The close tolerance bolts didn't fit, so I'm going to leave them in the bag for now.
Finally, I took a picture of all of the inventory sheets. I have horrible handwriting, but you get the idea.
Those all say "page done."
3.5 hours to most of the bigger parts inventoried, and 1.5 more hours to do the hardware. 5 hours total. Feels great to have the wing put away safely.
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 