ABF was scheduled to make the delivery between 9am and 2pm. At 1:45pm, after much anticipation, I heard the squeal of truck brakes outside...it was here! The driver was very helpful. I wheeled the main skins & ribs box into the garage with the help of a furniture dolly. We carried the spar box, which must have weighed close to 300 pounds, since it was too long to move easily on the dolly.
Here's the main skins & ribs box.
I made a point to check for visible damage, since I've heard several stories of builders receiving damaged components due to mishaps and mistreatment during shipment. Nothing major on my boxes, just a small indentation on one end.
Here's the spar box.
This sucker is LONG and HEAVY.
Time to open 'em up. Cut the steel straps.
And pry this sucker open. I was giddy with anticipation.
The first thing that caught my eye were the wingtips. Awesome. All sorts of goodies all packed in there. Even the wingtips were full of paper-wrapped stuff.
Jen and I started taking inventory of the skins & ribs box.
Lots of ribs, for the most part. The ribs are kinda cool, because as you cut away the plastic wrap, they spring out like that snake-in-a-can gag, kind of like an accordion. They're all compressed together when you get 'em.
After we had waded through the plethora of ribs, we took inventory of the skins. There are lots of pieces. Unlike the empennage control surfaces, the ailerons and flaps have dedicated leading edge skins. There are a lot more pieces that go into the wings than the tail. Underneath all of this are the larger flat pieces (with joggled inspection holes, etc.) that skin from the spar back.
Next was the spar box...the spars are just gorgeous.
Again, not a cubic inch of space wasted in the packing strategy. The employees at Van's who crate these kits are amazing.
Everything is padded and wrapped and placed in a space-optimized location.
More inventory taking, thanks to Jen.
Here's the center section of the spar. This gets carried through the fuselage.
Literally bags of bags of parts. Easily 2-3 times as much as the empennage kit. This plastic bag weighed about 20 pounds. Mostly rivets, if you can believe that. Also little hardware kits for everything under the sun. Nut plates, washers, nuts & bolts, etc.
After every bit of angle stock and Z-brackets and stiffeners and aluminum sheets and control rods and front and rear spars and pitot line and landing lights and wingtip lenses and inspection plates and baffles and every little bag of rivets and hardware, etc., were accounted for, I was relieved that nothing was missing. The pick list for this wing kit is massive. Five pages of line items.
The "coffin".
My bench tops are full of junk now.
And there's still a ton of stuff in the skins box.
I've gotta get organized and get most of this stuff shelved before I can start cranking. I think getting all of this squared away is more intimidating than the building process itself!
Later that night... It's 1am, and I just finished getting all the bags of hardware into three compartmentalized organizers. I only needed one of these for the empennage, but now I need all three!
Tomorrow I'll make the foray into starting construction...