Hello my dedicated readers, er, I mean reader (thanks, honey)! This week we’ve decamped to Telluride for our annual Memorial Day getaway. While there’s no actual work happening on the plane, the break is giving me time to catch up the build log and post some (hopefully) interesting content (in between margaritas and jigsaw puzzles).
Too Big for UPS
The big news is that the wing kit finally arrived a few weeks back. I had many people ask how close the final shipment came to the estimate provided by Van’s. It was pretty close. I ordered it the first week of January and Van’s promised shipment within 16 and 20 weeks (they are now listing lead times in months–sigh). I knew shipment was getting close when I noticed the balance charge show up on my credit card. Then about a week later I got an email from the shipping company tell me I could call and arrange delivery. I thought it odd that I had not gotten confirmation from Van’s but then shortly thereafter I got a packet in the US Mail (how quaint!) giving me the details I needed, along with instructions on how to handle potential damages. I have seen some pretty bleak reports of damage during shipment and was hoping I would not have to deal with such headaches.
Fortunately I had no such issues when the shipment arrived.
I’m sure the driver had some questions about the odd-shaped crates but if he did he kept them to himself.
The driver was very accommodating and pushed the crates over the curb and up the driveway into my garage/aircraft factory.
After the rush of the delivery was over I realized I had made a tactical error in scheduling it for mid-week. In retrospect it would have been better to schedule it for Friday so I could have quit work and gone straight into inventory management. However, you shouldn’t attempt to build an airplane if you aren’t good at problem solving and, after thinking about my predicament for a few moments, I grabbed my laptop so I could take my remaining Teams meetings from the garage. I assure you I was definitely, sort of, paying attention.
One thing that is not on the inventory sheet is the shear volume of packing paper Van’s uses to protect the valuable cargo. I was pretty sure I could have packed a small, single family home with everything that was left over, as you can see in the time lapse video below:
Inventorying the kit is a critical first step as you only have 30 days to inform Van’s of missing components and get them shipped for free. After that you pay the bill. I inventoried the large/aluminum parts as I unpacked them but there are several bags and sub-kits that require more careful study. In the end everything was accounted for with the exception of some backordered flap nose ribs, some AN4 bolts (they shipped AN3’s instead), and 3 measly K1000-06 nut plates. I felt sort of bad for making Van’s send me 3 replacement nut plates as I’m sure I have some extras but, being extremely Type-A, I could not violate the mandate to tell them what was missed. I received the bolts and nut plates within a week or so.
You Can Have a Storeroom or a Workshop But Not Both
As satisfying as the unpacking and inventorying was it left me with the dilemma of what to do with all the new pieces parts (not to mention the completed empennage) such that I would have room to work (and park my truck at night). I had already used a good chunk of the wall space for some decorative aluminum art pieces:
And I’d cleaned off enough junk from some storage shelves for the smaller pieces:
That left the problem of what to so with larger wing skins and the massive spars. My first thought was to hang the leading edge skins from the ceiling. I bought a hardwood closet rod at Lowe’s and fashioned some plywood brackets but, after attaching the brackets to the ceiling discovered the skins were just too heavy and cumbersome to safely get them up there. Instead I opted to reposition the “elevator wall art” so I could hang the skins alongside):
For the wing skins I decided to use the space along the wall I normally try to keep clear do I can open by truck doors. I used some structural pipe, hose and pipe clamps, and the sides of one of the crates to fashion a shelf of sorts that hold not only the wing skins but rear spars, j-stiffeners, and other long parts:
The reason I chose to mount the shelf off the floor was that I need room to store the wing spars. While it won’t be too long before the spars are part of the larger wing structure I did want a way to tuck them away during the initial construction phases. The solution I came up with was to attach some casters I had on hand to the shipping crate. That way I can roll them against the wall when I need to:
That left only the empennage, which had been occupying one of my rolling workbenches for the past several months. I had already decided it would live on the ceiling of the garage. The question was now to get it there. I thought about purchasing a manufactured solution like the one I use to store our Christmas sleigh (don’t ask–long story) but these are a bit overkill and expensive for what they are. Therefore I decided to try to roll my own solution.
I had previously fabricated two cradles to hold the empennage and so started by building a frame out of 1×3 boards and some plywood gussets to which these could be attached:
I bolted eye hooks at the corners and to the ceiling joists with the idea that I’d use rope to hoist the whole enchilada skyward and then secure it with some surplus light fixture chain I had on hand. After I trial run with ropes passed through the ceiling hooks I discovered the whole thing was too heavy to lift, even though most of the weight was surely the wood, not the aluminum. In the end I decided to add pulleys to both the frame and the ceiling to fashion a rudimentary block and tackle system. That provided the leverage I needed and, for the first time, at least part of the airplane took flight:
The empennage just rests in the cradle so to keep to sliding out and ruining both part of an airplane and two cars I threaded a bolt through a length of chain and fitted it to the tie down bracket. In the end I was pretty happy with the result as will be easily to get back down if I want to work on some of the remaining tasks.
Now, in the immortal words of Robert Irvine, “Let’s get to work!”
Building N726AG 