Thursday November 16, 2006
Wings Arrive (Wings)

I hoped to be finished with the empennage by the time this happened, but that was not to be. The wings arrived yesterday!

I spent some time the night before preparing the shop for the arrival of two gigantic crates weighing close to 200 lbs each.

A huge thanks to Wayne, Nick, and Philip for helping me unload the crates from the truck and figuring out how to get the tops off. The long, skinny crate is more than 15 feet long and barely fits in the garage.

There was minimal damage to the exterior of the two crates. The one that's open in this picture had a bashed in section on one end, but it had not affected the contents, luckily.

I spent a while unpacking/inventorying tonight. I have pieces of the wing kit stashed all over the house now.

This is the pre-manufactured center spar carry through. It ends up under the cockpit in the fuselage. You can see the stacks of wing ribs underneath. Those are going to be a pain to flange, flute, and debur.

The preferred packing material here was paper. This is the pile generated solely by unwrapping the wing ribs. I had already filled up our mini-dumpster with paper by this time.

Lots and lots of fasteners.

One of the fuel tank caps.

The plexiglass cover for the wingtip lights. This piece gets cut in half and fit into both notches on the fiberglass wing tips.

Most of the five page, dot-matrix printed pick list for this kit.

The pre-fabbed main wing spars, various other spars, and angle stock currently living in my hall way. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these items.

A close shot of one of the main wing spars. They look great.

The two fiberglass wing tips--they look huge in real life.

That cat found something under the bed...

...the leading edge skins and flap/aileron skins...

...as well as all of the main wing skins.

Now I've really got to finish off the rudder and elevators so I can move on to the wings. I seriously expected to be finished with them by this time. Oh well, this is reality. Having the wing components will be motivation, hopefully.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International