Finally the wings arrived!!  Van’s had about a 3 week delay due to being behind on the manufacture of the leading edges.  The kit arrived on Tuesday, and delivery couldn’t have been easier with lift gate service courtesy of Old Dominion Freight Line.  Five business days from Oregon to Pennsylvania is pretty good!

Unfortunately, on Tuesday I did not have time to crack open the crates and peek inside.  As the outsides showed no damage I felt confident all the parts made it successfully.  But just in case there was an issue, I did not want to delay an inspection. In fact, I came home from work early today with the specific goal of starting the inventory and organization of the kit.  In my head I had built up this enormous amount of parts, and while there certainly are a lot of parts, there were not as many as I’d imagined.

After two hours I had the crates emptied out and all of the large items inventoried, organized, and stored.  This weekend I will try to tackle the smaller parts.

Here are the crates before opening.

The first thing you see is the wing tips on the left.  They’re pretty big.

End results for the large items.  You can see the spars, and wing tips on the top shelf.  The 15′ fuselage longerons are on the second shelf.  Bottom right you can see all the ribs.  There is a metric sh*t ton of ribs!  My deburring wheel is going to get lots of use.

You can see I’ve numbered the shelves.  I listed the item location as I did the inventory so that 5 months from now I can still find everything.  I plan to do the same for the small items. 

I’ve got a lot of organizing to do for the small parts.

I decided to put the skins upstairs in the garage loft.  There just wasn’t room on my shelving units.