So even though I was out of town this past weekend, I still made time to obsessively check on the tracking for my fuselage kit, and I was quite plead to see that it had arrived in Houston as of Sunday. Around midday Monday, I got a call from a lady at Old Dominion about picking the kit up. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I could pick it up any time before 9 PM; I’d expected to have to come during the day and thus take some time off work. So of course I came home Monday, ate some dinner, went to Home Depot to rent a trailer, and proceeded way up north near IAH to the Old Dominion terminal.
Back home, Josie and I got the crate off the trailer and into the garage, and while it was too late to start any inventory, I of course had to at least crack the lid off and take a look at the contents:
So tonight after dinner, we went out and proceeded to get to work on the inventory. Before I’d even gotten much out of the crate, I already had a fairly large pile of packing paper going:
There are a ton of parts here. The packing list is a full 12 pages long. The wings had lots of parts, but were relatively simple: ribs, spars, stiffeners, skins, and some assorted bracketry and such. There’s no such consistency to the fuselage at all. Just tons of variations on angles, weldments, brackets, skins of all shapes and sizes, etc. I can already see that I’ll probably spend a lot of time searching for parts once I’m working on the fuselage.
Anyway, after a couple solid hours of inventory, the crate was finally empty:
And I’d learned that a real giant pile of paper looked like: (the photo doesn’t do it justice really)
Even after dragging the empty crate out into the driveway, the garage looks like a disaster area. I can’t even get to the shelves to start putting any of this away at the moment, because I have the workbench shoved against the tool cabinet and the wing cradle shoved against the workbench.
And really, I’m not done with inventory. There’s still a bag of hardware the size of a small toddler that has to be checked, sorted, and put away, and based on my experience with the wings, that’ll take even longer than the general part inventory. I suppose maybe tomorrow I’ll start trying to reign in the chaos out there…