Stjohn's RV-7

1 hours.
Worked on the Empennage for 1 hour. Finished breaking edges and surfaces of the reinforcement plates and HS spars. Drilled out HS spar holes to #30.

Empennage kit arrived today. Lots of little pieces and some big pieces. Shelley totally rocked, she helped me inventory everything out of the boxes, but I did the little bags of rivets and other fasteners by myself. I wound up needing 3 of those little plastic organizers and a little tupperware tub to fit and sort everything. Gotta tell you though, the P-Touch totally rules, even though the interface blows.
When Fedex shows up with this, it’s a happy day.. Except for the pulled shoulder muscle.

Here’s the unpacking.. So much blue and silver jumping out all at once.


By the power of Greyskull…

Imagine my surprise when I pulled all that stuff out of the box and realized I had no friggin’ idea how big all that stuff actually is.. If you have a 2-car garage, it’s no big thing, but I’m hosed. I had to get really creative, and among the solutions was helping my wife clean out the garden shed so we could put all our lawn crap in there. Sunday was carpentry and Garage Stuff Tetris. Turned out OK though. Check it:
Rebuilt the main workbench to be on wheels, with a slab of MDF on top. The original surface (2×12’s) became the shelf below. Now I can move this thing to the middle of the space and get to all sides, while keeping all my aircraft tools in proper storage. There’s also a new bench on wheels for the grinder and the bandsaw. And to top it all off, I managed to get yet a couple more years of use out of those black IKEA shelves from 3 apartments ago.



Skins are stored in the rafters. Yeah, I know, it gets warm up there and the plastic will get runny, then hard and brittle. Working on it. It’s just too damn convenient that the semi-folded skins match my roofline.

A dork and his airplane. Awww.

Here’s a better shot of the below-storage area. And the presentation easel to hold the big drawings.

And notice the caption scrawled hastily on the foam-core below the plans.

This was what I woke up to on the Intarweb this morning:
Reference
EMP CREDIT 6-27
Delivery location
LOS ANGELES, CA
Service type
Express Saver
Weight
29.0 lbs.
Status
On FedEx vehicle for delivery
Jul 1, 2005 7:25 AM
On FedEx vehicle for delivery
MARINA DEL REY, CA
Now, if the FedEx driver can find my house before he knocks off for the day, it’s going to be a glorious weekend of inventorying parts and prepping the shop!

and the kit is in transit. Now, why the hell FedEx Ground has to fly my kit all the way to Memphis, TN from Tualatin OR, then on to Southern California is one of those post-Einsteinian conundrums that winds up on the cover of Popular Science with a shot of a blue-white exploding galaxy. My original plan was to drive up to OR and pick it up, but then I did the numbers and figured there’s no way I want to spend that much time in a car. Beautiful drive though.
So. Tuesday, we meet again to see what we can make of the kit.
Things to do: Get some MDF (workbench is currently 2×12’s) and some organizers for the pi