Empennage Unpacking
| The Empennage kit was ordered on Dec 12, 2006. It was
shipped on Dec 21 by way of FedEx Trucking and took 3 business days to get
from Oregon to Oklahoma City. The kit was picked up at the terminal Wed
morning Dec 27th and taken to our hanger for unpacking and inventory.
There was some slight damage to the crating but no internal damage was found. One Note: the tops are screwed on, not nailed or stabled so bring your cordless drill with a phillips head. Makes opening things up much easier. |
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| Except for the larger flat pieces, everything is wrapped in bundles called SubKits. The inventory will list each item in each bundle so lay them out, unwrap one and inventory it, then move on to the next bundle. There is no noticeable logic to what is in each bundle. You might find pieces to 3 or 4 different sections of the Emp in a sincle bundle. We inventoried each piece and then laid them out by the airplane section (VS, Rudder, HS, Elevator, Fuselage) | ||||
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| What you end up with are piles of pieces all over the place. Next is to store them in a save place until needed. It took 2 of us 3 hours each to unpack and inventory everything except the parts bag. I did that in a little over an hour sitting at my workbench. If you want to bin things, you had better have a bunch of bins as there were 51 bags. Some bags had multiple different types of items in them so watch out. | ||||
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| One thing that threw me was in SubKit #8. It was labeled VA-140. Going to the construction manual, it is not real obvious what is going on. It is obvious that VA-140 are the trailing edge extensions. The construction diagrams label the rudder trailing edge as R-1006. There is one place where it is "R-1006 (Make from VA-140)" but if you miss this, it can throw you. Everything else in the inventory is labeled exactly as it is in the manuals and when you run up on this unique exception it breaks their established logic. | ||||