Completely Unpacked Wings

Well, inventorying the small parts only took about an hour or so.   Van's has changed their method of packing small parts and are now using a collection of "tackle boxes" as they are called on VAF.  They are translucent plastic boxes with customizable inserts that are postioned to make ~25-30 little part bins.  Van's then printed a 'parts map' that physically overlays the bins for easy identification.  Think 'box of chocolates' from Valentine's Day with the candies labeled on the inside of the lid.    VAF had a few grumpy comments about parts that spilled over, but mine were just fine.

(I did forget to double check the length of the Cherry Max rivets that I received.  Some very early kits apparently had the wrong length of those parts.)

Tackle Boxes of Small Parts

Despite my reticence about throwing away good material, I just cut up the crate into <5' chunks and folded and tied all of the heavy duty cardboard into individual bundles and drug it all to the curb.   I hope it all got picked up today!  (My wife has not texted me anything to the contrary, so I'm hopeful.) The garage is now officially a workshop and ready for business!

Workshop (neé garage),

 generously donated by my loving wife.

Mostly Unpacked

 I finished unpacking the big crate yesterday.  

Big Empty Crate

I drastically overestimated the shelf space for small items and underestimated the space needed for the skins & spars.  Duh.   I'm not completely happy with where I needed to put everything from the point of view of convenience in working on them, but I am happy that everything is either properly supported or tucked away such that they won't get bent.    There were only 3 pieces that weren't included and I'll have plenty of time to send Vans the discrepancy list before the 30 day window closes.

I opened one of the small crates and just looked at the wing tank, but didn't remove & unpack it yet.  I think I'll take the tanks out of their boxes and discard most of the packing material to get some more room in the shop.   

Small Crate w Wing Tank

I have to figure out how to get rid of the crate & pallet, though.  Even if I could just drag them to the curb for trash pickup, it offends my soul to discard perfectly good plywood.  

Tomorrow I will tackle the 3 tackle boxes of small parts and do their inventory.  I expect that I'll be able to send the discrepancy email to Vans before we leave for vacation next week.   When we get back, I will start my first bit of actual work and assemble another practice kit.  That'll help get my muscle memory back for working with sheet metal and give me something to use to learn to drive rivets.  One of the big selling points of the RV12 was that there were no driven rivets.  Not quite the case in the RV-15, so I borrowed a gun and will get some tutoring and build up the practice kit before tackling the main project.

Wing Kit Arrived!

Yesterday was a big day with the long awaited (9 months since original deposit) of my RV-15 Wing Kit (except for the spars, but they should arrive in about a month or so.)  Van's shipped via a company named ABF.  ABF called me the other day and set up a delivery for Friday May 8th.  Then the status page for the order said May 11th.  I called and they confirmed the 11th.  I pointed out they hadn't notified me about the change, and that the 11th wouldn't work for me.  They said 'OK' and said they'd drop it off on the 8th.  no apologies or anything.  Weird. 

OK, so the delivery window was from 8am to 8pm.  Because I never procrastinate, the garage was completely cleaned and organized and ready for the deliver.  Not.  So at 8am I check the status page (loading) and got to work in the garage.   By noon, I had converted a garage w/ nearly 3 years of cruft & debris into an acceptable and clean workshop.  

Clean & Ready Workshop

Around 1pm, the status page finally said 'out for delivery' and I started to trust them that they would deliver and not make me wait until next week.   Around 4:30, the truck showed up.  The driver cursed that they didn't give him the right equipment to unload it properly so I enlisted my neighbor, Kevin, and his friend and the 4 of us eventually manhandled the crates into the workshop.

Wing kit boxes in the workshop

main box, before opening

Main box

I tackled the main box first. I had to drive out to the hangar to get a Dremel tool to cut the metal straps and grabbed my drill press, band saw, grinder and a bunch of loose/small tools.  I had put off getting tools until the garage had been cleaned and converted in order to not add to the clutter and further drive myself crazy.  I spent about 2 hrs excavating a phenomenal amount of crushed brown wrapping paper out of the box to get to the result you see above.  I'll need to figure out how to package the paper so it can be picked up for recycling, and then I'll tackle the inventory.  BTW, I have 30 days to report any discrepancies for free remediation & shipping.  

10th Condition Inspection is complete

 I fetched the RV-12 back home today.  Ed flew me up in the Cirrus.  Nice flight, except for a 20-30 kt headwind.  It was surprisingly smooth. (Cue the violins playing minor key...).   We arrived at Burlington WI just before noon,  I got an excellent briefing on the things they had found.  There were about a dozen issues that many mechanics would have ignored or not even bothered to document, but Advanced Powerplant Solutions really did a great job capturing those little things and debriefing me about them.   Notice that I haven't talked about anything major.  That's because there weren't any! 😁

N76012 inside APS's hangar

Here she is, buried deep inside APS's hangar.  It took them 5 minutes to get her out and put the other planes back in. Their hangar is spotless.  I really felt comfortable with them working on her.

Top View of Engine w/o Shroud

When Van's designed the original RV-12, they appeared to have been very concerned about cooling.  Back in Feb 2015 I spent a fair amount of effort pulling lots of accessories off of the engine and installing a fiberglass shroud that directed ram air over the fins of the cylinders.  It was ugly and interfered with several maintenance actions and I never liked it.  About a year ago, Vans published a letter that amounted to "the shroud doesn't do anything.  You can remove it if you want."  I want.   It was removed by APS and the above picture shows the engine w/o the shroud.  Check out Feb 2015, sections 46-05, --06 and -07 for comparison. 

If all goes well, I should get my first crate from Vans with the RV-15 wing kit!

Garage -> Building Space

 I've been slowly creeping up on the actual conversion of the garage into the building space for the -15, mostly because it means that Lada & I will not be able to park inside until the project is moved out to the airport and I'd like to minimize her inconvenience.  Having said that, I cleaned off an old, unused desk that's been gathering dust & junk and turned it into a usable desk.  I moved a computer that I bought about 5 years ago to be a high end flight simulator, but I simply never got into simulated flight.  For one, I dislike the Windows operating systems and could never properly configure all of the myriads of drivers and other files to make everything work.  Secondly, I just don't enjoy 'flying' a simulator.  I suppose I'm too dependent upon the noise and accelerations to like just flying what I see on the screen.   On the other hand, the giant screens will be great for looking at the plans in large, highly magnified detail.

The kit is supposed to arrive the day after tomorrow ('overmorrow' back when that was a word in common use.)  I'll spend all Friday actually evicting the cars and moving benches, etc and we'll be ready to start inventory.

On the RV-12 front, I received the expected message on Monday that the plane was ready for pickup.  What I wasn't expecting was the invoice was about double what I had guessed -- over $8800.   For "nothing major", that's certainly a lot of work & parts.    Oddly enough, I'm glad that it is what it is.  This indirectly validates that there were items I wasn't attending to and now I feel good about flying her for another 10 years.

Wing kit (partial) shipped!

 Yesterday I received several email from Van's and a trucking company, APS.   It appears that my partial wing kit has actually been crated and shipped.   Van's uses their invoices to document everything, so I had a bit of consternation when I saw another invoice for $$$$, but then noticed the balance due was $0 and there was a line of backordered parts.  I haven't had time to download the plans and attach names to the backordered parts, but I know that the main spars are the big items.   I'll hopefully get that done tomorrow afternoon.

A thread on VAF discussed bucking rivets and I'm a bit confused.  I was under the impression that the plane was designed to be built using only pulled (pop) rivets or squeezed rivets.  I'll have to look into that as I have exactly 1 hour of training in bucking rivets and that was ~15 years ago.

On the RV-12 front, it was nearly ready when I chatted with the shop on Wednesday the 29th.   The person on the phone was not the A&P working on the plane, but thought it would be ready sometime today.  I'm guessing that it'll be Monday or Tuesday.   Logistically, that's fine with me because I don't have time off to go get it until Thursday and/or Friday.   As always, that's going to be weather dependent.  In addition, that's also my estimated window of when the wing kit will arrive.   I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Progress!

 Well.  I finally have something positive to report.    It's been 11 days since I paid the remaining wing kit balance.  I had several email exchanges with the Kit Sales department and after being told "5-10 days after payment" I finally sent a very blunt email to Accounts Receivable and left a similar blunt email.

Good afternoon,

    The operator suggested this followup email to a voice mail I left a few minutes ago.
    I wish to know if you received my payment of $8,242.50 made on 4/17/26.   The transaction reply from
 mail.authorize.net is below.  I made a payment of $3150 on the same day for the empennage kit and received a receipt on 4/20, but I never received a receipt for the $8K to be applied to the balance due of the wing kit.
    My posted kit shipment date was last week, on the 21st.  That was last updated over a month ago.   I have had several email threads with Kit Sales and it appears that they are not able to move forward with providing me an updated shipping estimate until they know that the wing kit is fully paid.
    I am very frustrated by the lack of communication in this process and would greatly appreciate being updated as to what is going on with my order and my payment.  
    If you have not received the payment in question, how do I go about getting it refunded from mail.authorize.net so I may remunerate it to you via a different route? 

Thank you for any available information,
-dbh

Well, the letter and/or voice mail seems to have done the trick.  In the morning I received the receipt along with a notation that the wing kit has been paid in full.  This evening I got a phone call (yes, a live person actually spoke to me) wherein she briefly mentioned the email and then proceeded to ask if Thursday (day after tomorrow) would be acceptable for them to ship my partial kit. "Yes." 

She estimated that it would be about 7 days in transit.   If so, that might not work well with my hope to recover the RV-12 from Wisconsin, but if so, I'll figure it out.

As a little nice addition, someone posted a render of the RV-15 tail feathers.   They look nice.