The fuselage kit arrived yesterday afternoon, but I didn't crack it open until today. All I can say is Van's crating staff are absolute masters of space utilization. There is A LOT of stuff packed in this crate!
The kit comes with the next set of plans and 14 pages of inventory to do. Outside of counting rivets, pretty much everything has to be accounted for. Unfortunately there are quite a few parts that are on back order, but I don't think it'll impact work for a while.
At least for the meantime, I stashed skins in any spot I could just to get them out of the way. Once the crate was empty of everything else, I put some of them back in it for safe keeping. I'll probably just keep the crate where it is for the time being. I don't think it'll be in the way for at least a little while.
I'm only missing one small section of aluminum angle. Van's sent two short lengths of the same size angle, when they should have sent two different sizes. I'll finish up with the inventory and then let them know. The last thing to do was the inventory of all of the hardware bags. I'm not sure what rationale Van's uses for packing their hardware, but it sure makes organizing everything take 100x longer. Instead of just putting all rivets, bolts, nuts, etc of X type in one bag, they are split into many, many bags. I assume it's because they pack them for sub-assemblies, but what a pain. They also combine things into a single bag (not rivets, thankfully), so you have to pick through 200 nuts and pull out the 20 that are slightly bigger, the 6 that are a little smaller, etc. I'm consolidating the hardware into bins, combining it with stuff I already have from the first kits. After a few hours of this, I called it for the day. I will finish up tomorrow.
