I wasn't planning on it showing up until late summer, but the finish kit is already here! There are plenty of items still back ordered, but I won't need it for a while, so there's no rush at this point. I still have many, many months of work left on the fuselage, so the big question is where on earth am I going to store all of this until I need it?
The canopy and cowling don't seem big in pictures, but they are gigantic in person. Granted, the canopy gets quite a bit cut off during the fitting, so it'll shrink in size by the time it's all over. I can see what people mean when they say fiberglass isn't Van's forte. The pieces are decent, but they're going to take a lot of work to get them to fit nicely and be smooth.
Aside from the monster pieces, most of the inventory fits on my workbench. Once the fuselage is finished, there just aren't that many big pieces left! Inventory started out quickly with the big items. The little box in the foreground will take hours and hours though. That's all of the bags of hardware (all mixed up as is Van's custom). I started on the hardware tonight and spent a few hours on it. It doesn't look like I even made a dent. I'll continue that another day. Most hardware is common to stuff I already have, so I'm just counting to ensure I have everything I need and then combining it all together with hardware from previous kits. There's enough new stuff that I'm starting to run out of places to put it all though. Once I'm done I'll have to take a step back and figure out where to hide it until I'm done with the fuselage.
So far, the one glaring mistake is that Van's sent me full size drawings for an RV8, not the RV9.
