The fuselage kit was delivered today by Pawnee Freight.  They sub-contract from ABF to deliver out here in the middle of nowhere.  I am amazed that it only cost me $240.47 to have the fuselage kit delivered from Van's in Oregon to no-mans land Nebraska.  That is an incredible value.

I tried to line up a couple of friends to help unload the fuselage crate, but I couldn't line up help and the freight company at the same time.  So I paid a contractor in town who has a forklift to come over and put the crate in the garage.  He charged me $35.  I couldn't even take the time off of work to unload it myself for that price.

Sure enough, when I got home and opened the garage door, there it was.  Not that big for $5K.

I am nowhere near done with the right (or left) wing, but I couldn't resist opening the crate and taking a look.  Van's has always done an excellent job crating the kits I have gotten so far.  They must have this down to a science.  Subway used to coin the term "sandwich artist", I think Van's has some "crating artists".

I quickly found the infamous "bags of parts" and decided that I would start inventorying and organizing them.  These tiny parts always take forever to organize.  Besides, for the most part, it is "mindless work" and I felt up to the task.

Ooohh, what is that round, black thing sitting on the table by the can of Mountain Dew?  Sure looks like a tailwheel to me....  Just last year at this time, I still hadn't bought the empennage kit.  My how things have change in 10 months.  As long as you keep at it, amazingly enough, assembly of the plane parts does progress.

These bins work fairly well unless you need to change the locations of the dividers as I found out tonight.  I got wound up once or twice while going through the bags.  I would fill a particular size of rivet and then a couple of bags later, there was another bag of the same size rivets.  You would think that Van's would figure out how much of a particular thing (rivets, for example) you need and put it all in the same bag.  If a hardware stores organized their parts the same way Van's organizes these bags, they would never sell any hardware.  Even trying to separate the parts out was mindless so it was a perfect activity for a Friday night.

Five or so hours, and I still have a ton of parts to sort out.  I haven't even dug anything else out of the crate yet.  I found several errors (in my favor) for bags of parts, so I probably better inventory the whole kit soon so that if I am short, I can get Van's to rectify the situation before I have to pay for the part again.

I see Van's listed on their website that as of yesterday, they have sold 2000 RV-7/7A kit starts.  That is just incredible!!!  Van's has a good thing going with their planes.