May 19-21, 2020
Stewart transport showed up in a fancy truck with a few airplanes in the back of it. We only got to keep one unfortunately. The truck was too big to get right up to our garage, but there was a convenient parking lot only 1/4 mi from the house. The plan for the day was to unload everything onto the dollies and into the truck and roll it all back to the house. Three friends came over to help us with the heavy lifting and pushing and they were essential.
Fancy Truck 
Crane Equipped 
Functional Dolly
The fuselage came out first and this is where the truck showed off its true quality. A built in crane made moving the fuselage a breeze and we were thrilled to find that Paul’s guess at measurements was spot on. This fuselage is a lot easier to manage than if it had been crated up and shipped by Van’s.
We knew that we’d ordered the finishing kit, however we weren’t expecting it to come in quite so large a crate. Luckily, it fit nicely across the bed rails of the Tacoma and with a couple straps all was well. It took the crane to get that out as well and all 5 of us to get it off the truck once it was back to the garage.
Last out of the truck were the wings. These were carried out by Paul and the driver one at a time. Again, the cradle fit perfectly – props to Paul for guessing right on the dimensions.
All in all, it took about an hour for us roll the dollies out, unload the truck, and get all of the parts back to the garage. The driver was very friendly and everything went smoothly, though we did make quite a parade walking down the street with airplane parts.
Once everything was tucked into the garage we had lunch and spent a few hours unpacking and inventorying. There’s 2 entire car loads of paper inside the finish kit crate and almost as much wrapped around parts in the fuselage. It took us 2 days to sort through all the bags and pieces and complete the inventory. There were a few small parts mission, and Van’s will send those on to us shortly.
Most of the big pieces ended up on the shelves, but in no particular order. We may suffer a bit in the future trying to find pieces, but there was just too much to organize properly. All the hardware we split into bins labeled by part number, it was time consuming but consolidated a lot of the bags.
It’s exciting to have the plane tucked into the garage and ready to be worked on. It’s a lot to do, but now we can make some real progress.
Cheers,
-Kacy
(Total Build Time: 187.0 hrs)