And here I am with most everything I can do at this point completed. Now I am waiting on my powerplant kit to ship. Van's is estimating that it won't ship till mid May.
In the mean time, I am going to spend time reorganizing the shop and try and find a suitable storage unit to store the canopy, wings, tail cone, etc.
So now I am officially waiting on my finish kit. The basic airframe construction is complete.
My local EAA chapter is also building an RV12 and for some reason only known by Van's their finish kit shipped before mine even though I ordered mine 5 months before they did. They are not even close to needing their finish kit. I accepted my modified order as soon as I got the notice, paid my deposit and my final payment as soon as I got the notice.
Not really that happy with Van's right now because of this. There is no real excuse for not honoring customer's place in line when the customer is not causing a delay. Kits should be shipped in order of order receipt period.
After getting over the shock of Van’s filing bankruptcy and dealing with winter depression. I am now back to working on these wing ribs!
More deburring, edge prep and soon to be scrubbing and priming.
This is the hardest part of building!
Prepping the wing structure for priming.
Should be able to get these primed after work tomorrow. It is getting harder to have good weather for priming,
On top of all of this Van's filled chapter 11 and we are trying to determine what our path forward is. More to come here!
Won't be long now as both of my kits have shipped together! I have a few backorders but nothing that should hold things up too bad.
So Van's took my final payment on the wings and fuselage a good while back (almost 2 months for wings and 1 month for fuse) and the status page shows both are assigned to crating. I assumed a similar time to ship as the empennage kit once that happened but we are well past that time.
I emailed and got a response from Kelsey at Van's and she said I am still not being crated yet. She is gonna check to try and get a better status.
My problem is that I will be off the continent for a 16 day Hawaiian cruise starting May 31st and won't be here to handle receiving any kits if they arrive during that window. I also don't want to lose my spot in line by delaying delivery. My hope way back then was that the kits would arrive before I left for that trip.
Received the magic email yesterday letting me know that my empennage/tail cone kit have shipped!
Been acquiring a few tools that I will be needing....
First off is you need a way to pull all the bazillion blind rivets and I am not about to do that with a manual puller! Seems everyone goes for the el-cheapo Harbor Freight unit. So did I!
Also added a 120° #30 pilot countersink bit from Cleaveland Tool:
Went ahead and picked up another 3M Scotchbrite Wheel so I can have one on both sides of my grinder. These things are critical in my opinion in doing a good deburring job as easily as possible. They are not cheap but are worth it!
Also refreshed my stock on the 1" versions of these that run on a die grinder. Got these from Cleaveland Tool:
So due to the lead times on kits, I just went ahead and ordered the wings and fuselage in addition to the tail cone/empennage.
Not like I will see them anytime soon but might as well get in line....
Well here we go again! Order has been placed for the empennage/tail cone kit! Guess I better get started cleaning up the garage!
