Surprise! Van's came thru early! Powerplant kit has arrived!

So out of the blue I was contacted by Van's to tell me they had an engine for me if I was ready to make final payment.  Absolutely!  Final payment was wired and a week later, this shows up!

The crate had the left overs of two additional ship to addresses on it.  Apparently the other two builders were either not ready to make final payment or chose to defer their spot in line or some other issue caused them to go thru them before offering to me.  No clue but I was glad they did!

The powerplant kit was shipped in two boxes.  The engine in the wood crate and the rest of the stuff was in this cardboard box.  This box was fairly light.

Here is everything that was in that cardboard box.  The exhaust, radiator, oil cooler, throttle cable and a couple brackets were back ordered.

Because I decided to add the Rotax Care extended warranty, I got a "free" $1300 Bose headset out of the deal.  That is basically half the cost of the Rotax Care addon.  I decided to add the Rotax Care due to the flurry of SB's that have been issued by Rotax lately.

Inside the engine crate was the engine, the engine electrical harness, the headset, the fuse box, the ECU computer. oil tank, air filter, fuel filters, starter relay, fuel pumps and a few other odds and ends.

All of the applicable service bulletins were complied with before the engine left Vans.

Ain't she pretty!

Here is one blade of the two blade prop.   This will end up getting replaced shortly after the ink dries on the paperwork by a three blade E-Prop.

Waiting game!

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. 

Flight Controls Part 12

Installed the flaperon push pull tubes to the aft bell cranks.  Pretty easy due to good access. 

Then attached the fwd end to the flaperon mixer.

Don't forget the washers!

Assembled the flap motor mounting bracket.

And mounted the flap motor.  You can use a 9v battery to run the flap motor in and out.

Flight Controls Part 11

Worked on the flaperon push pull control tubes today.

Installed the rod end bearings and adjusted to the dims in the KAI's.

Flight Controls part 10

Dropped back to install the nuts and washers on the bolts that I have installed so far on the flight controls.

The control sticks get castle nuts and cotter pins where they connect to the control column fork.  I guess they could have used regular nylon locknuts here because the bolt and bushing do not rotate.  I don't know why they went this route but I don't ask questions.

The aileron rod end at the control stick gets a nylon locknut and washer because the bolt does not rotate when torqued down.

The elevator control cable attach points get castle nuts and cotter pins because these are only finger tight so the spade end of the cable can freely pivot on the bolt in between the steel forks.

Bottom cable.

The inboard aileron control pushrod ends get nylon locknuts on the studs because the studs do not rotate after torquing.

Side shot to check that there are enough threads sticking out past the locknut.

The carnage to get all of these fasteners installed.  The DNA left on this airplane will definitely prove that I built it.

Flight Controls part 9

Got these bolts and other hardware installed with the aileron pushrods.  This is a total pain in the rear!  Those little spacer washers are the devil.  Access to the area is very tight for someone with big hands and forearms!  Washer wrenches were a life saver here as well as a mirror underneath to be able to see what is going on.  Took a couple hours to get the bolts and washers installed on these two rod ends!

Flight Controls part 8

Not much time to work on the plane today but I did manage to get the control sticks mostly installed.  Just had to remove the powder coat from the steel tube that the bushing slides into.  Had to hone the tube out a little bit to get the bushing to rotate freely and then finally only had to fine tune the length of one of the bushings to get it to go into the control column forks.