Fuselage Arrives!

I ordered a quick build Fuselage in August of 2016 and Vans at the time had estimated that it would arrive in February or March of 2017. Around the first of the year I had contacted Vans to see if there was any update, and they gave me the great news that my fuselage was in transit to Vans and would be arriving in Oregon at the end of January 2017.

Late January, Tony Partain and Vans both called me saying that the fuselage was ready to ship. When all was said and done it was about 2K to freight the fuselage from Oregon to Virginia via Tony.

Tony started using a new shipper apparently, which is the same shipper that freights all of the Factory Five cars around. My driver showed up right on time and started to offload immediately. That is where things started to go not as planned. The cable hoist system in the truck would not power up... The driver narrowed it down to the solenoid on the main gantry, so we hopped in my truck and went to NAPA to pick-up a new solenoid. Apparently the solenoid was a 6v solenoid which my local NAPA did not stock, so we drove out 30 minutes to another store, grabbed a solenoid and headed back home.

By the time we got back to my house it was nearing 1200. Which started to put me in a time crunch because I had to get to work for a meeting (my company had just been acquired that day and there was an All-Hands meeting that I needed to get to). The driver got the new solenoid in, but the gantry still would not move. I grabbed some jumper cables to jump past the solenoid, and the motor would not budge.

I was about to give up and call it a day (in reference to completing the delivery), but the driver asked if I wanted to offload the fuselage by hand. There were only two of us so we unstrapped it to see if we thought we could do it by ourselves.

I am lacking photos of the next hour because it was a bit stressful and both of our hands were a bit full. We were able to off-load the fuselage with two people off of the trailer. If I were to do it again I would NOT do it with only two people. It really needs a third person and ideally a fourth. That said, we got it off the truck and into my shop with only one minor cosmetic scuff. 

Now we have a fuselage! In our garage!

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