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.
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!