Where have I been since March of 2018?

I know, I know, where the heck have I been March – certainly not working on an airplane much. Crappy weather, house falling apart – same old excuses and interruptions. I did mange to order some prefabbed fuel pick up lines, Proseal, and a few other things, which also went through their own adventure during shipment. Apparently Fedex decided to all but destroy the original packaging from Vans. Admittedly this was rather package to assemble, because I had ordered a big can of Proseal, and I also ordered a replacement .032 x 12 x 3.5 foot piece of sheet aluminum for the leading edge mod on the right wing, since I screwed up the other one that I had ordered an eternity ago.

Even so, all Fedex had to do was put it on plane, then put it on a truck, and deliver it. Easy – right? Yes, until you factor in the sorting equipment in between each of those phases of delivery. Somewhere  in the middle of all that, a sorting machine got hold  of it and destroyed the packing. Amazingly, they did not seem to damage the parts – just the packaging. I knew something was up because my package did not arrive when I expected it to. When it did finally show up, the cardboard was mangled with packing tape, did not look at all like a Vans package, and had obviously been mangled or torn apart somehow. The only damage was a minor bend on one corner of the sheet aluminum that I ordered, but I also noted that Vans had cut it with the grain running the wrong direction.  A call to Vans took care of that, and a few days later I had the replacement part.

Vans wanted me to take pics of the packaging, which I did, and they confirmed that was not the way that it left their facility. Moral to this story s don’t  trust Fedex with anything. I wanted to use UPS but Vans talked me out of it because “they get a better rate with Fedex.” Next time I will use UPS.

A couple of other things have occurred since I last posted. I had wanted to get a new travel trailer, and decided that this year was the year for that to happen. I wanted something a little newer and larger, with built in air conditioning and a nicer master bed. Not hard to find a better bed, since I had been sleeping on the couch for years. While I was pursuing a new trailer, my truck decided to start nickel and diming me. Time to make a decision – so I spent the past several months researching trucks and trailers, and ended up getting one of each.

Then, as if that was not enough, I decided with all the delays in the plane build that I needed to bite the bullet again and order a quickbuild fuselage for my RV-8 from Vans. So, in the past few months I have acquired a new trailer, truck, and 75% complete airplane fuselage.  Oh, and I also spent the past 2 months trying to sell my old trailer, which finally did sell about a week ago.

To top it all off, work has been a nightmare – that’s about all I am going to say about that. So here I am, several months later, a LOT poorer, completely exhausted, and oh yes, I am writing this in Oshkosh Wisconsin after making the maiden voyage in my new-found ground-based travel machines.  I have been running non-stop for months now and I am completely exhausted. I only had time to throw everything from the old trailer into the new one wherever it would fit – no time to organize. More about the shakeout of the new rig and all about the Airventure 2018 journey in the next posts.