And So It Begins!
As the Queen song goes: it finally happened, I’m slightly mad! We officially placed our order for a Van’s Aircraft RV-10 Empennage Kit last Sunday, July 26th, 2015; on the last day of EAA Airventure Oshkosh 2015!
The first of what is sure to be many “RV grins” as we hold our completed order form autographed by Rian Johnson
The night before we had conferred with Judy & Jenn and all four of us had agreed on pulling the trigger, all we needed was to do it, do it NOW!
We arrived about an hour before the booth closed and half the airplanes were gone and so was much of the team. The few that were left were packing the rest of the booth to take back to Oregon. Fortunately for us Rian Johnson, Chief Engineer of Van’s, was still there! You might remember Rian from our Visit to Van’s post. He was the one that gave us the amazing and incredibly nerdy tour of the place. When we let him know that we finally had made up our minds he very graciously took time out of packing up to take care of us.
A few papers filled out and $4k later we were the owners of an RV-10 serial number! The rest of the day we were giddily saying “we’re actually doing this!” After having built one airplane (a Glasair SII-S FT) we know exactly how big of a project this is and the serious commitment and emotional roller coaster that it will mean for us to complete a second one. That’s why I think there were some parts excitement, some parts disbelief, and some parts dread at what we had just gotten ourselves into.
As I write this a few weeks later and we’ve had the time to organize ourselves and begin the preparation process for the arrival of the actual airplane parts I’m confident that we have a good plan in place to get started and move in the right direction. The next post will probably be about getting tools, preparing the workshop, picking up the kit, etc. Picking up the kit? Yeap, you read that right! Van’s was recently required to charge sales tax to their Washington state customers. That would mean that between the 10% sales tax on the kit and the shipping charges we’re looking at spending an extra $600 to have the kit delivered. We were hoping to borrow Joey’s dad’s SUV but the box is too large! It’s 10.5 ft long, 1 ft tall, and 4 ft wide. A HUGE box! We’re gonna end up renting a truck. A truck rental with gas will entail an expenditure of between $200 and $300 and we can use the truck to get some other large items while we have it so we decided to go with that option.
Until next time, clear skies and tailwinds!
