Pregnant with RV-10

In the weeks between purchasing our empennage kit and going to Van’s Aircraft in Aurora, OR to pick it up, we were kept busy cleaning and preparing the workshop. With the pickup scheduled for the Friday before Labor Day, that gave us about a month to get things ready.

Back when we were working on the Glasair SII-S and trying to get it ready for Oshkosh, we had someone tell us to think like expecting parents and imagine that we’re pregnant with Glasair — that in 7 months or so (at that time), Oshkosh is coming whether we’re ready for it or not.

August was our short month to be pregnant with RV-10 empennage.

Organization

Since there are a number of us building, and we’re not always in the same place, communication became critical to organizing and accomplishing everything. Unfortunately, after only a few days back from Oshkosh, we had polluted our email inboxes with different email threads, each one containing multiple thoughts and conversations. It was a confusing mess, and clearly this system was not going to work, or allow for easy access to past conversations.

We needed a better system. Fortunately for us, there are many available. We needed one that could separate different topics into separate threads that were easy to find. We needed notifications so we could replace email. We also needed a system that could track the progress of tasks so we were all on the same page. And we wanted this system to be free. So after looking at a few different project management tools, we started trying out Trello.

The Ampersand Kanban Board

Trello is a light-weight, card based project management tool. If you’re familiar with Lean or Agile development, this should look pretty much identical to a Kanban board or scrum board because, well, that’s exactly what it is. For those unfamiliar, tasks are comprised of cards that are sorted into a few different columns. At its most basic, an inbox for things in discussion, a doing column to track progress of tasks being performed, and an archive column to show what we’ve done. We decided to also add a couple notifications and reference columns as a way to store long-term items. Each card can be discussed or moved around depending on its status. After using this for just a few weeks, it has become an indispensable way that we manage the parts of the build that aren’t in the plans.

Workshop

Our workshop is in the basement of my house. Fortunately, it has a garage that opens to an alley way, so we’re not going to have to excavate around the house to get the completed airplane out.

However, at the beginning of the month it was a mess. After a couple years of accumulating stuff, it needed to be cleaned out and readied for spending some quality time down there. That meant sweeping and mopping, compressing or throwing out stored items, and planning for how we’d set up the benches. We added a significant amount of general purpose light and task lighting as well.

Taming the mess, one small corner at a time.

In all, we got most of the cleaning done before Labor Day, but we still needed to finish getting our tools and organizing them, making our workbenches, and generally completing the shop so we could actually build an airplane down there.

But we couldn’t wait to finish the few remaining items. We were pregnant with RV-10, and the delivery date had arrived.