Author: Berck

I spent the entire day working on the shop and the workbenches.  It’s not very glorious work, and I don’t even have pictures.  I finished the workbenches, and spent hours cleaning and organizing the shop.  I put the label maker to use and labeled the tool chest.  I set up the rivet gun and air drill, and tested them.  They make impressive noises.  I spent a lot of time setting up the DRDT-2, and creating a removable perch for it between the two work benches.  While dimpling, it will fit between the two benches, and when we’re done dimpling, it can be removed and placed on one of the shelves below the benches, and the benches shoved together.

Tomorrow we start on the practice projects!  I’m hoping we can finish them, but our hand squeezer has been backordered.  I’m not sure if we need to squeeze any rivets.  If not, we should be good to go.

The first day went really well!  We actually got a bit more done than I thought we might.  We unpacked the entire crate, inventoried it, and built two EAA workbenches.  The work benches still need a top layer of MDF and a shelf, but are mostly complete.  There ended up being two damaged elevator skins.  I’m surprised it wasn’t much worse given the holes FedEx punched into the crate on both ends, and the fact that they completely ignored the this side up markings.

While Randy and I were working on the workbenches, Joanna inventoried the “bags”.  Thousands of rivets, and a lot of bolts and other little parts.  She put them all in storage containers and labeled them, and counted everything but the rivets.  It’s kind of amazing given the number of parts that there wasn’t anything missing.

Crate sort of unpacked:

Not for use on aircraft:

(It will definitely be used on an aircraft.)

Skins:

 

Berck, Randy and Jonah: 9 hours each. (though, no actual construction.)