Moving Day & Final Assembly

Hangar Move

After over 3 years of N10JW living in my garage it was time to do the big move. I had completed a majority of my Hangar Move punch list with only the Air Conditioning items outstanding.  I didn't want that to hold up progression so I made the call to go forward with the move.

The same friends that loaned me a truck last year and helped hang the engine also happen to own a Roll-Back which is a perfect method for moving the chassis. In preparation I pulled her out to my drive way for a couple photos.

Once Andy got here we talked a bit about it and figured out the best way to pull the plane onto the truck. The plane has an incredibly wide wheel base compared to your average car and we determined there was about 3/4" clearance available on each side.  We also decided it would be best to go ahead and remove the wheel pant mounts from the wheel nut to avoid any damage.  Once that was done I lined her up and actually laid under the fuselage with a tow bar attached to stear her while she was SLOWLY winched onto the truck.

Now Andy has some plane part moving experience.  He also helped me about a year ago when I moved the wings and the horizontal stabilizer to the hangar.  After looking things through decided it was best to do an additional strap on the nose gear, one on each main that would cross and another around the steps to hold it all down.

Moment of truth came and we pushed on the 20 mile or so journey to the airport.  It's a pretty funny sight and being the chase car I enjoyed watching people's reactions to what they were seeing.  We also drove no faster than 50 MPH on the highway.

Unloading was a lot easier than loading.  We had her off the truck and in the hangar in about 5 minutes.  It was a HUGE relief to have that safely done and quite a project milestone. 

Final Assembly

I would imagine its hard for any builder to do that move and then just lock up and go home.  I had come a bit prepared and brought a number of things from my garage with me so I could get a bit acclimated to everything. From a work prospective, still working off punch lists I now have it divided into 'Final Assembly' and 'Home Work'.  Some things like say the wing tips, I can finish up in my garage, while other things like the obvious wing attachment have to occur in the hangar.  My plan moving forward is before every work session I'll write out the things I want to get done, review those planned elements and ensure I have the tools and parts needed to do them and then head out to the airport.  Make notes, lists, ect. prior to coming home.  Rinse & Repeat and I'm expecting to make fast progress.

Not wanting to wait on progress I decided to started on the first task of removing tape and other protective coatings that I had left on.  After that started with reviewing each page of the plans, one by one and ensure the all steps had been done as I'm now able to go through the plans and complete things that I skipped previously.  Didn't take me too long to realize for whatever reason I left out two rows of AD470 rivets on the Vertical Stabilizer for whatever reason.  I assume I might have thought that it got rivets to the tail-cone skin seeing two rows pre-punched holes on the aft part, which I now know were used for other rivets.  So I had circled this step, put my VS up in my garage and forgot about it the next 3 years.  Given that I didn't bring my #30 bit I was quickly at a hard stop. Not to be beaten I used the time to remove the wingtips so I could bring those home and organize my hangar a bit better.

I did however take a picture of N10JW prettied up a bit!