In total I received 5 kits: empennage, wings, fuselage, canopy/finishing, and undercarriage. The Wings came with an extra crate for the preassembled spars, and there were 2 tubes for the pushrods and stringers.

Each kit came with a packing list so the task was to make sure that everything that was supposed to be in the crates was indeed in there. It took me about 3 full days to get through it all. The fuselage was by far the hardest, followed by the wings. The undercarriage was trivial.

Overall, the contents matched the packing lists remarkably well. There were just a few small items missing. A few bags were shart an item. For example, I received 25 grommets when I was supposed to get 26 (see picture below). It pays to count carefully! However, there were around 20 or so bags with several hundred to thousands of rivets that I was not about to verify. Hopefully they give you a few extras…

I also received one part that was correct but labeled incorrectly, one part that was the left side instead of the right side, and one part that had two labels. I have yet to confirm if that last one is correct or not.

On a sour note, the packing of the fuselage kit left a lot to be desired. They put the heavy jig peices on top of the skins which caused some damage. The corners of some of the skins also damaged the skins underneath (see pictures). I’ve requested replacement parts and they are expensive so lets see Sling’s tolerance for such requests.

The day has arrived! My 6 crates and 2 tubes have made it all the way from South Africa to my home in Bend, OR!

I thought that 1 slot in a 2 car garage would be enough space, but boy was I wrong. I need to find a temporary space to store most of these.

Transport from Torrance to Bend cost arount $2.5K and took about a week. It seems that it was transferred from one truck to another in Redmond, OR before the final shipment to me.

The driver complained that the wood block on the underside were spaced in a way that didn’t accept the forks of US palette trucks. We had to manhandle the boxes onto a dolly to get them out of the truck and into my garage.

Overall the crates were in pretty good shape, but there was some light damage. We’ll see if that translates into any damage to the parts inside.

When it comes to dimpling skins, from what I can tell, most builders go with a “hammer type” C-frame, or a “lever type” compression C-frame. This hammer-type dimpling tool and this compression-type dimpling tool from Cleaveland Aircraft Tool seem to be the most popular.

I decided to go with a different option, the CARD1 from Hisham Hassan at Clemson Aeronatics (not sponsored), which came highly recommended by the VeArds here. It’s a C-frame, but it’s BEEFY! I mean, struggle-to-lift-up beefy.

Rather than being powered by hand, it works with your pneumatic squeezer! Being so BEEFY and using the pneumatic squeezer means that, in addition to dimpling, it can also rivet!

Best of all, if you pick up this package, you also get some BEEFY yokes and a couple of handy tools to sweeten the deal. In the end it’s hardly more than what you’d pay Cleaveland Aircraft Tool for the hand-powered compression dimpler, but you get better ease of use, more capability, and generally higher performance tools. I figure that if it costs me an extra hundred dollars, I’ll make it up in time saved.

Unfortunately, this tool is all I have for now… no parts to dimple and no squeezer to do the dimpling. I’ll post an update in due time…