Up until today, all the parts of the empennage and wing kits were sitting in our one bedroom apartment in Millbrae. Today, they have finally found their home in our new hangar.

About half a year ago (a lifetime ago, gentle readers!), we went to our local EAA meeting in San Carlos airport, and learned that we are not the only ones building a Sling TSi in the Bay Area. In fact, we learned, our fellow builder Claude Pignol is not only building a Sling, but also looking for another builder to split his hangar in Hayward airport with! This worked out for us very well. The hangar has a lot of space and is right next to an airfield. This was an important point in our social favor, as this was the first question everyone asked when learning that we are working on the airplane in our apartment, “Where are you dumdums going to take off and land? Off the balcony?” There is also a Home Depot right across the street from the hangar, handy for last-minute impulse buys. Finally, the airfield itself is almost BARTable (so we both can get there after work relatively easily) But, most importantly, Claude is super experienced (has built and flown airplanes for many years), and is way ahead of us in the construction process, and helps us a lot. Claude is a super cool guy - he lets us use his many tools and shows us the mysterious ways of airplane-creating. Peter claims that, given the fact that we are the ones with the blog, us moving in with Claude is mildly reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes / Dr. Watson situation. I don’t think Claude plays the violin, so the comparison can only go so far.

Anyways today is the day we officially moved in! We gathered our special moving forces (good friends Steph and Fred who are each likely strong enough to lift the entire airplane with one hand), and dumped all the parts in a U-haul. We had to go with a giant 24 foot one, because the spars are 13 ft long, so the smallest truck they can fit in is 17 ft (the 13 ft truck has 13 ft from attic to the back door, so we would have had to suspend the spars from the attic). Peter drove it and freaked out the whole way. He bumped the truck a little bit on one of the first floor balconies (there was not enough clearance), but otherwise, the drive and move went rather uneventfully. Yay for hangar space!