First Contact

Whoa!! wow, cool and all that stuff.  There's a big truck in front of the shop with a delivery.  Oh what a feeling walking outside and looking into that truck.

The first thing I saw was a long box labeled fragile helicopter blades!  I guess that's when it hit me, we had the makings for a helicopter right here and right now!! WoooHoooooo!!.  Boxes, boxes and more boxes and then an OMG!

The tail boom tube had one end completely torn off and missing.

The driver said humm, I wonder if it's ok!  You can imagine what I was thinking. Well we couldn't get to it where it was so we began to unload everything with our Bobcat and when we finally got to the tail boom tube we pushed it out and laid it on the ground and started looking inside the tube.  The packing was hanging out and some of it was missing, the tail boom was lying in the bottom of the tube free to roll around, ohboy!

Well we pulled it out and the small end was crumpled meaning we were going to need a new one and most likely be screwed around by the freight company for months.

We finished unloading the rest of it and loaded it all on a trailer and a large P-30 step van we have for the trip home.  We called RotorWay about the problem and to our surprise they told us they would have the tail boom picked up and sent back to them and send us a new tail boom pronto and that they would deal with the freight company.  Kewl!!  

Well later that day when we were unloading things at the house I got to thinking about just how bad the tail boom was damaged and whether or not it could be repaired or not.  The damage was at the tail rotor end and maybe the metal could be straightened out so it wouldn't look too bad. As long as it wasn't structural, meaning it wouldn't hold up well since it was dented in the place it was, we could repair it in the event we needed it some day.  Now my thoughts were in another direction thinking it would be a better idea for us to settle with the fright company ourselves. 

When I called RotorWay they weren't too happy with that notion and they felt they had first rights to it even though we were the ones who paid extra for the freight and shipping insurance, which if you remember was "not" part of the purchase price.   Humm, that didn't seem right to us and we really didn't want to go along with it but thinking the situation over, we decided to not make waves with RotorWay since we still had a lot of business to do with them and didn't want to alienate them towards us.

We're still wondering how much money or free freight they got off our insurance monies but as the saying goes, Oh well!.

Anyway back to the kewl part of opening up all those crates, we've never said wow so much in all our lives.

What a Wow!! feeling when we opened up the engine crate and got our first look, I don't know which one is neater the blades or the engine lol!!!

Every box contained more neat stuff and we had parts everywhere lol.  There were all kinds of packing material used everywhere.

RotorWay did a hell of a good job crating all the parts,

everything had a place and was integrated with parts that fit into the other parts.

We had a few parts that were damaged from rubbing against one another but it wasn't RotorWays fault it was the long rough ride from Phoenix in the freight truck.

We took an inventory of everything comparing it to the packing lists and everything was there in the right box right where it was supposed to be.

Who ever figures out how to ship this thing is a genius lol.

If you could have only seen our house, we had helicopter all over the place, it was so Kewllllllllllllllllllllll.

We called RotorWay back the next day and told them what parts were damaged and they told us to recreate the parts that needed replacement and they would have them picked up and in the meantime would get new parts shipped out and that was supposed to be that.

Well it took us a bit to resize and build a crate from the old ones to ship them back but alas we got it all done and waited for the freight company to pick them up.

In the meanwhile a few days had passed and we called RotorWay to get a tracking number on the new parts. They told us they couldn't ship them out yet because they didn't have any plywood to build a crate from and that they were awaiting on something to come in so they could use an old crate to ship our parts in,
WTF!  ok
<sigh>

The next day they called and said they managed to find some wood and they would go out that day.....Kewl!

Now remember that damaged tail boom?

Well that turned out to be a different story, they had to wait until they received the old one back and then haggle with the freight company and etc....etc....Blah! Blah! Blah!

Off hand I really can't remember how long that took but we were on hold building our ship until until RotorWay got their ducks in a row and got our parts back to us to go on.

There are lots of things you can work on in a situation like this but we really hadn't planned on skipping around and ending up with a little of this and a little of that completed until the boat came in but thats what we had to do and in the end it all worked out. lol It took over a year for us to find our pool table.

END