S-21 and the New Kit Arrival

After ordering our Rans S-21 kit in November 2025, it finally showed up in July 2026. While the wait was painful, I think it will be worth it in the long run.

Just a few parts, some assembly required. Just like Ikea.

Having ordered kits from Van's, Glasair, and Murphy, I think this may be the only time I have ever ordered a kit with nothing back ordered. Well, the Murphy Elite order didn't have any back ordered items either, but that was just a tail kit. In this case we ordered almost the whole airplane; the tail kit (Rans makes the tail 3 separate kits), the wings, the Fuselage, and the Finish Kit. We didn't order the Firewall Fwd kit yet just in case we change our mind on an engine, but I think we are pretty well locked into the Titan 340, 180 HP engine.

If you are interested in the story of how we arrived at the S-21 at this point in time, it is explained here.

The arrival and de-trucking of the kit was a very interesting thing that I had not experienced before.

Click on photo to view video.

Once everything, and in this case "everything" is a crate and a pallet, was off the truck, it looked a lot like what is shown below.

Lots of room!

I had feared that the crates would take up more room than they do. I had measured everything out and it should have worked like this but, you never know. I wanted to make sure that there was still room to get the airplane in and out and there is plenty, as can be seen below.

Room to spare, though not much.

The kit showed up late in the day and by the time everything was in with the doors closed, it was almost 6:00 and time to call it a day.

Day 1, Wednesday July 15, 2026, I started the unpacking and inventorying process in earnest. There were several items packed in and around the fuselage cage and I wanted to start with those so I could move that out of the way to start on the crate.

Lots of bits.

They put the windshield on top inside the cage, so it was hard to see what all was in there. Since the windshield is big enough that it would cost a lot to get a replacement shipped, I wanted to put it somewhere where it would be safe and out of the way. I considered leaving all that cardboard on it, but I really needed to take it off, just to make sure that there weren't any other parts packed with it. There weren't. There is plastic covering the plastic on both sides, so it should be OK. I have it stored upstairs where there was a Sportsman windshield stored for many years and it came out OK.

At least I can see some of it.

I thought there were just those two boxes which I was pretty sure were full of hardware, they were, but it turns out that there are two more sitting where the seat cushions would go. The seat cushions were there too.

There are the stock tires that come with the kit.

The tires they supply are 8.50-6 Tundra tires, with the smooth surface, no tread. They are good off road tires, but pavement eats them up. I think I will hold them in reserve for now and start out using 8.00-6 regular treaded tires.

The bigger, odd shaped items I inventoried as I removed them, but when it got to more packaged items, I waited until I had everything removed to do the inventory. In the beginning, since the pallet was at the front of the hangar I was trying to use the little table by the door, but it soon became apparent that it would be inadequate for the task.

Manual inventorying.

The Packing List is 22 pages with 827 line items on it. I started out by manually scanning each page looking for the item I had in hand. Since there is no rhyme or reason to how things are in the packaging, other than probably what fits best, I was jumping all over all 22 pages. It quickly became clear that this would take the rest of my natural life if I stuck to it, so...

Technology to the rescue.

I was recently talked into buying a MacBook Neo. It is quickly turning out to be one of the best things I have bought this year. I had an old Dell Laptop floating around the hangar, but it is absolutely useless. If I turn it on when I first get there, it may have a file open by the time I leave. I need to take it to be recycled and tell them to make sure it dies a slow, painful death.

By pulling up the .pdf of the Packing List, I can search by part number and get to exactly where in the list it is, then go to my hard copy and tic it off. I will be very happy when the whole list is ticked off.

The adventure of building an airplane is supposed to be a learning process, and no one says that process can't start before the building begins. In this case, I remembered that I had more room available than the little desk up front, so I got settled in for the long haul.

A bigger table is better.

I got a 32" monitor on a rolling stand, primarily to use while building so that I can make the drawings big enough to see, they are standard as 8 1/2 X 11 sheets of paper. In this case, it allowed me to see the pack list easier and a mouse made navigation easier as well.

The four boxes are jam packed with hardware and other tiny bits.

The last thing I tackled on day 1 was the gear legs. There is a note on the outside of the package that says "Gear Leg Tall, (S-21), (S-20) ... Need new bolts, if upgrading from old S-20 gear legs". Apparently, the S-20 can now use the S-21 gear legs. I find the whole thing interesting as I would not have called these "tall" legs. Of course, I haven't seen the original S-20 legs, so I really have no basis for comparison.

The "TALL" gear legs.

The gear legs do look stout and are sort of semi-airfoil. They aren't really an airfoil shape, but they are rounded at the front and back. If you look very close, or open the picture in a new window and zoom in, you can see a groove on the back side of the leg for the brake line to sit in.

Day 2, Thursday July 16, 2026 left me in a little bit of a quandary on where to start. I need some help to get the cage upstairs and well and truly out of the way, but there was none extant. I can just roll the cage, which is all that is left on the pallet now, out of the way as needed, there is still that fact that I needed help to get the shelf with all of the skins on it out so that I could access the rest of the contents of the crate. Or so I thought.

All of the big skins are on a shelf at the top of the crate.

I wanted to take the end off of the crate and slide the skins out onto the crate top and put the whole thing on furniture dollies, aka "skateboards". I didn't come up with that idea on my own, I saw it on TV. While I was waiting for our kit, I watched a lot of build videos from other people that had already been through it and this is one thing that I found. In that video, however, the guy doing it had a helper. I wasn't sure I would be able to do it all by me onesy, savvy? Oh me of little faith, will I never learn?

After taking the end off of the crate, I was able to slide the tray out. The only problem was, when I pulled on the shelf, the whole crate wanted to roll toward me. I threw some chocks under the back wheels of the rear skateboard and put a quick stop to that.

It took a little bit of finagling to get the crate lid aligned with the end of the crate and with the end nearest to the crate elevated so the skins would just slide out. With a little grunt work, I got-er-done.

The crate with the skins removed.

With full crate access, it was time to go to work. They do not skimp on the packaging paper when they pack the crate. It would be so easy to just throw all this paper in the back of the truck and haul it off, but I have to go through every bit and make sure that there is not a part packed in it. There almost certainly isn't because the packages with parts in them are neatly wrapped and labeled with a part number, but one never knows. It would be my luck that there would be one part that they threw in with the packing paper and it would turn out to be made of pure unobtainium. So, I check all the packing paper.

Roughly half way through the crate.

Mount Paper beginning to erupt!

By lunch time, I was about half way through the crate. Now, that is just unpacking the crate, very little of it is actually inventoried yet. Some of the bigger pieces I inventory as I go so that I can take them upstairs and get them out of the way. I want to make sure that nothing gets put away until it has been inventoried.

In order to facilitate getting the crate unloaded, I am just piling the parts in and around a table that I have set up behind the RV-8. I am trying to keep things segregated by kit, so I am making three piles, one for the fuselage, which includes the finishing kit, and one for the wings, and one for the tail.

Parts is parts.

More parts.

These are mostly fuselage skins and other, mostly flat things.

By the end of the day, I had just about everything in the crate removed and put somewhere. All that was left was the front and rear wing spars. I need to clean off the place I want to put them and then they will get put away also.

Almost there.

Meanwhile...

Paper mountain grows.

I started off folding the packing paper, which is a two-ply paper that is folded in on itself that takes up a lot of space and putting it on the floor. But it quickly became clear that I just needed to drop it and fold it later. Some of it I will hold on to as it is very handy, but there is no way I can ever use all of it. The wrapping paper, which is basically butcher paper, I had been folding up and throwing in the cage. This too is way more than I can ever use, but I will save some as it it is useful for many things.

After all that, I'm beat. I'm not used to this kind of manual labor. Tomorrow I hope to get all of this cleaned up so that I can get the airplane out and take break to go flying on Saturday.

The inventory will take a good bit of time, and I see no reason to rush it (pun intended). Before too long, I hope to be able to get started building, but first I need to come up with a building table and I have an idea for that, and that is not my idea either.

One issue that I thought I had was with the rudder skin. When I pulled it out of the crate, it looked like it was two flat pieces, rather than one piece, folded in the middle. All of the instructions and videos I have seen show it as one folded piece. If they are changing that to what I could only imagine would be a riveted trailing edge rudder, I was concerned. First, I had seen no instructions for this and second, I do not like riveted trailing edge flight control surfaces.

I quickly unwrapped it and was relieved to see that is was indeed a folded piece.

Rudder skin.

I am used to Van's tail skins where they only start the bend. Once the innards are finished, the builder has to complete the bend making sure to keep it straight and maintain the proper radius. At least with this skin, the bend is complete from the factory and requires no additional work from the builder. Whew!

Day 3, Friday July 17, 2026. There was only a little left to do today so I got after it early. I started by getting the rest of the long pieces out of the crate and inventorying and putting them away.

All of the long bits.

I put all of the long pieces in a place purpose built to hold long stock. Up there are the wing spars, the horizontal stabilizer and elevator spars, the lift struts, the stringers, the trim tab skin and other such things.

I kind of have things stashed all over for now.

Fuel tanks (the header tank comes with the Firewall Fwd kit).

I think there are enough shelves.

I plan to use a separate section of shelving for each kit. One for the tail, another for the wings and one for the fuselage.

Rans tips on the left, Aerosport on the right.

Now I see why Aerosport Products has so many parts available for the S-21. Some of the ones from Rans kinda suck. Shown above are the horizontal stab tips from Rans on the left, which I think are injection molded plastic, requiring a LOT of trimming verses the Aerosport tips on the right, which look like they are 3D printed and should just slide right in. Guess which ones I'll be using.

Vertical stab tip.

Another example, above, is the Vertical Stab tip. The one from Rans (top) is plastic and requires a lot of trimming, while the one from Aerosport is fiberglass and should require less trimming.

Rans wing tips.

I also don't like the Rans wing tips, which are, anyone? Yep, plastic. I will definitely be using the Aerosport ones. They also have a funky mounting method. Well, funky from what I am used to. It may take a bit of work to get installed, but once set up, they should be easier to remove and replace than what I am used to.

Finally I got to the bottom of the crate.

Open wide and say "AAHHH".

I was planning to spend much of today gong through all of the packing paper to make sure there are no small parts hiding so that I could get rid of it when it dawned on me, I don't need to be in that big a hurry to get rid of it. If I throw it all back in the crate it can sit there until the inventory is complete. If there are no parts missing I can just toss all, or most, of the paper. If there are, at least I know where to look.

Problem solved, well at least, problem kicked down the road.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode, which can be found here.