Session 1: 31st August 2020

As John-the-delivery-person observed, I don't have a lot of space to spare. This was something of a surprise when he said it, as the garage I have is quite well proportioned. However, he was entirely correct.

We'd broken out the tools in the previous session. I could have break out everything else, but that would require buying a bunch of racking (and probably not be that much further forward). So, realistically things were going to have to stay in the boxes until they are ready to be fitted onto the car. However, that left me with ten smaller boxes (around 50 x 40 x 30 cm each), three larger boxes (120 x 60 x 30cm) and three poster tubes*. Some of these had packing labels that listed the contents, but most had one word ("lighting", "suspension" and so on).

Starting each new page of the build manual with a scavenger hunt, searching through every single box (which were stacked four high and two deep) to find the necessary parts, seemed unattractive. Far better to open each of them once, work out what was inside and write a really long list.

Anyone who knows me in a work context knows that my go-to tool for bringing order to a chaos of many moving parts is Trello. There's plenty of tools out there, and this one is probably overkill for this task, but it's the one that I know and that makes it easy. So, I set about documenting things into a Trello board, opening each box, listing out what I found, taking lots of photos, sealing things back up and then listing where I put the box.

* ...as well as a wooden packing crate labelled "gearbox", the pallet with the engine, four wheels, two seats, two sets of two exhaust pipes, the transmission tunnel cover, and (inside the car) four wheel arches and the nose cone.

In the process I broke out the parts I needed for page 1 of the build manual, the front wishbones and Parts Bag A.

Somehow, four hours had passed just moving boxes, opening boxes, disposing of some of the packaging (they were all filled with plastic pockets filled with air, which are no longer needed since we're not worried about the parts moving around any more), taking photos, making notes and sealing boxes up again. At this point it was dark, and so that was really it for this session.