Smooth Ride kit...

All of our piston engine aircraft are getting these "smooth ride kits," which basically is an STC for taking off the front single engine mounts and installing dual mounts on the front. It is supposed to keep the engine from drooping in the front and is supposed to help keep vibration to a minimum. Well, I've done 4 of these kits so far. The first plane in our fleet to get the kit was 5Y-CMA. I helped Jose Reyes install it in just the first 3 days I was working in the shop. Basically, I was just helping more than anything. Well, I did the next two on 7DG and 90U, our two project planes (the pictures below are 7DG, I did the installation about a month or so ago). I also put it on N756MS, one of the newer 206s to the fleet (6MS also has the "new" paint scheme, which 7DG and 90U will both get). We also put the kit on our Cessna 210, but that was primarily Brandon (short termer) and Chris Kibe (Kenyan mechanic), with some input and help from me. We have 1 or 2 more to do, and that will be our complete piston fleet with the smooth ride kit...


7DG's old single front engine mounts
















7DG's new dual front engine mounts.
(The pink stuff is structural adhesive... not my first choice of colors, but all we had. Oh, well.)

Some more pictures...

The new floor and the Brownline seat tracks...got rid of the old Cessna floor that has the slight rise in the back and the old Cessna seat tracks.

Brandon (one of the short termers and a fellow MAI man), getting crazy with the heat gun and the MEK. He scraped poo off the ceiling and walls of both 7DG and 90U for about 3 days.


Josh (another short termer) cleaning corrosion from under the instrument panel.


Cleaning the wings...(L to R) Faith, Chris, Joseph. They are hard workers.

The beginnings

So I thought I would start giving you all a look at what I'm doing at work. Well, most of what I do. We're rebuilding two Cessna 206s, both of which I had the opportunity to do some work on last fall in Kidron, Ohio (props to Preferred and their awesome crew). Anyway, they've been shipped over here and were in the process of rebuilding them for our fleet. It's a lot more work even than was involved in rebuilding Twin Otters at Fayard Enterprises. Here, we take most of the plane apart, clean, inspect, repaint, rebuild, etc. It's very detailed. I figured I could start showing you some pictures of the process...I know you aviation guys will like them if no one else cares. We're doing N827DG first and N4790U second (well, sort of stagger-stepped). Most of the pictures of the blog will be of 7DG because we're doing a lot of the work on it right now.



N827DG as she stood when I arrived in the shop back in March.

Interior instrument panel area back in March.