337 wing repair / replace
 

Howdy, all.

It took some fancy foot work, but after a week of basicly BEGGING, I managed to get my employer to at least consider alternatives to scrapping our SkyMaster.

To that end, I am trying to figure out what it will cost us to repair the damage to our wings that we discovered while performing the inspections suggested in FAA SAIB CE-10-20.

As a minimum, we will be replacing the winglet with Factory caps. Although I'd love to use the Horton STOL tips...I fear that they may simply replicate the excessive lift forces that exist with the current stacked mods.

if at all possible, we'd like to keep our tip-tanks. But will loose them if necessary.

More to the point, I need to know if anyone out there can recommend a wing shop to either repair our very minor damage, or replace the wings entirely.

I've heard rumors that some shop has 337 jigs, but no names or links.

I do know that removing the wings is a pain, but its better than seeing my baby parted-out.

I need to get my boss some estimates soon in order to keep him on-board. Any recommendations are appreciated.

Thanks, all.

Cole

If you mean removal of the wings from the fuselage (not just the extensions), then the number I saw during the early work on the SIDs is 200 man hours, which translates to $15,000 at $75 per man hour. Additional work since then may have narrowed this number further (up or down), so perhaps others will jump in here with more current estimates.

This high cost, along with the opinion of many that a wing failure would not occur at its attachment with the fuselage, explains SOAPA's resistance to the wing-fuselage attachment SID.

To cite an expert, here's the gist of one structural expert with Skymaster knowledge told me about the wing (excerpted from my post of 2/24 on the SID thread):

"If fatigue-tested to failure, no one knows where it will fail. Cessna doesn't know and I don't know. But I know that the wing-fuselage attach points are the least likely to fail. If I had to guess it would be just outboard of the strut, or perhaps the strut itself, but not at the wing-strut attach point but further down."

He dismissed a failure at the wing-fuselage attach points because of the massive over-design and because the front attachment, which carries the heavier load, is in compression in flight, meaning that the wing is pushing down on the top of the fuselage, rather than trying to pull up (i.e., separate) from the fuselage.

Ernie

Don Nieser
 

Call Don. He's in Oklahoma City, at PWA. He has wings, but could probably fix yours.

http://02337parts.com/

Phone: 405.722.4079 Cell: 405.503.4686

Spend no more time, call Don.