Complete interior re-furbish

[hharney]

Here is the progress report for the last couple of days, rear engine mounts are replaced, rear engine oil filter is installed, all inspection plates on the left wing, booms and tail are back on. The new tail strobe is installed. I had to rebuild the mount on the tip of the bottom tail cone as over the years this has been compromised. I have the white nav light on the starboard side as original and so now added a tip strobe to the port side.

One item that is being thought out is the plastic cuff that transitions the boom strut to the boom. This unit looks almost impossible to change. Mine has a nasty crack and I would really like to change this before paint. It is flush riveted to the boom but looks impossible to re-rivet if removed. Has anyone ever changed this item?

The interior continues to make progress. Although finishing yesterday was a dream. That's ok because I am still not in a hurry. We had problems with the original interior light switches. Cessna really went the extra mile with these stylish slide switches. I guess I shouldn't complain, they are 40 years old. I had new switches from aircraft spruce that I bought but once they arrived they were only rated for 12VDC. Although they were rated at 25 amps I just decided that the originals were still good so I wasn't going to change something that wasn't really approved. Anyway, the pilot map light switch decided to come apart while trying to re-install the window trim that it mounted to. After fiddling with it for what seemed like hours, checking to see if it worked, cleaning the contacts, lubing it so that the action was easier we finally had it installed. Just small incidentals like this can really eat up your afternoon. Of course it's Valentine's Day so my interior tech and his son had plans with the lady's so about 6 PM it's done for the weekend. Well some progress was made as the photos below testify. I am really liking what I see. It's going to be one of a kind. The leather that was chosen is really nice, soft with a casual texture to it. We decided that wrapping the windows was going to be really difficult based on the plastic frames. Cessna has more curves and angles and to wrap these would leave several seams in many directions. We were going with an raised stitch and it would have created quite the railroad track look. So after painting one of the plastic trims and seeing how it changed the look I decided that I could live with the plastic window trim. My plastic was really in good shape. The only piece we had to replace was the overhead console. All the windows are original pieces. With the special paint that is used and the offset color to give some nice contrast the trim really turned out nice. It looks brand new. We lowered the carpet line on the side panels. The original line was like 1/3 of the way up from the floor. By lowering the carpet line it allowed us to use more leather on each side of the designer fabric. I am sure it was easier for Cessna to just push the carper up higher and it also may have helped in the sound control over the vinyl upholstery that was original. We make some nice access panels for the main gear area to be inspected in the future. With the advanced use of Velcro these days it's really nice what can be done. The panels are totally invisible looking at the upholstery but it you know they there it's just a tug on one corner and the panel comes off to give a nice access to the area of the gear for inspection.

Trying to decide on the paint scheme, keeping the new interior in mind and trying to use some of the original color has been challenging. Not sure which way I am going yet. There were about 3 or 4 designs that I liked after searching all the Skymasters I could find pictures of. I will continue to work on this as time will allow even after the aircraft is being prepped for paint.