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Saltaire

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  1. What a customer will ask you to do. Vintage camo scheme and a shark’s mouth.
  2. The post below I placed just recently on MooneySpace.com and this is one thing I can say about us. It does not matter to us that you may take your airplane to a fly-in and have it judged; they are all the same to us. What we strive for is quality and airworthiness. We use aircraft grade materials throughout from paint stripper to top coats. We do take the airplane apart, from the spinner to the tail feathers including the flaps. Our paint facility is one of the few in Florida with an actual air system that forces makeup-air into the hangar during processing which brings the best gloss to the finished product. Yes we charge more but our customers get more. “Saltaire has refinished three award winning aircraft this year! In May at the 2nd Annual Beechcraft ABS Fly-In, Beech Baron N1064C won the award for Best Paint. In July at the 2012 EAA Fly-In in Oshkosh a 1948 Navion painted by Saltaire won a Class III Bronze Lindy Award, N888LW. Finally in September at the International Comanche Society Fly-In, N8818Y won the Flagship Award. Congratulations to these aircraft owners and to the incredibly dedicated staff at Saltaire Aircraft Refinishing for their never ending dedication to quality!” If you are really looking for that paint job that stands out, we’re probably the shop you’re looking for.
  3. Parker, We've moved (2) customer deliveries to after 1/1/13 for this very reason. Joe
  4. One last thing. As of January 1, 2013, the state of Florida will no longer collect sales tax (6%) on aircraft maintenance on aircraft with a GW of 2000 pounds or greater. Up till now, this law applied to aircraft with a 15,000 pound GW or higher. An aircraft paint job is considered maintenance so going forward in Florida, you save 6% at the bottom line.
  5. My favorite topic so I thought I’d chime in; This narrative is for a complete "strip and paint" paint job from a paint shop owner’s point of view. I find that since any time an owner is about to pull somewhere between $9 and $12K out of his pocket, the expectation of the resulting job, paint or otherwise, changes dramatically. So here are some of the facts and a check list of things to look for. First off, for a Skylane the average touch man-hours are between 200 and 250 hours. Considering a modest fully burdened labor rate of say $32/hr, the labor cost would be between $6,400 and $8,000. Historically at my shop our material bill has represented 25% of the sale price. For a $10K job, $2,500. This is all the materials; sand paper, stripper, paint, primer, masking materials, computer generated graphics, grind wheels, bulk paint thinner, etc. So doing some simple addition before profit, the cost is somewhere between $8,900 and $10,500 for a 172/182 type aircraft. If the shop owner is OK with a 10% profit add that on top and you’ve got your price out the door. Checklist things to consider and reasons why there may be shops out there offering to do the whole thing for $8K. 1) Does the shop you are looking at have an actual paint hangar, incoming air, outgoing air (positive pressure system) with fire suppression system inside? 2) Is the shop using an aviation grade paint system throughout? Aluminum compatible acid-etch, conversion coat and primer. Aviation grade top coat (Dupont Aviation, Sherwin-Williams Jet-Glo, etc.) 3) Will the aircraft be disassembled and the control surfaces checked for proper static balance after paint? 4) Does the shop have an A&P on staff for the disassembly and reassembly? What is included in the job? Stainless steel hardware, reassembly with new certified hardware for control surfaces, shadowed “N” numbers, metallic trim colors, etc? Keep in mind, aircraft paint shops are not regulated so it is up to the aircraft owner to do the homework and find the right shop that you’re comfortable with.
  6. Minor flaky corrosion on the surfaces of any aluminum airplane is common. On a Mooney my biggest concern would be the 4130 steel fuselage frame. It is difficult to see if the frame has corrosion without taking some parts of the airplane apart in order to get a good look (interior and exterior components). On the aluminum, you can remove many of the wing and fuselage panels in order to take a look inside. Look for the same corrosion you saw on the control surfaces on the inside surface of the inspection panels. It will give you a good idea of what the aluminum looks like on the inside of the airplane. On the frame keep in mind that until the early 80’s, Mooney dip primed the frame in zinc chromate which literally sits on top of the metal not really bonded to it. They changed over to an epoxy primer in the early 80’s which offered much better protection over the zinc chromate primer. Joe
  7. I’m not as familiar with the Bravo as the 201/231 tails but I imagine they are the same. The skins are formed on a one sided tool (mold) using a hydroforming process. For the industrious owner, you can replicate the tool from a good skin on your airplane (you don’t have to de-skin a good elevator, just take the whole assembly off the airplane). There are epoxy tool molding compounds that you can cast and produce a “master” of the skin. This master will need to be filled where the rivet indentations are and smoothed and extended beyond the skin edge. You’ll need the formed skin to be oversized. You can now use the master to make a new mold (composite material would be the easiest). And if you now own the mold you also own the ability to make those skins. So, where to take the mold to get the skins made? Contact Cessna and see if they are willing to press out 100 or so skins. This is the exact method we used when I worked at Mooney to produce inboard P-51 main landing gear door skins. We had a P-51 owner bring us a skin. We built the tool as described above. We then pressed 100 of them for him and he sold them to other P-51 owners. It can be done without buying the whole Moony factory.
  8. Saltaire has refinished three award winning aircraft this year! In May at the 2nd Annual Beechcraft ABS Fly-In, Beech Baron N1064C won the award for Best Paint. In July at the 2012 EAA Fly-In in Oshkosh a 1948 Navion painted by Saltaire won a Class III Bronze Lindy Award, N888LW. Finally in September at the International Comanche Society Fly-In, N8818Y won the Flagship Award. Congratulations to these aircraft owners and to the incredibly dedicated staff at Saltaire Aircraft Refinishing for their never ending dedication to quality and detail!
  9. Saltaire

    Saltaire

  10. yes, we did. we have not found it available in the US at all. Mooney says 4 to 6 months to manufacture. AOG!!
  11. Inlet scoop needed. Mooney Bravo. Mooney sent wrong configuration, states no longer available. Salvage yards, no success. PLEASE HELP !!!
  12. Jeev, Jet-Glo is great paint. Super durable. It’s a “pure” polyurethane and the white will go on supper glossy, no need to clear coat. If you choose the scheme with the black bottom, once again the Jet-Glo black will give you plenty of gloss without clear coat. If you decided to have some metal-flake in the stripes and “N” number, base coat/clear coat may be the way to go. Good luck!
  13. The one on the left. I think it’s cleaner. Just my 2¢
  14. Hi Scott, I fully respect your opinion but if you think with me a minute maybe you can understand how a Mooney could take 1200 hours to build. Back in the late ‘70s and early 80’s the aviation industry was pumping out over 300 aircraft a week and Mooney was no exception. The highest monthly production rate when I was there was (44) 201/231’s in a single month. There were approximately 400 to 500 employees working in Kerrville at the time so let’s use the 500 employee number. ¼ of the employees were in engineering, administration, sales/marketing, quality assurance, etc. The 1200 hour number is for just those employees that touch product. So our touch labor force is 375 people. A standard manufacturing year contains 1920 man-hours so doing the math that gave Mooney (at that time) 720,000 available touch labor man-hours per year or 60,000 in a single month. If I take my 44 aircraft build in one month and divide into 60,000 available hours we get 1,363.6 hours to build a Mooney. Slightly higher than my recollection but certainly in the neighborhood. Please keep in mind that back in 1978 the GA industry built 17,811 aircraft that year. Figuring 48 working weeks in a year, that would be 371 aircraft per week ( Piper Vero beach was building 15 a day). How did they do it? Unlike today, rivets and all, GA manufacturing employees worked on the same parts and assemblies day in and day out. All the tools, equipment, jigs and fixtures were loaded and building parts every day. The repetitive nature of the work drove the learning curve thus driving the man-hours down. The other way to look it is through a cost model analysis and at 3000 to 4000 hours in just labor you would not be able to sell a Mooney back then for what they sold for. Just some food for thought.
  15. As the production engineering supervisor for the factory in the early 80’s, and if my memory hasn’t failed me, it took approximately 1200 man-hours to build a Mooney (J model). Please keep in mind that those hours included building all the detail parts. Sheet metal bits, welded assemblies and subassemblies, seat cushion foam, machined parts, etc, etc, etc. Joe
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