Some big steps were made yesterday in moving the restoration along. Joe Matz, John Breitennbach, Tom Brennan and Troy Warinner took on the C-53’s main landing gear struts and had them disassembled for restoration. This step included repainting them as well replacing the internal gaskets, O-Rings, and scrubbers.
We were able to find our one culprit however on the right outboard strut that caused it to leak. Keep in mind, this packing has been in the airplane for over 25 years and was not being maintained. It was beyond necessary to not only replace this bad strut, but all of them.
The associated strut components were then completely disassembled, tagged and cleaned and prepared for paint before being shot with PPG Aerospace Paints and left to dry for the week.
Jim Aaron continues to make amazing progress on the “Troop Seats” in the cabin and continues to fabricate from the original drawings all the necessary components to bring one section of seats to life. These will be used as well in our ride program.
Mark Lindley removed, cleaned, inspected and reinstalled the flap position indicating armature for the flaps. Our aircraft utilized originally a mechanical flap position indicator that used a physical piece of wire that ran to the cockpit to show you the position of the flaps. This was replaced at some point on ours with an electrical DC gauge. We now have the armature restored and reinstalled.
Joe Matz, Jason Capra & Emilee Derewicz worked on stripping the left main landing gear & took them all the way down to bare metal. The effort was worth the result as they hang in the paint booth currently drying awaiting new hardware and the rest of the landing gear components for the left side to return. That’ll do it for this week. As always, stay tuned for more updates throughout the week!
Comments