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Margy Natalie
August 11th 03, 03:28 PM
"PiperSeneca@" wrote:

> What is the parts availability like for 1940's vintage Navions?

Not bad at all. One guy just bought the contents of the Navion factory.
From what I've heard, the people that bought the paperwork are trying to
make the parts considered bogus, but I don't think they have a chance.
He got 9 truckloads of parts including things people hadn't seen in
years. The Navion Society has some drawings that they have been making
parts from for years (the guys that bought the rest of the drawings are
trying to make those bogus also). We've never had problems getting parts.

> And how much commonality do they have with the later upgraded models
> up through the 60's Rangemasters?

Not sure, but I'm also not sure I'd call a Rangemaster an upgrade (as she
ducks from the objects being thrown by rangemaster owners).

>
> There seem to be several Navion owners groups. If so, what's the
> difference between them?
>

Politics! Well, a few more differences. The American Navion Society is a
company and it has a large parts dept. You must be a memeber to buy
parts. Navion Skies has a great want ads section and they organized more
trips (South Africa, Europe, etc.). We belong to both.

>
> And finally, ownwers impressions of the aircraft would be appreciated.

Best airplane ever made :-). Big, roomy, can carry the kitchen sink.
Faster than a 172, not as fast as a Bonanza. We can carry camping gear
for a long week and 2 folding motor bikes with no problem. It handles
very nicely and is rather docile. Ours is in for the conversion to an
IO550 and we've gotten a bad case of the might as wells. It will be great
when it's done!!!

You need to get a copy of the Navion Societies "How to buy a Navion".
It's a bit dated, but so are the planes :-). We had a GO-435 engine in
ours. It was great while it lasted, but when it blows you really need to
re-engine and that's $$$$. If you know that going in it isn't too bad and
ours lasted 6 years. If you can find one with a big (modern) engine in it
from the start it is great, but more expensive.

You should join the societies now and get to know some Navion folks. They
are your best resources when you are looking at planes. If you can find
the local Navion mechanic that would be a big help also.


Margy

Montblack
August 11th 03, 07:17 PM
Not sure I understand who is the bad guy here. Who is making the "bogus"
parts?

Sierra Hotel Aero bought, at auction, the Navion type certificate (etc) this
past December. Are they now trying to protect their auction purchase -
Navion's type certificate. Is this a bad thing in Navion owners' eyes, or a
good thing?

Are others making parts without Sierra Hotel Aero's ok. Do they need the ok?
Is this where the battle lines are? Who's winning so far?

What do you project the fuel burn per hour numbers will be in you Navion?
Will it be fuel injected? IO550. Does the "I" stand for in-line or (fuel)
injected?

Will you get a paperwork increase in useful load with the bigger HP engine?

--
Montblack


("Margy Natalie" wrote)

> Not bad at all. One guy just bought the contents of the Navion factory.
> From what I've heard, the people that bought the paperwork are trying to
> make the parts considered bogus, but I don't think they have a chance.
> He got 9 truckloads of parts including things people hadn't seen in
> years. The Navion Society has some drawings that they have been making
> parts from for years (the guys that bought the rest of the drawings are
> trying to make those bogus also). We've never had problems getting parts.
<snip>

Margy Natalie
August 11th 03, 08:19 PM
Montblack wrote:

> Not sure I understand who is the bad guy here. Who is making the "bogus"
> parts?
>

No one is making "bogus" parts. Sierra Hotel bought the type certificate and
can make new parts. Classic-Aero bought the parts inventory. SH is saying that
C-A's parts are bad because SH owns the type certificate.

>
> Sierra Hotel Aero bought, at auction, the Navion type certificate (etc) this
> past December. Are they now trying to protect their auction purchase -
> Navion's type certificate. Is this a bad thing in Navion owners' eyes, or a
> good thing?

Having SH own the type certifiicate is good, but it is also good to have 9
truckloads of parts available.

>
> Are others making parts without Sierra Hotel Aero's ok. Do they need the ok?

An owner can make parts for thier own airplane. C-A is selling parts that were
made by the factory 50 years ago.

>
> Is this where the battle lines are? Who's winning so far?

I think they will both win (I hope)

>
>
> What do you project the fuel burn per hour numbers will be in you Navion?
> Will it be fuel injected? IO550. Does the "I" stand for in-line or (fuel)
> injected?
>

It's injected. I'm not sure what the fuel burn will be, but it will be great
when it's done. I expect 16 + or so??

>
> Will you get a paperwork increase in useful load with the bigger HP engine?

I don't think we will as we already had a 260 HP and the tips. We had to
re-engine as we didn't have one that worked and the 520 or the 550 is the way to
go. The 550 became available and we grabbed it.

Margy

Jay Honeck
August 11th 03, 09:17 PM
> An owner can make parts for thier own airplane. C-A is selling parts that
were
> made by the factory 50 years ago.

These are airframe parts, right? There's just something about a fifty
year-old part that worries me, although I can't say exactly why...

> It's injected. I'm not sure what the fuel burn will be, but it will be
great
> when it's done. I expect 16 + or so??

Hmmm. With our O-540, we can lean it back to 14-15 gph in cruise, but it
gets as high as 25 gph on take off.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

G.R. Patterson III
August 12th 03, 02:44 AM
Jay Honeck wrote:
>
> These are airframe parts, right? There's just something about a fifty
> year-old part that worries me, although I can't say exactly why...

Why? Lots of people are flying in collections of fifty year-old parts.

George Patterson
They say that nothing's certain except death and taxes. The thing is,
death doesn't get worse every time Congress goes into session.
Will Rogers

Jay Honeck
August 12th 03, 10:27 PM
> > You wouldn't let a little inter granular corrosion worry you, would you?
>
> Ain't any corrosion on these parts. They've not been stored in Vero Beach
> like your Cherokee parts were.

Just curious: Where *were* they stored, Ron?

And who the heck was paying rent on nice, dry, buildings to store old
airplane parts?

And how come no one knew about them? (This is starting to sound like a
Howard Hughes-style story...)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Margy Natalie
August 13th 03, 02:25 PM
Margy

Jay Honeck wrote:

> Just curious: Where *were* they stored, Ron?

They were stored by whoever happened to own them at the time (until now the type
certificate and the parts always belonged to one owner). The last place they
were stored was in Ohio, before that Texas I think.

>
>
> And who the heck was paying rent on nice, dry, buildings to store old airplane
> parts?

Whoever had the type certificate at the time.

> And how come no one knew about them? (This is starting to sound like a
> Howard Hughes-style story...)
> --

Well, the owners of the type certificates up to now had the idea that they would
build Navions, so this was factory stock, not parts available. As far as I can
tell there was no real inventory of the parts. The guy who is working on our
plane bought the whole load and he figures he should have them inventoried
within the year (there are LOTS of parts). I've seen boxes and boxes of parts
and the cardboard on the boxes looked good, so I would guess they haven't seen
water.

Margy

Ron Natalie
August 13th 03, 02:41 PM
"Jay Honeck" > wrote in message news:IYc_a.129716$uu5.18626@sccrnsc04...
> > > You wouldn't let a little inter granular corrosion worry you, would you?
> >
> > Ain't any corrosion on these parts. They've not been stored in Vero Beach
> > like your Cherokee parts were.
>
> Just curious: Where *were* they stored, Ron?

Seguin, Texas and later Bowling Green, Ohio. Currently they are in Aurora Nebraska.
Might have made other stops. Also, a lot of this stuff carried over from the original
North American days. NA had the presense of mind to zinc chromate everything
in sight.

> And how come no one knew about them? (This is starting to sound like a
> Howard Hughes-style story...)

When the last real Navion "factory" shutdown in around 1971 in Texas, a group
of people founded the American Navion Society and bought up what they could
get of the inventory. Nobody really knew how much other stuff was left squirrelled
away. The type certificate and the factory tooling kind of languished around for
a couple of decades with the general recession of the GA aircraft industry. Around
1996 or so, a group in Bowling Green, OH managed to snag the remains of Navion
Aircraft. They hunted venture capital to see if they could start up the line again.
I guess that didn't succeed (frankly, it's the same old problem, they were going to
build Rangemasters, and why anybody would want a draggy cabin retract at that
price is beyond me). The whole thing was auctioned off last year again. As I
said, SH got the tooling and the paperwork while Classic Aero got nine tractor-trailer
loads of the inventory. These aren't just "spares" these were the backlog of the
assembly line waiting to be built. There are entire wings there.

PiperSeneca@
August 13th 03, 08:44 PM
Right you are, and it seems people are still trying to resurrect old
planes at high prices, like the Micco/Meyers and the Tiger. Nice
planes, but...

Anyway, glad there are parts around and for what it's worth, to me it
sounds like Classic Aero is in the right on this one.

What about the Navion's odd little sibling the Twin Navion? Does it
have parts commonality with the rest of the Navion clan?


"Ron Natalie" > wrote in message >...
Around
> 1996 or so, a group in Bowling Green, OH managed to snag the remains of Navion
> Aircraft. They hunted venture capital to see if they could start up the line again.
> I guess that didn't succeed (frankly, it's the same old problem, they were going to
> build Rangemasters, and why anybody would want a draggy cabin retract at that
> price is beyond me

Ron Natalie
August 13th 03, 08:54 PM
"PiperSeneca@" > wrote in message om...
> Right you are, and it seems people are still trying to resurrect old
> planes at high prices, like the Micco/Meyers and the Tiger. Nice
> planes, but...
>
> Anyway, glad there are parts around and for what it's worth, to me it
> sounds like Classic Aero is in the right on this one.
>
> What about the Navion's odd little sibling the Twin Navion? Does it
> have parts commonality with the rest of the Navion clan?
>
There are actually two different twin Navions the Riley's and the Camairs.
All twin Navion's started out as canopy singles. They essentially hang
the wing engines on, remove the front engine (evidentally, in some cases
in that order, there's a picture floating around of a Navion "tri-motor" but
I don't believe it actually flew that way), and redo the tail (larger vertical
stab/rudder and rudder trim). Yes there are a lot of common parts.
Actually the first bunch of conversions were just essentialy "field mods."
It is rumored that this "mod" was what led the CAA to come up with the
STC process...

August 15th 03, 03:47 AM
On Thu, 14 Aug 2003 09:58:05 -0400, "Ron Natalie" >
wrote:

snip

>Underseat or Baggage compartment? These were factory mods and are
>on the original single engine type certificate.

Underseat. He tried to explain it to the Federales in that manner, but
the install wasn't documented anywhere. I think the whole Camair
thing had them flustered from the get-go.

>
>> I worked a couple nagging gripes on the "demo" Rangemaster a few years
>> back. The really funny one was varying/high idle speed.
>
>Don't understand that. Should be a rather straight forward IO-520 installation.

Nope, this sucker (the "demo" ship) had been modified numerous times
in varying manners. I only worked on it a couple times, don't know all
the details.

>
>> It had a
>> Piper single throttle quadrant installed, but the gear/throttle
>> warning switch was mounted near the carburetor (instead of in the
>> quadrant Piper-style).
>
>Carburator? What the hell did they use for an engine in these things. No
>Rangemaster ever had a carburator. They also never had throttle quadrants.
>Only the twins had those.

OK, so it might have been an up-draft injector unit. It's been too
long, I can't say for sure that it had a Continental engine. It
definitely had been fitted with an retract Piper single quadrant. I
popped the cover off of it and showed the "marketing consultant" that
was flying the 'plane the holes where Piper mounted the throttle/gear
warning switch, even gave the guy the p/n for the proper switch.

This airplane was far from a "stock" configuration.

snip

>> Only other thing I remember was the owner squealing
>> like a pig when I told him I wanted to replace the diaphram in his
>> prop (was older than I was at the time).
>
>He was extremely lucky. I never got more than a couple of years out of the
>diaphram at a time. I think Hartzell only claims they're good for 3 years anyhow.
>Got the drill down, pull the spinner, unhook the actuator linkage, remove the pin,
>unscrew the big nut, pull the prop. Unscrew the retainers for the diaphram,
>replace, resafety wire all those dang screws and put the prop back on...

I can dig it. When I figured out how long that thing had been in
there, it scared the crap out of me. Didn't fly it 'til after the
inspection/diaphram replacement (was "out" of annual when I yanked it
out of the hangar).

I really enjoyed flying it. The radios were ancient, but everything
was "there", it met the Federal requirements for an annual inspection
(barely)- was in dire need of some TLC.

TC

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