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| July 12 — The last few weeks have been busy ones for our/your Win-A-Twin Comanche. This hectic time is part of the run-up to the EAA AirVenture at Wittman Field in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This year, this annual airshow takes place from July 27 to August 2, and as usual, AOPA will be there in force. You'll find our signature yellow tent just inside the main entryway to the event, between Cessna's and Lycoming's booths. That yellow tent will be one checkpoint. The other will be the Twin Comanche, taking up prime real estate right up front. Airtex Products finished the airplane's interior on July 6, and what a nice transformation that made. Sure, there were a lot of people who liked the fancy paint job and who liked the new avionics but who still didn't seem to like the idea of actually getting in the thing. An interior as old and ugly as our original just had a way of repelling people. All that's changed now. Airtex's Dodd Stretch came up with a leather and wool custom-made interior that did away with the old and put new-airplane smell back in charge. Gone is the sagging headliner. Gone is the white Naugahyde. Gone is the stained, worn avocado carpet. Stretch's crew of 27 staffers rebuilt the seats, seat rails, sidewalls, and headliner and made the interior a pleasure to use and a pleasure to see. Airtex is best known for its interior kits. The company makes up the kits, sends them out to owners or their FBOs, and the interiors are installed in the field. Airtex sells some 500 kits per year. But you can also bring your airplane to Airtex's hangar at the Trenton-Mercer County Aiport (TTN) in Trenton, New Jersey, and have one installed there. Airtex installs about 30 interiors per year this way — which is the route we took. Back to Sebastian It was a five-hour flight to Savannah, where I waited out masses of thunderstorms plaguing Florida, and another hour and a half to COI. Having that new, quieter interior made the trips nearly effortless. So did having the WSI Inflight datalink weather service. I was able to circumnavigate several storm complexes on these and other flights using the near-real-time, ground-based Doppler weather radar imagery presented on N204WT's MX20 multifunction display. Our avionics shop — Sebastian Communication Inc. — was the destination at Merritt Island, and that's where Sebastian's Carl Campbell made some final touches to the Win-A-Twin's panel. An emergency standby attitude indicator was installed, as were the internally lit, custom-built subpanels. Mid-Continent Instrument Company provided the standby attitude indicator (they also rebuilt the primary attitude indicator), and it's their new model, dubbed "The Lifesaver." It's electrically powered and has an integral battery, which automatically kicks in if there's a complete loss of electrical power. The subpanels are works of art. Built by EDN Aviation of Van Nuys, California, they contain their own internal lighting, which shines through the engraved switch labels. Very clean and very classy-looking. Quite the change from the ratty old subpanels — which were so worn you couldn't read some of the switch labels! A LoPresti visit Wisniewski swarmed over the engines while Campbell dealt with the panel. A whole lot of work got done in just a few hours. For starters, the sources of a couple of small oil leaks were located and fixed. One came from an oil filter that had worked its way loose. Others came from the seals around the bases of the oil dipstick tubes, which were also tightened and re-safety wired. Broken wires from the left engine's fuel flow and EGT probes were also discovered and repaired. On to Oshkosh What's next |
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