From hideous to shredded to......?

Well, my desire for a project to work on and my equal desire to hoard money have been at odds with each other lately as I hemmed and hawed about redoing the interior in my Apache. Finally, I figured if I didn't start the project I would not have any motivation to get off my butt and order the new upholstery. And boy do I have motivation now. As you can see, I have already stripped about half of the old interior out.

I will be installing an all new interior from Airtexinteriors.com and will make regular posts about my progress. First, I will continue to strip the interior down to the metal, then clean everything, followed by the installation of all new soundproofing and insulation. This will be a good time to inspect all the hidden stuff like the hoses for the overhead fresh air vents and heater ducting... The goal being to actually be able to get some fresh air and hold in some of those 35,000 BTU's the heater puts out during the winter. After that, I think I'll do the headliner first (glue drips down, better to get it on metal than new upholstery). This promises to be just an absolute load of fun (ha! that's a load of something all right...) Eventually I will move on to the carpet, then walls. The seats will get done at home when I feel like it sometime in there. Here's a picture of an Airtex interior in a Grumman that has the style and color seats I will be getting, try to imagine that in the "before" picture above. These are the same style they did for the AOPA "Win-A-Twin" Twin Comanche a couple years ago. I can't wait to sit in these comfy, newly upholstered and padded seats and make airplane noises. Yes, I went there... Since that's about all I'll be able to afford to do after all this work. Eventually, I might actually fly it. Next year. Sometime...

I hope.

New upholstery all around isn't all she is getting, I am sprucing up the panel with new overlays and a newly cleaned and painted glareshield (already complete, yay!) She'll also get new placarding all around. I may also try this new plastic coating I found that can be brushed on to refinish my yokes, I'll report on that after I test it on something. Speaking of yokes, one of the few things I have completed so far is refinishing the original Piper emblems on the yokes, This took some effort to get it right, but the result was worth it. If anyone wants their Piper yoke emblems refinished, I'll do it for you, now that I have a system down... The pics don't do them justice, but its quite an improvement from what they were. The hardest part was matching the original colors since none of it remained on mine to use as a guide. As tempting as it is to reinstall these now, I have decided to wait until everything else is done. When these once again grace the yokes, the project is then "finished".

More to follow in the upcoming weeks. The first shipment of material should be here sometime in late December...
One last thing to keep in mind, the green seats you see, ugly as they are, aren't that bad considering they are the original factory seats from 1963...