Cessna 402B Update: The Latest Sagas

Again ... it's been a while since I wrote about what has been happening with what I've been doing in the hangar. Well, most of my time has been involved in the Cessna 402 (surprise surprise). When I last wrote, we had managed to hang the landing gear, but had to stop due to lack of finances. We got the money in to continue the work and have been very busy. 

Unfortunately, when servicing the right hand landing gear, the hydraulic fluid did not look too good, so it had to be removed and replace all the o-rings and seals. Once that was done, we managed to get it all back together again. But just before we got ready to rig the gear, we ended up removing the landing gear actuator and reduction gears due to worn gears, unidentified grease and damaged bolt holes. It was a very messy job with grease everywhere, you can see in one of the photos a tub full of grease that had to be removed, but was a great experience to see the inner workings of an actuator. Once this was all repaired, re-greased and re-assembled, we installed it ready to rig the gear.

The insides of the reduction gear box.

The grease that we pulled out ... there was still a bit more to come as well.

Some of the insides of the Main Gear Actuator

Rigging the gear turned out to be less difficult than we first thought, but then as we were rigging from scratch and not just trying to adjust it, all we had to do was follow the Cessna Maintenance Manual step by step. After a few days we had both main and nose gear rigged and working perfectly. This meant that after 18 months of wheels up, we could finally put the aircraft back onto it's wheels. It was a great feeling to finally see it back on the ground.

In the cockpit, the avionics have been updated, which meant that a lot of old systems had to be removed, along with all the redundant wires, switched, circuit breakers and antennas. As you can see from the photos, there are a lot of wires to work through to remove just the redundant ones. I found myself stuck in a cramped cockpit for about a week, feeding these in and out of the small holes. For those who understand these things, there is a new GPS/NAV/COM unit, audio panel and transponder. The other units going in is a GPS unit, NAV/COM and an ADF (for when he's flying in Canada). The last photo is of a new wire loom that will go to the new circuit breakers for all the avionics.

I have also repaired the four side cowls (the structure that covers the engines). Two of the cowls had severe corrosion on the bulb angle, so had to be replaced. There was also corrosion and cracks on the pans and three of the cowl flap hinges needed replacing due to wear. Lastly, there were numerous cracks that needed stopping and strengthening. I finally got them all repaired and installed back onto the aircraft.

This is just some of the work that I have been involved in whilst working on the 402. The last few weeks I have been repairing the lower cabin door/steps by fabricating almost a whole new step due to cracking and have repaired damage to a door that has see many people climb up and down them. Yesterday and today I have been working with Mike Dunkley, one of our supervisors who has 20+ years maintaining aircraft all over the world, to rivet together the horizontal stabiliser (tailplane for those in the UK). The left hand leading edge had to be changed due to corrosion and incorrect hardware, whilst the lower skin had so much damage it too had to be replaced. These had been fabricated by two other engineers, but as it was just Mike and myself working on the 402 due to holidays, illness and family emergencies, we got on and riveted it all together.

We still have quite a bit more work to do ... but when we got the wheels back onto the ground, it felt like we had turned a corner.