National Aeronca Association Bulletin Board

Here is just a little info I’d like to pass along. I am in the end stages of getting my O—235 mounted back on my Citabria and running again. It was sick and needed an overhaul. I’m sure many of you have gone through this yourselves but for the benefit of those who will be going through this in the future I thought I would share a few of my lessons learned.
The disassembly and reassembly was done in our local shop and I was involved as much as possible. That saved a lot of labor costs for just taking stuff off and putting things on. It’s still just nuts and bolts we’re working with here. Important lesson number one is to buy a current overhaul manual, and get one right from the manufacture. I made a mistake and bought one off the web from ESSO and it was a photocopy of an out of date manual. Basically worthless, I still ended up researching things from Lycoming’s web site and even redoing a few things that were wrong.

For overhauling the critical parts, I sent my case to DIVCO in Tulsa for reconditioning, they were busy and it took a bit over three weeks but they were good to do business with and they did a great job. The crank went to Aircraft Specialties, also in Tulsa. They do super good work also but they could polish up a little on their customer service skills. I had them magnaflux all my steel parts too. The cylinders went to Gibson Aviation in El Reno, OK and I give those guys a great big Atta-boy. Quick, good and affordable, I was very happy with them and would highly recommend them for any cylinder work.

Done in this way an overhaul is not a terribly long process and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg; either one will do.

Now I still haven’t run my engine yet so I suppose I might be changing my tune before this is all over but I hope not.

I’ll be putting this all on FB too for the other followers as well as the other A/C groups I’m on but as you know, FB has the shelf life of a Banana. This will be here for reference a lot longer.

Larry,

Thanks for sharing your experience, especially regarding the manual. I have an O-235 that I want to go thru and your choices for service were the same as mine except for the the cylinder work. Lots of chatter on the f-AA maillist about who to use and who not to has directed me elsewhere.

Richard

Just a note, Aircraft specialties has changed hands in the not too distant past. I would recommend Rick Romans to recondition your hard parts. They are next door to Specialties, and are very customer oriented. When my parts went through their shop I was able to go back and talk to the guys doing the work, and I never felt like I was a bother at all, they answered all my questions (in other words the put up with me). Being next door to Specialties their pricing was the same. I do business with both places, I buy parts from Specialties and have work done at Romans.
As for the case shop, I believe Divco has changed hands too, and I recommend going through Crankcase Services in Sand Springs. They are slammed right now and do have long overhaul times but worth the wait.
I am doing my own cylinder work!

I have also had good experience dealing with Gibson for cylinder work.

Bob