I Bought The cheapest 421C In The World.

Good Earth, something and our books, pilot's operating manual, great. I noticed something while I was picking up the camera and I didn't realize it's super cool and it's this little white speck right here, which is practically impossible to see on the camera, oh, there it goes right here. this little thing here is spoilers when you press a button inside they stick on, little fins that lift up so you can slow down on your descent from very high altitudes without changing the power setting which on these engines damages the engines.so this one plane is loaded, it has something that I didn't realize, these ailerons right here behind me, it's a little hard to see, well, the strakes behind, under the tail, they have those that are really cool, they have spoilers. and then yeah, I saw what's called micro vorticity uh vgs in this part.

I don't see them on the rest of the wing, so I'll have to find out which one it is. The paint is good on the engines. They're good, the interior is nice, the avionics are a little dated, but nothing we can't upgrade pretty easily, they already did a full inspection, they found some things that I already talked about those important things, uh, this right here. I don't know what that is, so I'm going to have to get Tony here to talk to me about what that is and Tony, by the way, super, he's a legend, he's the guy who started this and he actually advises the FAA. at Twin Cessnas you're going to love what they started with, they started with an old 310 straight tail to get the twin Cessna flywheel for all the owners and operators, mechanics and everyone else that's around these airplanes so they know all the little things. covers all the nuances of these airplanes and coincidentally he printed the first article for me and it wasn't from 1989, number one, that's pretty interesting and I got a lot of information from the website there.

It's free setup equipment and everything and then you can pay for memberships and it's a great organization. Now I'm a member of it and we're actually going to start doing more things with them because of this. airplane and all the good things about flying a twin engine and how many more doors it opens in the

world

of aviation. I have been a twin Cessna flywheel member since 2021. Best money I have ever spent. They have a lot of resources, you have a Twin Cesser twin engine airplane, go check out twin ssa.org, you'll be glad you did it right, let's find Tony and find out what that corroded piece of metal is, because it looks expensive.

This is Tony, he is the main man here behind all this and the legend, the myth. That's Tony. Tony, explain it to us. I noticed we had some corrosion there, but tell us what you found. Well, we were doing an annual meeting. inspection on the airplane and uh that was going to go to a pre-purchase evaluation uh for a potential new buyer because the owner was selling it uh the airplane in the middle, along with the annual inspection, this airplane is 421 it has a secondary system of fuel in it, fuel tank in it like a long range tank that's added and in the engine to the cell it's mounted behind the engine area so it's back here yeah it sits in this area and this is the fuel tank itself, right here. that's the fuel tank that comes out of that wing, yeah, it goes inside this area, inside this area, here, okay, and it adds an additional 26 gallons of fuel here, the fuel is then transferred from this tank to the wings , where it is then used for the engine, this Tony.

The guy is so smart that the location of this tank and the construction of this tank that we found in the past has a real problem with corrosion in the structure around it. A lot of really bad things happen in this area. First of all, the tank. Construction, if you want to look at it, there's a weird rubber bladder inside and then to protect it from the heat and the environment and to give it some kind of structure so it doesn't collapse when it's in there, they stick it inside. of a stainless steel box assembly and then they coated this box with some kind of similar insulating material and sprayed some on some panels that are like Drop in around it and so on, but over the years what we found is that this retains moisture and also releases some type of chemical which I think is probably a chlorine-like chemical and it will get into the aluminum structure around it and cause other corrosion around it, so if we look, here's one of the straps that I can see some aluminum right there uh yeah yeah here we're gonna see some of that and some of there oh yeah so any moisture that gets between them gets stuck and then the moisture of course , it causes corrosion, yes, so the big problem is.

What it is for us in a maintenance field inspection field is that all of this is closed, so without doing a lot of work you can't see it, so it doesn't look perfect from the outside until you get inside and no one really rips it. it's far enough apart that you can go in and look at it if you don't know what the problems are, so is there a specific time to what extent you're supposed to check for that corrosion? time limitation uh it's just an area where it says to generally inspect the condition and your condition and my condition and someone else's condition is very different and to what extent you go in and find it now our advantage has been that these These are not on all airplanes, they are on some as an option, but they are on different airplane models, so the Cessna 421, 414, Cessna 340 and Cessna 310r series airplanes have this type of tank as an option and we have found some corrosion strong on the plane sporadically for the last 10 years and we found three quite corroded in the last year since the beginning of the year, actually oh wow it is quite frequent now because the planes are getting old and one of the most important thing that spreads this kind of problem is repainting the plane and when they take the paint off, the water and paint stripper gets around the cracks in things and soaks in and soaks it in and we'll see a little bit more.

I'll show you where you can actually see where the stripper and the water got in and attack these things that are causing the corrosion. Yes, it makes sense. Well, let's go back and yeah, let's take a look. grab one side of no, I can grab it so this cover comes off but it takes a lot of work it's like this is the firewall another problem here is a lot of heat this is a firewall this is just 16,000 stainless steel Steel and this is the turbocharger here and its casing can operate up to 1600° or more and separates it from that tank.

The hottest part of the airplane's fuel tank is a piece of 16,000 stainless steel. it protects it in the middle so to get into that tank you have to remove part of the tank and then you can remove the cover and what you will find on this cover below is that tank will be there. then inside this cavity, this area here has this piece that we've already started to take out, but there's a lot more of these pieces that if you can see, oh wow, yeah, look what the structure is like here now that we have. I broke it a little bit to get it out because it's so flimsy and everything, but you can see the kind of corrosion that's on the inside and I mean, yeah, you can, you can practically run your hand through it, yeah, well, they were there.

There were holes in this and here you can also see this corrosion. This should be solid aluminum material and you can see it's just dust, yeah, and it's gone, yeah, it looks like Elvis's backside still, yeah, and then and then. You will have other areas of corrosion. This is the top of the wing. This is what is important. It starts to become the important part and those would be areas where this area here can most likely be cleaned up. We can stop her where. is in, you can take and clean this on the surface of a material like this, we can clean about 10% of its thickness and then treat it and not have to do anything structural, but the really scary part is that here in this place Below is the main wing spar, so this is the part that's like the main bridge of this wing that holds the whole wing and the engine and everything, and if it corrodes here it's terribly expensive to repair, so we wanted to get it.

Stu showed up here before I got to that, so we're going to remove a little bit more here and pick this up and we'll go in and clean this underneath and clean these skins if possible, we've had to do that. come in before and remove these plates here these structural plates, you can see they hold the motor. We had to remove this skin here, remove it completely and put it on. I don't think we're going to do it. I have to go really deep into this, but right now it's important to stop it now and not have to go too far, not let it continue, to get it to that point.

People ask, how much is too much corrosion? And you know, yes, of any kind. of itself, especially in these structural members, obviously, Cessna did not design it to withstand the stresses that are required considering corrosion, they did not, that was not part of the deal when they designed it, uh. uh we don't have much to do here because we just have to rely on the original sas engineering on the plane, which is to return it to its proper condition. Okay, that's not the best thing in the

world

, but it's the worst thing we could have done.

I have found on the plane that I can live with that you can see that this firewall is really something like yeah, a stainless steel lock, it's not very thick, yeah, with a little bit, it's just this heat treatment material like just like if it was stuck now, when we're done here with all of this, we'll come back and put in a newer style, a Sil firewall that's going to go to 5,000 of and we'll apply it to this material and it's No, it doesn't react with moisture like this. We have a lot of new materials that are really great compared to what they had in the mid 70's in general.

I don't know if you inspected this. plane or looked at it at all, do you have any opinions on this plane? solid plane overall needs love full cake J no it's good it's a good solid plane um it doesn't have anything that any other plane can have on it that that's this era. I tell people many times that you know we're not really in maintenance mode on the airplane that we're now in restoration mode on these airplanes. These are real antiques and so you're not the owner, you're the caretaker of this plane right now, so it's something that's become more prevalent.

The reason this makes these airplanes make sense is that their value has dropped enough that we can buy them at a purchase price that is perhaps a tenth or less of what a new airplane would be and even if it seems expensive to maintain per year, that's substantially less than it would be to buy a new airplane today and, for us, there really isn't any new airplane being built that is in this category of airplane just not available in new condition. , so it will keep them viable for a long time, although their price apparently requires a lot of money for maintenance. on the airplane we have to pay attention to these kinds of things that we have learned over the years, corrosion, it is much easier to repair corrosion when it takes three or four hours of work to clean it and treat it than to wait another eight or 10 years and then spend hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to replace sections of the plane because corrosion has completely eaten away at it.

Great, okay Tony, any words of wisdom for anyone looking to buy a Cessna twin. someone who knows what they're doing do a pre-assessment to get started, don't forget to look it up. I just had a phone conversation with someone who had deposited some money on a plane that was on the dtas Twin. They said well, it doesn't have corrosion because it's in a dry country. It has always been here in the Dakota or Montana area. When they started looking at it, the wing was completely corroded almost in two. In it, those he backed were lucky that he was one day away from spending his money on the plane and he backed out and ran away, but they could all have corrosion for some reason or another. and corrosion is our biggest enemy, engine stuff, yes it's expensive, it's a big deal, but we can fix the engine pretty easily.

All I have to do is make one phone call and you can get a new rebuilt engine pretty much anywhere, so there's that. It's not where we want to put our Focus. We really want to look and make sure that the fuselage that we're putting that engine into is in good condition. Frankly, it seemed too pretty for Jimmy's world, but we're moving on. In the world, you know what I'm saying, let me know in the comments, do you think it was a good buy or not? It has to be a much better value than Elvis' plane, but we'll see, now we have to fly back. go check out the other planes, do some more work on the Elvis Jet and they'll call us when this thing and the 310 haven't even opened the 310 yet, the Silver Bullet finds out what they find there. before we can start the auction in May at 310 and the lanir, see you next time.

I want to say a big thank you to Twin Cessna flyer twin cna.org, great organization, they got a lot of resources here, go check them out. It's a fantastic group of people who have already helped me a lot with the 310 and soon this plane that I just

bought

will be a 421, that's right, a 421, the Big Daddy of all the twin Cessnas. I just realized that I haven'tlooked. This locker, wow, this is always a good sign, oh, this tire chalk, there you go pilot, just to close the luggage door so you don't break yourself because on these you have to press that to close it and lock it.

This is a fantastic family hauler. Yes, if you like this video, you will love it. Be sure to subscribe by clicking here.