If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ll tell you about me and my airplane. As much as I love flying and going places, I love hanging with my friends at the airport and restoring my airplane. The latter is probably what I love most. I’m always doing something to it and I always have a list two pages long of things to do. Some of them have to do with fixing broken or worn out parts, after all, my airplane was built in 1977. Most have to do with restoration though. So, this month’s topic is appropriately titled “What can you do with $1.35?”

Okay, probably not much, but you can actually restore something and complete the project for $1.35! On your panel are probably many dials, switches, and instruments. If you have toggle switches, and I have about seven, you can replace the switch caps with new caps for $1.35 each! Aircraft Spruce sells switch caps in white and red for mini-toggle switches and white, yellow, black, red, green, and blue for standard size toggle switches. They look great and the replacement couldn’t be simpler! They also have red flip up switch guards commonly used on avionics master switches for less than $20. For 300 and 400 series Cessna twins they have full replacement packs for less than $30.

The “Before” picture shows my aircraft clock with a yellowing switch cap. The new caps from Aircraft Spruce come much longer than needed, just hold it up to the old switch cap and cut it with wire cutters, Exacto knife or scissors. The switch caps are made of soft, pliable rubber and cut easily. The After picture shows the new cap in place. It’s white and shiny new! It took less than a minute and I did all seven of my caps in less than five minutes and less than $10!

Here’s the best part: You’ll like the way it looks, and you’ll want to do something else that’s inexpensive next month!

Resources

Aircraft Spruce www.AircraftSpruce.com

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