Navion Parts Availability

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message news:IYc_a.129716$uu5.18626@sccrnsc04...
You wouldn't let a little inter granular corrosion worry you, would you?

Ain't any corrosion on these parts. They've not been stored in Vero Beach
like your Cherokee parts were.

Just curious: Where *were* they stored, Ron?

Seguin, Texas and later Bowling Green, Ohio. Currently they are in Aurora Nebraska.
Might have made other stops. Also, a lot of this stuff carried over from the original
North American days. NA had the presense of mind to zinc chromate everything
in sight.

And how come no one knew about them? (This is starting to sound like a
Howard Hughes-style story...)

When the last real Navion "factory" shutdown in around 1971 in Texas, a group
of people founded the American Navion Society and bought up what they could
get of the inventory. Nobody really knew how much other stuff was left squirrelled
away. The type certificate and the factory tooling kind of languished around for
a couple of decades with the general recession of the GA aircraft industry. Around
1996 or so, a group in Bowling Green, OH managed to snag the remains of Navion
Aircraft. They hunted venture capital to see if they could start up the line again.
I guess that didn't succeed (frankly, it's the same old problem, they were going to
build Rangemasters, and why anybody would want a draggy cabin retract at that
price is beyond me). The whole thing was auctioned off last year again. As I
said, SH got the tooling and the paperwork while Classic Aero got nine tractor-trailer
loads of the inventory. These aren't just "spares" these were the backlog of the
assembly line waiting to be built. There are entire wings there.