When the owner of a 1980 Beechcraft 58 Baron came to us wanting a complete interior redo, we couldn’t turn it away! Our team immediately brought him into the shop and began picking samples and going over the details of exactly what he envisioned his aircraft to be. At first, we settled on a two-tone grey and burgundy; both leathers being from Moore & Giles. Later, he called back and requested to stop back in and see what other options we had to replace the burgundy tone- we will give an update on what finally sticks in the 58 Baron blog #2. We are keeping the grey!

We then got to work on disassembling the sidewalls, headliner, and seats. This is where we ran into our first problem; the plastic molding had gotten brittle over the years. It was shattering at the slightest touch. We began searching for pieces- getting the part numbers and calling around to friends at salvage yards trying to locate what we needed. This provided no leads however, so we turned our search over to the infamous Textron.

Textron is a company that can help you locate parts suppliers with a specific piece in stock and grant access to illustrated parts catalogs, making part searching a bit easier all the way around. They also have specialty websites, including one for Cessna and Beechcraft. However, Textron only turned up three possibilities- two of which were just sold. The only part we found had to be made-to-order and it costed well over what the budget is for repairs. Patchwork was possible, but if avoidable we try to give our team a break on tedious and time-consuming tasks where we can. This was not one of those times and our team got to work patching and repairing the broken pieces of plastic.

Once that was complete, we began adding the foam to the material where necessary and upholstering the sidewalls. We started making patterns at this point for the seats and cutting the materials for the upholstery work. Excited for our progress, we prepared our adhesives and tools and started doing what we do best- Re-dos! We completed the side walls and patch work and we will begin installing shortly (which we will cover in the next blogs covering the 58 Baron) whenever we get the owner’s color choices in for the seats and move forward with that.

Stay tuned for the rest of the series where we breakdown our journey into a 1980 Beechcraft 58 Baron re-do into 3 parts, highlighting our progression, some of this issues we ran into, and what we did to resolve it.