Be It Known: I am not buying an airplane, disassembled or otherwise. I just see airplanes that have been taken apart for restoration and the like, and I’m curious as to how much it would cost to put them back together.
For example: Here’s a 1969 Cessna 150 taildragger conversion. ‘Aircraft currently disassembled to strip and repaint and redo interior. Wing was already finished. Fuselage and interior in progress.’ Ignoring repainting the rest of the airplane and finishing the interior, if you trucked the thing to an A&P, how much would it cost to have an airworthy airplane? What do shops charge nowadays? $100/hour? More? How many hours would reassembly take?
FWIW, a 1967 taildragger conversion is currently available on controller.com for $18,500 and a 1969 trike is $27,500. ISTM that if someone buys the auction airplane at the asking price, they’d get a fair deal if they could get it back into the air for $10,000 or so. (By ‘fair’, I mean fair to both parties.)
Some friends and I did it for the cost of miscellaneous nuts and bolts and none of us are mechanics. We took it to a joint vocational school and the instructor signed it off. The kids at the school got some hands on experience and we got a plane out of it.
And let me tell you, NOTHING got past the instructor. It was meticulously restored.
And there’s an interesting suggestion. IIRC - Technically it’s legal for you to do the work, as long as it is signed off by a qualified A&P Mechanic. Of course, he’s putting his ass on the line vouching for your work, so odds are it only happens if the work is SIMPLE or he knows your abilities.
I’ll try to ask my partners if they remember. It was in the late 80’s and we all had jobs and I was also in school so we were picking at it as best we could. I’m sure we spent over a year or 2 on it. The 2 partners were teaching me to fly at the time also. Imagine something like a kit fox that had the wings already done. It was slow going because it was a plane-in-a-box. Pull a part out, scratch your head, look at the book, ask the A&P, paint it, install it. Once the wings were on and rigged it seemed to go much faster. It was a high wing fabric plane with struts so it was actually easy to assemble from a logistical POV.
Yes, that’s all true. It takes a good A&P who knows what he’s doing.
The same process occurred when we opted for a larger engine. The guy in charge of the project walked us through a lot of the labor involved and made modifications to it and got it certified. His modifications were better than the factory version of it. The A&P has to be someone who builds aircraft as a hobby. But in both cases the A&P’s were right there working with us.
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Technically it’s legal for you to do the work, as long as it is signed off by a qualified A&P Mechanic.
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There’s a TV show called *Shipping Wars *that features weird and often ludicrous things being transported by equally weird and ludicrous transporters driving anything from real semis on down to old church buses. A recent episode had someone shipping a MiG cross-country, and the surprise was that the transporter had to disassemble, haul and re-assemble the thing into flyable condition at an air show. I was thinking “This guy’s barely qualified to drive, no way in hell he’s an A&P!” but with the magic of editing, he gets the wings back on with no leaks and makes it airworthy.
I was wondering about that episode. You let some amateur reassemble the plane you just bought and then you’re actually planning on flying it? Seemed foolhardy.
Are we talking about a piston engine trainer or a jet? Both are going to take a serious shop who have a background with the plane or a tremendous amount of time on their hands to research it.
As a military plane it would be built under experimental rules which has it’s own certification process. It’s not something that can be thrown together and flown.
It was a MiG-15. They made it appear as it a guy who couldn’t even get into trade school eight years ago was able to reassemble it in a parking lot without so much as a shop manual.
Mikoyan & Gurevich made piston-engine aircraft during WWII, but the most common MiGs you see in private hands are the jets. MiG-15s, -17s, and -21s are plentiful and cheap. There’s a MiG-21 for sale at controller.com right now for $69,500. There are MiG-23s for sale, too. (Operating them, and getting the type certificate to fly them is, however, a considerable expense.)
If I were brave enough to add it all up I could tell you (or at least give you a starting figure - it’s not done yet). But I don’t like being cranky and looking at it all laid out in black and white would definitely make me cranky!
Well those early Migs were really well designed from a mechanic’s POV. They were designed to be serviced quickly. It might be possible the outer wings were super easy to unbolt for transport. The Russians were good at stuff like that. Every time I read up on a Russian plane I’m always amazed at how clever the engineers were.
So TV antics aside, it may have been easy to knock one down for transport.