Skybolt has years of development and installation experience with Cessna cowlings and fastening systems. Just when we think we have seen everything, something new pops up.

Unfortunately, the cowlings manufactured with cushioned platemounts, were a very undesirable design. With tens of thousands of aircraft built with these cowlings, we have no choice but to do the best we can with what we have to work with. Even the newer C172s with 180 HP engines ran into the exact same problems we faced over 15 years ago with the conversion aircraft. The fix is the same: Fastener alignment.

Over the past 15 years that Skybolt has provided alternate fastening systems for these cowlings, we have discovered that most aircraft cowlings are very well installed and maintained. I like to say that if an aircraft were built on Tuesday through Thursday, the cowlings fit great. The Monday and Friday airplanes create the problems. However, we have no way of knowing what day of the week your aircraft may have been manufactured. The firewall bracket mount locations seemed to have very loose manufacturing tolerances. When mated with a stamped cowling with defined hole locations, there is a chance that the bracket mounts and the holes are miles apart. The original Cessna-Lord rubber mount has a lot of flex built into the rubber to allow very loose tolerances. The Skybolt SK2003 assumes that these bracket/mounts to cowling holes are aligned. If they are not aligned properly, the forces transmitted throughout the cowling is concentrated to improperly aligned fasteners and the firewall mounts crack. The fasteners are fine and the SK2003 mounts are fine, but the aluminum bracket they mount to is not.

The SK203 conversion kits properly address hole to mount alignment and with our alignment template, this process is very simple and cracking problems are nonexistent.

Very rarely do we experience problems with the O320 engines. The O360 engines can create problems and this is our theory why:

The 0360 engine has a pronounced start and stop torque. This torque is transmitted via the engine baffling to the cowling and ultimately to the fastener mount. (We have even seen where the exhaust comes in contact with the cowling) If the fasteners are properly aligned, the force is usually shared. If not aligned, the force becomes isolated to one or two fastener brackets. Although the failure is not much different than the OEM failure rates, we advertise a better system that should not fail. Despite our best efforts to write detailed instructions, we cannot control the quality of the actual installation and we cannot control differences from one aircraft with good engine mounts versus one with sagging engine mounts. The baffling stiffness can play a roll as mentioned. These variables combined with the O360 engine can lead to problems and do make up 99.9% of our customer service calls. Therefore, we do not warranty these aircraft with the SK203 Conversion.

We will sell the kit for these aircraft because we know, if the instructions are followed and the extra effort to use the SK2003-AW washers are incorporated into the installation, bracket mount cracking should never be a problem. We choose, however, not to warrant these installations because of other variables pronounced in these aircraft.

Skybolt has several customers who have installed four and five kits on 180 HP (O360) converted airplanes, with no cracking problems, then the final aircraft has problems. Again, the failures we run into are no different than those with the original mounts, but they require replacements, and we want our kits to be maintenance free.