I don't know why, but I love sheetmetal. I wanted to go into a field that was difficult and that not many people like. I felt this would improve my chances of rising like cream to the top. I made a good decision, because I happen to have the right personality for sheetmetal. To be good at sheetmetal you need to be a perfectionist capable of mind-numbing redundancy while staying alert to seemingly insignificant details. You have to like puzzles and high stakes. One wrong move and you can flush a week's work down the drain. You just have to be able to take the setbacks and stay optimistic. It also helps to be a little bit lucky.

It all started when I was 3 or 4 years old. One of my earliest recollections is sitting on my dad's lap looking at an old WWII "Spotters Guide". I remember trying to memorize the names of the planes. It had pictures of Allied and Axis aircraft, so that people could recognize planes and tell if they were on our side or the enemy's side. I think this was when the hook was set and I started down the road to becoming an airplane nut. In junior high, it became more serious. I discovered "WARBIRDS MAGAZINE". I loved it. Guys would drag these unrecognizable hulks out of a swamp or off a mountain top and spend a fortune on them to turn them back into airplanes. It sounded like the life for me, till I read the fine print about them getting malaria , gangrene and then, finally, divorced. I was smart enough to figure this out, but something was still wrong with me. I realized this while I was at Basler Turbo Conversions of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. We worked 50 plus hours a week on DC3s. In my spare time, I built model airplanes, read aircraft magazines, read aviators' biographies, watched aircraft documentaries and, of coarse, went to the air show. I would rather watch an aviation documentary over sports any day. Well, I have come to realize I am an aircraft nut, but now I have embraced this fact and started my own business. I hope to capitalize off my mania. And, by the way, I'm still married to my first wife.

I went to trade school straight out of high school and in 1994 I received my airframe & powerplant license. Three years later, as soon as I was eligible, I received my IA rating. The most noteworthy places I have worked are Kenmore Air Harbor, Basler Turbo Conversions and Scott Erickson Aviation.

Scott Erickson Aviation was an Aviat dealer located in Omaha, Nebraska. We sold a lot of Huskies , Pitts , and Yak55Ms. Most people traded in a Cub or a Maul when they bought a Husky. I got to fly and work on all of them. I have a lot of respect for both the Maul and the Supercub, but the Husky is definitely the top dog to fly and maintain. I also assembled brand new YAK 55Ms that Scott imported from Russia. The highlight for me was to receive 10 hours of aerobatic training in a Christen Eagle.

Basler Turbo Conventions of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is where I became a sheetmetal specialist. Refurbishing a WWII C-47 to a zero time airfame, stretching the fuselage 40" and installing turbine engines takes a lot of sheetmetal work. This was a total emersion in structural sheetmetal with enough volume to give me an extremely high level of proficiency. Besides stretching fuselages, I remember changing a series of skins that ran the entire length of the top of the fuselage. Rivet spacing was tight and rivets were large (compared to Cessna). The vertical seams of all skin panels were 1/2 inch between double rows of rivets and the horizontal seams were 1/2 inch between single rows of rivets. Many panels were three feet wide and ten feet long. That is a lot of rivets. Cherry maxes weren't an option. After I acquired the skills and confidence to handle very large jobs, I wanted to do more artistic work with a perfectionist flare.

I moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, and went to work for Kenmore Air Harbor. After filming "Six Days & Seven Nights," Harrison Ford had Kenmore rebuild a Beaver for him. While there, I entirely reskinned two deHaviland Beaver fuselages and rebuilt Cessna and deHaviland flight controls and did a lot of float repairs. This was an awesome place to work, down on Lake Washington's waterfront. The floatplanes flew overhead all day and at night they gently pulled on their moorings as the waves came in. I felt like I was living in a post card.

After my son was born, my wife and I decided to move back to Wyoming to be near our families. My dad and I started Shearer Aviation Specialties, Inc. Kenmore gave me my first order of 10 deHaviland Beaver elevators to rebuild. I also did two 180 flaps for the director of maintenance at Kenmore.

These were great places to work and I would highly recommend them as places of employment or to do business with. I made a lot of great friends, and worked with great craftsmen.

 

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