The only reason I never put two motorcycles in the back of a 206 was because I only owned one (one motorcycle, and one 206.)

After I put the single motorcycle in, there was plenty of room for 4 weeks' worth of northern gear for two people.

The 1960 Cessna 210 and the 1961 Cessna 210A have time life limited saddles at 1000 hours

The remainder of the saddles up to the 1969 Model Year 210J are on condition.

Subsequent models are done differently and the problem goes away.

The saddles used to be about $800 - $1200 the last time I bought one quite a while ago. I bet they are 4 times that now.

The 1960 Cessna 210 and the 1961 Cessna 210A have time life limited saddles at 1000 hours

The remainder of the saddles up to the 1969 Model Year 210J are on condition.

Subsequent models are done differently and the problem goes away.

The saddles used to be about $800 - $1200 the last time I bought one quite a while ago. I bet they are 4 times that now.

It looks like maybe my hangar neighbor with his 210M has been misinformed on the gear saddles and I have passed on inaccurate info. He's going to buy a couple for spares; maybe that's not necessary. Are the carry through spars still readily available?

I needed saddles for my 177rg. Rather than the Cessna saddles my mechanic had an engineering order (I think similar to your 337) prepared for metal replacement saddles, and had them manufactured. He had gone down that road before. They were not particularly expensive.

Cessna was somewhat on track with your first part with the Cessna NGP. But then they bought Columbia instead. And seemingly screwed that up.

It would have been cool if the NGP was fully developed and Columbia still existed. Granted in hindsight sight, the 2008 recession shortly thereafter probably would have killed both anyway.

In the M model, the gear saddles are lined with a replaceable shell lined with polyurethane layer. The polyurethane liner will wear, particularly if the gear is not rigged/adjusted properly. This liner can be field replaced (part is around $400, readily available) but must be done exactly to the prescribed instructions/proper adhesive. Hutch Aviation has overhauled shells for around $900 after core credit of around $400. I bought from Hutch recently. Excellent quality.

We recently bought an older P206. It has the pilot and copilot doors with a smaller door in the back. We love it. I took my family of 5, including three young kids to go visit my parents and do some work for my dad. We were loaded, but still well under gross.

I’ll never forget the look on the face of the FBO girl as bag-after-bag and kid-after-kid poured out of the plane. It must have looked like a clown-car circus act. When we unpacked the plane after the return trip, I realized we had completely filled our minivan with everything we took.


Comfort and style points? Not really. But never cared about being in style.

I own a 69 182M and have flown them both. Imo the 182 flies nicer it’s lighter on the controls, but don’t get me wrong if I needed (and price didn’t matter) I’d gladly own a 206. I also like the 182 dashboard it’s a little lower. The 520 makes a racquet when it takes off but some people like that. I sure do like that throaty sound a 520 makes taxiing. I burn about 13GPH at 65% and plan on 125 TAS at about 5000’ with a stock 470R and 3 bladed Hartzell. They’re both great planes can’t go wrong with either of them.

When I worked at Cessna, we occasionally issued Engineering Orders to fix issues on pre-delivery airplanes, but I never heard of one for a airplane in the field following delivery.

Bill my guess is it is mere semantics, what you call a 337 we call an engineering order.

When I saw "gear saddles" and "337" in the same sentence my mind went in a third direction.

That was one of the annoying things about trying to find information for an old Skymaster using Google - searching for "337" + any aviation term was just about useless.