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Stein Air tour - part 1

dougweil

Well Known Member
Hi all:

This past Saturday the Twin Cities RV Builders held our spring meeting at Stein Air's new facility at the Faribault, Minnesota airport.

Most of us local RV builders have "grown up" with Stein Bruch who literally started this business selling aircraft wire out of his house way back when. Stein Air grew and grew over the years and for a long time operating out of an industrial park near the Lakeville, MN airport. Last fall they began construction of a beautiful 16,000 sq foot hangar/production facility about 40 miles south of Minneapolis at the Faribault airport.

Literally the day they started laying the footings for the new building last October, a tornado ripped through the airport destroying the FBO, many hangars, and many airplanes. Fortunately Stein only lost some sand and gravel. Amid the long cold winter and cleanup around the airport, the construction of their building
continued and is now about 98% complete. Here's a photo tour:

Hangar facing the ramp (with your's truly's RV-7 in front):

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Front of the building at the parking lot:

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We had 18 fly-ins on a beautiful Saturday morning for the grand tour:

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The hangar area can accommodate about 8 "full size" airplanes or a dozen or so RVs. Stein Air is a full FAA certified avionics shop and they will be expanding to working on "spam cans:" in addition to RVs. (Yep, that is a Beech Baron converted to a turbo-prop):

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An overhead of the new production area. Plenty of room for their mail order parts business plus instrument panel assembly:

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Here's the machine shop. Lot's of computerized tools to fabricate custom instrument panels:

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This panel layout could be yours!!:

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This is where the sausage is made. About a dozen workstations where your dream panel is put together:

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Any color wire you want:

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Someday all the electrons will be flowing in a neat, orderly manner:

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Continued... Stein Air tour part 2...
 
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Hey - that?s my panel!

Nice to see they were working on my stuff (design on the computer) while you were there :)
 
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