Custom Aircraft Tool Kits and Kitting

A kit is not a pile of tools in a case. A kit is the set required to complete a defined task, in a container that shows at a glance whether all of it came back. We build the kit, cut the foam, mark the tools and hand over something that can be issued and checked as one item.

Built to a task, not to a piece count

Every tool kit on the market is sold on its piece count, which is exactly the wrong measure. A 263 piece kit that is missing the one countersink cage the job needs is a 262 piece kit and a trip back to the crib.

So the starting question is not how many pieces you want. It is what the kit has to accomplish: a skin repair, an avionics loom, a cylinder change, a flight line turnaround. From there the list is what that task genuinely requires, and nothing that is only there to make the number look better.

Kit families we build

Sheet metal and structures. A gun, bucking bars, sets, dimple dies, a squeezer, clecos and pliers, drills and bits, snips, fluting pliers, a seamer and a rivet gauge. The minimum viable set is smaller than most people expect and considerably more useful than a padded one.

Avionics. Micro drivers, precision pliers, cable crimpers, pin extractors, a continuity tester. Small tools, which makes them exactly the tools that go missing, so this family is always supplied shadowed and marked. A ninety piece avionics kit without shadowing cannot be checked in under an hour, and so in practice it does not get checked.

Engine and powerplant. Compression testing, magneto timing, cylinder work, plus the adapters that make a tester fit the engines you actually operate.

Flight line. Deliberately short. What a turnaround needs, in a box one person can carry, in foam, because a flight line box is opened on a windy apron where a loose tool leaves the box permanently.

Training. A first kit for a student, sized to the syllabus rather than to a career, with tool identification from day one so tool control is a habit rather than something learned later. See training schools.

How a kit is specified

Start from the task and the manual

If the task has a published procedure, the tool list falls out of it. Where a customer or an operator manual dictates a specific tool or a specific torque range, that goes in the kit rather than the nearest equivalent we stock.

Decide what a kit means administratively

This is the part that gets skipped and then causes trouble. A kit issued as one item needs one identity: a kit number, a contents list attached to it, and a decision about whether individual tools are serialised as well. Where a kit is issued to an individual rather than to a bay, that changes the marking scheme.

Foam and marking together

A kit and its insert are designed at the same time, because the drawer layout constrains the tool list as much as the task does. Tools are etched as part of the same job, so the kit arrives complete rather than needing a second pass. See laser tool marking.

Duplicating a kit you already run

If you have a kit that works and you need six more like it, that is the easiest job we do. Send one complete kit, or a full contents list plus the existing insert, and the rest are built to match. Duplicating an existing kit is also how a fleet standardises: after the third identically laid out box, a technician can work out of any of them without looking.

What we will tell you honestly

Some tools we cannot source competitively, and some specialist tools are only available through a manufacturer's own channel. When that is the case you will be told at the quote stage, with the alternatives, rather than finding a substitution in the box. If a kit is better bought from the tool manufacturer directly, we will say so and quote the foam and the marking around it.