We bumped into Karl Grove at the Redlands, California, airport recently. That’s a pleasant, single-runway job hard against the San Bernardino rock piles guarding Palm Springs from Los Angeles normalcy. We hadn’t seen Karl since the Reno air races where he made a very credible effort in Biplane class and later put up the most innovative engine program in Sport Gold since Will Mathews put a Vortech in the back seat of his White Lightning.
We were happy to learn Karl has opened a shop at Redlands: Grove Aero Services Precise Pitot Static, or GASPPS. We should pause long enough to underline Karl Grove is no relation to the more widely known Robbie Grove, in case that was getting in the way.
More apropos is Karl and company are staying busy with all the usual small airplane maintenance chores but taking on a specialty in new instrument panels, which is all the rage these days. What makes GASPPS different is Karl’s turn to UV printing. That’s a new process where the “ink” is cured by exposure to ultraviolet light. This means no powder coating or other preliminaries, as the UV printing goes directly onto just about any surface from leather to carbon fiber.
Naturally, printing via sunburn is a bit more expensive than traditional screen printing but offers the advantages of precisely rendering fine details, and it’s actually cost-competitive on small-run or one-off jobs such as custom instrument panels. There’s also a 3D effect as the UV process builds up more material than traditional printing. That, and it can obtain a higher gloss than screen printing. It’s a digital process, so any digital text or image can be printed. For more information see gaspps.com.
