CARBONDALE, Ill. -If the difference between men and boys is the size of their toys, then Michael L. Gartke is one heck of a man.

The 22-year-old Bensenville native, a senior in aviation technology at Southern Illinois University's Carbondale campus, has spent much of the past year painstakingly reassembling a vintage military training jet-and he's not done yet.

"I haven't been keeping track of how many hours I've spent so far in order to keep from discouraging myself," Gartke said. "I'd guess it's at least 1,000."

Working on the Lockheed T-33A-5LO has taught Gartke something about big projects.

"There's a beginning, a middle and an end-the middle just gets a little bigger than you would like it to be," he said.

The jet, from a line Lockheed manufactured between the 1940s and the 1960s, actually belongs to SIUC. One of four such planes bought as Air Force surplus in the early 1970s, the former navigation and gunnery trainer has since embarked on a third life as a sort of mechanical systems classroom for students in the University's aviation program.

"First-semester guys crawl around and get familiar with the instruments, the radio, the hydraulics, brakes and electrical systems," Gartke said. "They run the engine, they take the tires off, they jack it up so they can test the landing gear retraction.

"Even though this stuff is 50 years old, these systems are similar to what we use today. It's fun to see where the equipment we are using now started out-to see the progression from '40s technology on."

Over the years, two of the trainers had become spare parts sources; the other two had started showing signs of wear. Eventually, it came down to a choice: redo them or lose them.

Gartke thought restoration would make a good student project-hands-on experience that would make his department's classwork come alive and give its students a sense of pride.

"And these aircraft are unique-they're classics," he said. "I thought if we could get one looking decent, it would be a calling card for our program, something people would remember when they thought of SIU."

Gartke planned to disassemble one plane, repair and clean its various parts, then put it back together again.

"There was a lot of skepticism at the beginning," he remembers. "They said, 'You will get it all taken apart, and then it will sit in a box for years.'"

To head off that possibility, Gartke read the trainer's maintenance manuals cover to cover before he touched his first bolt.

"The manuals aren't real good because of the way they wrote them back then," he said. "They don't explain things because they assume there's a lot you already know."

Once the work got under way, Gartke ran into an unexpected problem with his student crews.

"Things were installed with 100 screws a piece-invariably, a lot of them were stuck and you had to drill them out," he said.

"People would get discouraged. They'd spend 15 to 20 hours and couldn't see any difference. I started to lose workers."

Nowadays, Gartke portions the work out differently. The hydraulics class restored the hydraulics system as a class project ("It's in excellent shape right now," he said with pride); the electrical systems class is at work on that one.

"We've also been working on breaking down tasks so people can start, do the work and come out with a finished piece that they can point to and say, 'I did this work,'" he said.

"You find out who the really good workers are when it gets down to the jobs nobody wants to do."

Gartke and his crews finished reassembling the trainer last fall. They've stripped off the old paint, replacing it with a new coat of gunmetal gray and a snarling red mouth. In addition to the hydraulic and electric systems, they've overhauled the brake system. Still to go, the fuel system, power plant, instrument panel and cockpit refurbishing.

Folks don't rib Gartke about being able to put the plane back together any more. But because it's taken so much longer than he expected ("three to four times longer," he said), the new joke focuses on the length of time he has spent in school.

"I'm working on getting into a graduate program in manufacturing systems, and they're saying, 'You started this project and now you have to go to graduate school to finish it,'" said Gartke, who began his academic career in one of SIUC's two-year programs.

He hesitates to say how much time the remaining work will take, but he's optimistic.

"We have a ways to go yet, but we're getting there," he said.

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