The avionics package is atop the instrumentation panel, but there’s no compass yet. The cyclic and collective sticks are connected. The seats and seat backings aren’t installed, and their space is dotted with neatly bundled wiring.

The plastic bubble canopy is on order. It won’t arrive for another month. The Avco Lycoming 305-horsepower engine is set, so clean its metal covers and piping gleam. The 45-foot main rotor assembly isn’t put together, and the tailbone section remains detached, but the main rotor shaft and transmission sits on a workbench, near several looseleaf service logs and parts cataloges.

The assemblage of parts has been Gerald K. “Gerry” Bouchard’s decade-long quest: to rebuild a two-seat helicopter in the cozy confines of his one-car garage on Mohawk Drive in Lincoln.

That’s right, a helicopter.

In his garage.

And he’s about 90 percent done.

“Everything in it is brand new, up to snuff and right where it should be,” Bouchard said Wednesday, a boyish bounce to his voice. “It’s all been done strictly – I repeat, strictly – by the book.”

The former Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. flight-line mechanic, who has a commercial helicopter pilot’s license and a private fixed-wing license, plans to finish building the chopper and take it out, and up, for a spin in September, he said.

Bouchard, 69, bought the 1963 Hiller UH-12E light utility helicopter in 1996 for $12,000 from a private owner when the banged-up little bird was little more than a collection of spare parts.

“It was just a big mass of wires going everywhere,” Bouchard’s wife, Mae, said.

Only the airframe was intact, he said.

Mae Bouchard was rather shocked when she saw the helicopter’s size and realized how involved restoring it would be.

“At first I thought, ‘Well, they have those little kits that people buy.’ That’s what I thought he was getting,” she said.

Tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of rivets later, the helicopter looks, well, like a helicopter.

It’s similar to the Bell OH-13 helicopters used by M.A.S.H. units during the Korean conflict and made famous by the movie and television series. It has long landing skids, a bubble canopy, a piston-driven engine and the exposed engine area typical of early helicopters.

“A regular car nowadays is a lot more complicated than this,” Bouchard said.

Wherever possible, Bouchard upgraded the machine with state-of-the-art equipment, such as its radio and its alternator, which replaced its circa-1953 electrical system generator. He relocated the transmission oil pressure gauge from the floor to the instrumentation panel to make it easier to see.

“I modernized the whole thing as I went,” he said.

Bouchard estimated he has spent almost $60,000 restoring the helicopter, which has a somewhat mysterious history. He believes it was used as a crop duster and an observation helicopter at Bangor International Airport, but isn’t really sure, he said.

The restoration tested his memory of his 15 years at Sikorsky in Stratford, Conn., his skills and his endurance, but Bouchard doesn’t see his garage-bound quest as all that unusual.

For one thing, helicopter pioneers such as Stanley Hiller and Igor I. Sikorsky, who Bouchard knew slightly in Stratford – he remembers the elderly inventor and millionaire on the factory floor, pounding out dented aluminum aircraft skins with a sandbag and a rawhide mallet, like any other assembly line worker – hoped that helicopters would find a home in people’s garages as replacements for automobiles.

“I’ve always wanted to restore my own helicopter,” Bouchard said. “I couldn’t tell you how many helicopters I have restored for work, but this is the first I’ve ever done in my own garage.

“You like to keep your hand in it,” he added. “Where else are you going to work on your own helicopter, if you don’t do it yourself in the garage?”

His wife admires Bouchard’s meticulous approach.

“I don’t know how he does it,” she said. “It’s a lot of work. Everything has to be just so. It shows that when he starts something, he finishes it. He is very loyal to what he says he is going to do.”

The finished helicopter will be worth about $125,000, Bouchard said, though it would probably fetch only $85,000 for sale. He has no plans to sell it, however, just to fly it when his time, and fuel budget, allows.

And Bouchard might try restoring another helicopter, perhaps a Bell OH-13, although his wife thinks he should quit while he’s ahead.

“It’s just like guys restoring cars,” he said. “I like restoring helicopters.”

Nick Sambides, Jr. can be reached at 794-8215 and Nicksambidesjr@yahoo.com.