Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Needless to say, this brought the guys at Unique to their knees, the price to the Emir was $75K each for 15 Cobras, that cost them $15 to 20K each to build. You do the math!

Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

I learned quite a bit at Unique about their version of a Cobra, what not to do mainly, and I would change things a lot while building Biritz’s car. The main thing I knew that I had to do was make the wheelbase the right length so that the body would fit. Nothing else was ‘sacred”, so I would set the engine back as far as possible to get more weight to the rear for traction. All of this was easy since I was starting with a bare frame with no motor or transmission mounts welded on. I mounted the Jaguar rear end in place, and would use is for the point where everything else was measured from. I had the measurements from the centerline of the rear axle to the firewall, and the front axle centerline, so all I had to do was make the engine fit in that space. The 351 Ford engine had a hydro-formed scatter shield bell housing that bolted up to a Ford “top-loader” transmission that had a very long tail casting, which made for a very short drive shaft to couple up to the Jag rear end. From U-joint to U-joint centerline was only about 12-5/8 inches. It only took me a couple of days to get the engine and transmission bolted up to the rear end, and the engine and transmission mounts welded into place. The next step was to build and mount the front suspension, which was going to take some time since I was designing a completely different set-up than Unique used. I was going to use the same MG-B front spindle and up-right forging because it was the same part that was used on the Brabham Indy car, and many of the Brabham copied Indy cars as well as the McClaren Can Am car. I took one of these to a junk yard to try to find a front hub and disc brake assembly that would fit and also find a Jaguar brake caliper that would fit also. After trying several things, I discovered that a Chevy Monte Carlo front hub and brake disc fit the MG spindle, bearings and all. This was quite a surprise, a Chevy part fitting an MG part. I felt pretty lucky so far, now I had to find a Jaguar caliper that would somehow fit this combination without a lot of modification. The junk yard guy was very patient with me, and gathered up some Jag brake calipers, and after trying several, we found that a Jaguar XJ-12 unit fit real close, just a small adapter would be needed. I could hardly believe that I was this fortunate, I had hoped to find something compatible with the rear Jag brakes, so this was perfect. All I had to do now was build the upper and lower A-arms per my drawing, and locate an appropriate rack and pinion steering, and I would be well along on the building of this “Hot Rod Cobra”.

I wanted this car to look as much like the real thing as possible so that only the “purists” could tell the difference without opening the hood. Biritz kind of blew that a little, he had been shopping for some wheels that turned him on, and they were far, far away from looking like the originals. Oh well, it was his car, and if that was what he wanted, that’s what he would get. Many people that saw the car thought it looked better with “Joe’s wheels” than the original style with the three pronged knock-off center wing nut.

Sandy drove the car quite a bit, chasing parts for me, but she said that it was a nuisance, because when she would pull into a station for gas, five or six cars would follow her in so that they could look it over. I don’t know why Sandy or Joe never got stopped by the cops for loud noise, because I had built the exhaust headers and side pipes with absolutely no mufflers, so you can imagine what that NASCAR 351 Cleveland Ford sounded like! Neither Sandy or Joe puttered around when driving it, they both had a tendency to “stand on the gas”, and run her through the gears. I only rode in the car once when Joe had it, and that was enough, because he ran it up to 132 miles an hour by the speedometer going down Kyreen Road in Tempe, then took his hands off of the steering wheel and got on the brakes real hard, to “show me how good the brakes worked”! Joe claimed that he had driven the car down I-10 towards Tucson at 152 MPH, but it started getting a little “light” on the front end, so he didn’t push it any harder. I think he said that he had only had it up to about 6800 RPM, so I wonder what it would have done if I had put a front spoiler on it to keep the nose down. This had been a fun project, and there was no doubt that I had created a “bad assed hot rod”!

Two days after I had finished the “Cobra”, and wondered what I was going to do next, I got a phone call from a guy named Steve Bolan. He said that he wanted a “Turbine powered Sprint Car” built, and asked if I would be interested in going to work for him.

Larry

I am posting a photo of the Cobra, I have misplaced others somehow, but will find them somewhere in my mess. This one is before it was finished, but will do for now.

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Bolan had contacted a fellow in Mobile, Alabama who’s name was Bill Hite, and was famous for radical race car designs, most of which were “outlawed” right away. Hite had built some four wheel drive race cars, and his expertise regarding this was what attracted Bolan to him, since the plan was to use this technology for the turbine car.

Bolan had located the last turbine engine that had ran at the Indianapolis 500, with Rick Muther as the driver, and Howard Millican was the chief mechanic. This engine was an Allison C-20B from a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. After it was banned for use in an Indy car, Millican put the turbine in a Championship Dirt Car, owned by a friend named Mike Riley. It ran pretty good, but was soon “outlawed” there also.

So at this point Bolan had a turbine engine, and a chassis design and drawings from Bill Hite. He hired John Mueller, an Indy mechanic to build the frame from Hite’s drawings, but before Mueller got very far along, Bolan fired him, mainly because he wasn’t getting things done fast enough.

Bolan had to find someone else to help him build the car, and this is how I got involved. Bolan had been married to Steve Krisiloff’s sister, and even though the marriage didn’t last, Bolan and Krisiloff remained good friends. Krisiloff had driven Grant King’s Indy car when I was working there, and we had become friends. When Bolan told Krisiloff that he was looking for a different mechanic, Krisiloff, who knew of my skills, suggested that Bolan contact me. Rather confusing, but I don’t know how else to explain it.

When I arrived at Bolan’s to begin working on this creation, I expected a “race shop”, but discovered that the car would be built in his company shop called Lanbo Products, where he had employees doing production welding, wire forming, and some other things. Maybe this was why Mueller wasn’t getting anything done, trying to build this car in this atmosphere was difficult at best. After thinking about it for a moment or two, it wouldn’t be any worse than Mickey Thompson’s race shop, rather cramped for space, and always people milling around. Sandy had gone with me of course, and after meeting Bolan, then looking at the frame that Mueller had been welding together, and spotting the Allison turbine sitting nearby, we realized that this was going to be a challenge, for several reasons.

1. Bolan was 6’7, and 240 pounds.
2. The frame was only 24 inches wide, outside dimension.

3. I had never laid hands on a turbine engine.

4. How am I going to stuff two Halibrand Championship quick-change rear ends in there, one for the front, and one for the rear?

5. How am I going to couple the turbine to the Halibrand units?

There were a lot of other things that concerned me as well, but I figured that the best thing to do was, just start putting things together, and deal with situations as they came up. This car was going to be very complex, turbine engine, four wheel drive, four wheel independent suspension, inboard brakes, and on and on. Sandy asked me if I really wanted to tackle this project, and I said, “Why not, we’ve got about 4 ½ months to do it.”

The clipping I am posting with the date, shows where progress was with only about nine weeks to go for completion.

Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

The Halibrand quick-change units had to be located as far to the left as possible, so that the turbine could also be to the left to allow as much leg room as I could for the driver, because his legs would extend all the way to the “hot section” due to the reclining seat. I could only go just so far because I needed room for the inboard brake rotor, and I wanted as long as a left front axle as I could get. The location was the same for the rear, because I didn’t want any angularity in the drive shafts from the engine to the Halibrand units, because these drive shafts were going to be turning somewhere around 10,000 RPM, as I recall. The rear one was going to pass through the cockpit, and just a few inches from the drivers rib cage, and just under his arm pit! ( the N1 turbine section turned 50,000 RPM, and drove the compressor, N2 turned 33,000 RPM, and was geared to the output shaft)

I guess the first thing that I need to cover is how I built the couplings for the drive shafts. I discovered that the female through spline in the Allison case was the same spline as the drive axle on a Volkswagon bus. This VW part had a through hole, so I just put one in from the front side, and another in from the back side, then put a long bolt through them and put a nut on the end to hold them in place. The VW shaft had a flange to bolt a VW CV joint to, but it didn’t quite clear the “governor” so I removed the governor, and
made a plate to cover the hole on the mounting pad on the Allison. I figured that we didn’t want a governor anyway, we wanted this thing go like hell, and if she blew, so what? I had spoken to an engineer at Allison, and he said that if we broke a driveshaft or something the governor wouldn’t catch it soon enough to stop the overspeed anyway. USAC had required a stainless steel “scatter shield” around N1 and N2 to use this turbine at Indy, but the guy at Allison said that if the turbine came “unglued” that shield wouldn’t help at all. We put it on at first, but it was a pain in the butt to remove to change “hot sections”, and it was heavy, so we threw it over in the corner, and that was the end of that. If it blew up, Bolan wouldn’t be 6 ft 7 any longer, but he said he wasn’t concerned about that, there were a lot of things dangerous in racing, but people kept doing it.

The Halibrand end was simple, I bought two Halibrand drive couplings, did a little machine work, and welded VW flanges to them. Then I bought some 1-¼ inch 4130 chrome-moly steel tubing to make the driveshaft from. I took a couple of VW axles, and put them in a lathe, and turned about four inches on each end down to make a press fit into the steel tubing, them sawed that part off. I got eight VW constant velocity (CV) joints, put them on these pieces I had made, and bolted them to the flanges on the Halibrands, and the Allison, and simply measured the distance between them, cut the tubing to the required length, and welded this all together. Couldn’t have been any simpler to do, and it looked good. Now I had to figure out how hook the Halibrands to the Oldsmobile Toronado CV joints in the front and rear uprights that Hite had designed. We bought some “stub axles” that fit the Halibrand, and were designed to use Porsche CV joints. Of course the front and rear uprights were different, because the front had to be made to steer. This meant that all four axles had to be different, the right side axles were much longer than the left, because of the offset of the turbine, and the Halibrands. We wanted all of the axles to have about the same strength, so the short ones were smaller in diameter than the long ones, and so on. We thought this was important since all four axles would be subjected to the same amount of torque from the Allison turbine. Bolan machined the axles from 4340 steel I think, then sent them out to have splines cut for Olds on one end and Porsche on the other.

Larry

Posting photo of Allison C-20B

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Bolan had bought a “roadster-type” nose and tail body parts from Grant King, and I had to modify these to fit our chassis, and the other body panels I would make out of aluminum. The fuel cell was in the tail, which made it difficult to access the “quick-change gears, so I did about the same thing I had done to Mickey Thompson’s FWD car at Bonneville, I made the fuel cell on a hinge, so it would swing away, then change the gear ratio, and swing the fuel cell back into place and bolt it back up. The car was coming together pretty fast, and we decided that we should fire up the turbine. I had wired the starter up to an external jack like on an airplane, so I could plug in a battery cart for starting, there was no in car battery. The cockpit was arranged like a normal car, a brake petal, and a foot throttle. On the dashboard I had installed a Cessna fuel mixture control, the vernier adjust type, and by pulling it out, it would shut down the turbine. It was tied in with the throttle linkage to the fuel control on the Allison. During the start procedure this would be used instead of the foot pedal by pushing it in about an inch when the starter was engaged, and the idle speed could be controlled by turning the knob. I had dreamed all of this up by reading a manual Bolan found somewhere, and I was aware of “hung starts” and all of that stuff. I was “flying by the seat of my pants” because I had never started a turbine before, and Bolan hadn’t either. We weren’t sure what was going to happen when we lit it off, so I suggested that we park the car nose first into the wall of the building, and chocks behind the rear wheels. Really, I wasn’t real sure if it was going to go forward or backwards! There was a “percent” guage on the dash, sort of like a tachometer I figured, and as best as I could tell from the manual, when it read 19% or so the ignition switch was turned on, and when the spark plug thing started snapping, the Cessna knob would be pushed in and this thing would start. I think that when the % got to 23 or so, the battery could be disconnected, and the turbine was running on it’s own, then the knob could be turned to speed up the engine to where it sounded happy. This may sound real crazy to you airplane types, but, hey, this was all new to me.

The time had come to do our thing, and we were all nervous as hell, but we went through the “procedure” that I just mentioned, and Bolan flipped the starter switch, and it sounded like a run-away vacuum cleaner, then he hit the ignition switch, and I heard that snapping sound from the igniter, and Bolan pushed the fuel knob in a ways, and there was a low roar from the engine, then it became a little louder, changing pitch, then it sounded “happy” to me and I pulled the battery plug out. After about 30 seconds Bolan gave the foot throttle a push, and it speeded up. He jazzed the throttle a few more times, and we were all smiling, we had fired that baby up, and she sounded real good. Bolan shut it off, and all any of us could say was, do you mean that’s all there is to it?

Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

The turbine was directly connected to all four wheels, there was no clutch, in and out box, no differential in the Halibrands, nothing. If the car was put up on jack- stands, and you rotated any wheel, they all rotated, and N2 in the engine turned. When the engine was started you had to hold the brakes to keep N2 from turning, but N1 was rotating to drive the compressor, and the hot gases were passing through the N2 and out the exhaust stacks. Of course there was a tremendous torque being applied to the N2, and when the brakes were released you had better have the car pointed in the direction that you wanted to go! This may sound wild and crazy, and it was, but the speed was easily controlled by applying whatever brakes it took to slow the car down to drive in and out of the pits, etc.

What I mentioned earlier about the turbine “overspeeding” and blowing up was not really a big deal, for this to happen both driveshafts would have to break at the same time, or if all four axles broke at the same time.

The car was 37 inches high at the top of the roll-cage, and weighed just under 1000 pounds, about 400 pounds lighter than an average sprint car. We used Indy car tires, the front smaller than the rear, which made it a challenge to select the correct gear ratio or the front and rear Halibrand quick change units. Halibrand had a large selection of gears, so using some creative math, I was able to come up with a formula that made it pretty easy to do, although I was never able to explain this to Bolan, or anyone else. Mickey Thompson had told me that at say, 100 MPH, there was about 2% slippage on the tires, if you calculated engine RPM, gear ratio, and tire diameter, the speed that you came up with was not the same as a “timed” speed, it would always be lower. Mickey had proved this at Bonneville during his land speed attempts. This is not hard to understand really, take for instance that an Indy car on an oval track runs a smaller tire on the left rear than on the right rear, (stagger) with a locked rear end, and goes 230+ miles per hour down the straight-aways, so if the bigger tire was slipping 2%, the smaller tire had to be slipping even more. I just called it my “Mickey factor”, and I would plug a number into my calculation to make it seem right when selecting my front to rear gear ratios. Maybe I am not explaining this right, but there’s probably an engineer out there somewhere who has more degrees than he or she had dates while in college that could. During testing at Phoenix International Speedway, I discovered that I could correct under steer or over steer by changing the gear ratio in the front drive, instead of jacking with the suspension or tire stagger.
There’s another one of my weird things that I need to mention. Bolan had contacted SCCA to run the car at the Pike Peaks Hill Climb, and they issued him the number 100. To me there was no way that that number would look right on this car, so when the sign painter came to paint the numbers, I told him to paint a big number one with a banner though it with the word hundred spelled out. (as in the photos I posted) When Bolan came in and saw the way the number was painted, he just about, well, I won’t use that word, but how about “soiled himself”? He told me I would never get away with that with SCCA, but I told him, “watch me”! When the SCCA inspector was doing his thing, he said that I had the wrong number on the car. I asked him what the number was supposed to be and he said 100. I asked him to tell me what number was on the car, and he said, 1 hundred, so I said to him, “then how can that be wrong?” We went around and around over this number thing, and he finally gave up, and had someone higher up on the food chain come to look at the car. This guy had a smile on his face, and asked the other guy what my number was supposed to be, and he said 100, and the “big gun” said that it looked like 100 to him. Luckily this man had a good sense of humor, and probably thought it was pretty clever.

There was another incident with an inspector, at Indy they hadn’t outlawed turbines, but had restricted the annulus area of the intake to 12 square inches, which made them uncompetitive, This turbine had ran Indy anyway, but with an aluminum cone shaped restrictor in the compressor intake. The engine inspector came over, and I saw that he had a rule book in his hand, and a confused look on his face. He asked where the intake was because he had to measure it, and I told him it was in the cockpit, which confused him even more, but that was where the compressor was, it extended from the rear of the turbine into the cockpit. Then he asked where the annulus was, and I pointed to the restrictor cone, and said, “right there”. This guy had a wooden yardstick in his hand, and a rulebook that said 12 square inches, so he held the yardstick inside near the compressor, and said that it looked legal to him. Needless to say, as soon as he left, I removed the restrictor cone, they would never know the difference.

Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

The Pikes Peak Hill-Climb is run on a mostly gravel road up the mountain, starting at about 9,000 feet above sea level, and ending at about 14,ooo feet, and there are 156 turns in 12-1/2 miles. At that altitude, not only do the drivers have to deal with the lack of oxygen, but also the engines. This is where the turbine should have an advantage. We had replaced the Indy tires with some real gnarly dirt type tires, all four the same size. Bolan made a practice run, and the car performed well, but we were informed that it had been decided that we couldn’t run four wheel drive. There was no way two wheel drive would give us the traction needed because of the high torque output from the turbine. We couldn’t be competitive due to this, and considered loading up and going home, but a lot of people wanted to see the car run up the hill, so we just did a demonstration run, I had decided that it would be best to unhook the rear drive, the car would handle better driving the front wheels in this situation. Maybe SCCA did this to us because of my argument over the number 100, kind of a get even deal. I had met Eric Lorentzen at Phoenix, and had the job lined up to work for him on his airplanes as soon as the Levolor hangar was completed at Scottsdale. In the meantime, I had met another friend of Bolan’s, Ken Rowe, who had bought a “Starduster” biplane somewhere in California. For some reason Ken had Bolan fly it to Phoenix for him, Bolan was a very good pilot, and about as brave as they come, but this thing scared the hell out of him during the ferry flight. Ken asked me if I thought I could fix it for him, and of course I told him yes, although I had never worked on a full sized aircraft before, except for the Radar-Computer Bomb- Navigation System on the B-47’s in the Air Force, back in the 50’s. I had built a lot of radio controlled models, so in my mind, this couldn’t be much different, just bigger.

Ken had a hangar at Falcon Field in Mesa, just a few miles east of Phoenix, and Sandy and I met him there to see what a “Starduster” looked like. It was a cute little thing with two cockpits, and I decided to take a crack at seeing what I could do to make it fly better. I had a talk with Bolan about what it did, and what it didn’t do, and the main thing he said was that it was wormy as hell on take-off, and felt tail heavy, and sluggish in flight. Ken had given me a key to the hangar, and his phone number so I could call him if I needed anything.

The Starduster had an O-320 Lycoming engine that I thought needed to be moved forward about an inch and a half, with a little down thrust and a little right thrust. It was a pretty good sized lump, and those numbers seemed good to me for some reason. I didn’t like the original landing gear, too complicated, and besides that I figured that the wheels were too far back, and the footprint was too narrow. I went to some aircraft “bone yards” to see if I could find some landing gear legs that I could use. I found some round -tube Cessna gear legs that I felt would be perfect. (at least the guy said that’s what they were) Now I had a plan of attack, and some parts to work with, so Sandy and I went to work. We decided that this would be an interesting, and fun project, something new, and different than the race car things we had been doing.

Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

As Sandy and I were “fixing” the Starduster we had noticed that there were three more of them at Falcon Field, we would occasionally see them taxi by near the hangar. I saw that one of them was kept in a hangar across the way where I could see inside it, and I would sometimes see these guys sitting on an old couch there. We figured these were some “old timer” pilots, probably retired, and just hung around the airport, watching the world go by, and flying their airplanes now and then. It became obvious that they were sort of “keeping an eye on us”, they would look over toward us and talk among themselves, and point in our direction. I guess curiosity got the best of one of them because he came over, and asked me what I was doing to the Starduster. I told him what I was doing, and he asked,” why”? I explained that the owner had told me that it had some evil tendencies, and I was going to make some changes to correct the problems. He asked if I had previous experience working on Stardusters, and I told him, no, this is the first one I had ever seen. Then the “old timer” asked me, “what makes you think what you’re doing will work”? I proudly said, “well I’ve built a lot of radio controlled airplanes, and the tail-draggers were usually evil on take-off, and I fixed several of them”. He got a stunned look on his face, and said, “this ain’t no model airplane”, turned around , and went back over to where his buddies were, shaking his head. Sandy started laughing, and said, “I think you just made that guy crazy”.

We watched as he started talking to his friends, and they were having a rather “animated” conversation, much arm waving, pointing, and walking around in circles. Sandy and I went back to work, it was one of those 110 degree Arizona days, so we wanted to get out of there, and go home and get in the swimming pool, but there was a couple of things that I wanted to finish first. We were about to close the doors and leave when we looked over and saw all three of these men standing just outside the hangar. I told them to come in out of the hot sun, and look around. Sandy and I sat back out of the way while they checked over my progress, we were kind of grinning at each other. They would point to things, and mumble quietly to each other, so that I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and shrug their shoulders, and either shake their heads, or nod their heads, depending on what they were looking at. In a few minutes, they headed for the door, and one of them turned to us, and said, “You’ve seen the movie, The Flight of the Phoenix too many times!”

Well, we got the Starduster finished despite what the “old timers” opinions were, and Ken took her up for the first test flight. Sandy and I went out by the flight line to watch him take off, and it looked pretty damned good to us, and Ken flew off somewhere for about 20 minutes, then we saw him coming in to land. It appeared that he “greased” the Starduster onto the runway real smooth, and as he taxied by us heading to the hangar, he had a big smile on his face. We went to ask him how it felt, and what did I need to do to make it fly like he wanted, and he was grinning like crazy, and said, “don’t touch thing, it’s perfect”. We looked it over for leaks and all of that post-flight stuff, then he got it fueled up, and went back out to do some “touch and goes” and some other “horsing around”. When he returned, you couldn’t have knocked that smile off his face with a ball-bat. Ken had a couple of his friends fly it, and they commented how docile it was on takeoff, and said it handled great in the air. Sandy and myself went up for a ride, as well as my brother Joe and his wife Vivian. Ken flew it a lot, and flew it to Oshkosh for the annual “Fly In.” My first full sized aircraft project had turned out pretty good.

Larry

[GeeBeeZ1931]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Well Larry I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dying to know how the "old timers" responded after they found out how great your Starduster mods were?
This whole story is just Great!
Bill K

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

After finishing the Starduster, I decided that I needed to get more familiar with full sized airplanes, so I got in touch with my old friend Ralph Payne who had lots of manuals and books on aviation. He gave me a CAM 18, or something like that, that explained how things were supposed to be done mechanically regarding aircraft. He also loaned me other books to study so that I could familiarize myself with techniques relating to aircraft maintenance and repair.

I had some time to kill waiting for Lorentzen’s hangar to be finished at Scottsdale, so that I could start working on his airplanes, and Sandy and discussed several options, build some R/C models, do something in auto racing, etc. Sandy came up with a solution, she said, “ why don’t you build an airplane you can ride in?” Hmm, that sounded like a great idea.

I had seen a ¼ scale “Bowers Fly Baby” at a hobby shop that I thought was pretty cool, and had some possibilities for doing some modifications to make a “mini-warbird”. I got the building manual, there were no plans, just a loose-leaf binder with some drawings, instructions, a materials list, and a full sized “fold-out” of the wing ribs. Some of you may be familiar with this aircraft, it was built for an Experimental Aviation Association contest to build an airplane from mostly hardware store, and lumber yard materials, and had to have folding wings, and a horizontal stabilizer with a width that could be legal to tow down the road to an airport. Bowers won the contest with his creation. I went through the materials list, and made some changes, I was going to use aircraft grade plywood, and hardware. It would cost much more, but I wanted to build a “proper Fly Baby”. We were going to build it in the garage at our house. I had all of the tools that we would need, plus a band saw, drill press, air compressor, and all of that. The wings would take up the most room, so I built them first, and we put them in the living room so they would be out of the way. Then I began building the fuselage, and tail feathers. I was going to use a Continental engine, so I went looking for a motor mount at the local aircraft bone yards.

I found an A-75 engine that needed overhaul, and bought it for $150.00. I got a Wag-Aero catalogue, and also one from Aircraft Spruce, so I was able to order lots of things from those places. ( and also get familiarized with aircraft hardware, lots of pictures there) We were moving right along, so I wanted to find out about fabric for covering the wings, and so on, and I had seen info in the “Spruce” catalogue about “Stitts” materials, and this seemed like the way to go. I discovered that there was a “Stitts” dealer here in Phoenix, named Floyd Newton. I called him, and he came to the house to tell me all about his products. When he saw my wheelchair, he asked, “are you the guy who did that Starduster at Falcon Field?” I replied with a “yes”, and he said, “yeah, I’ve heard about you.” Old Floyd and I became good friends, he had been around “home-builts” forever, and gave me a lot of good tips.

There was a lady in the neighborhood who took her “walks” daily and would pass by and say “hello” as she went by. I usually had the garage door open when working, so she knew I was up to something, but never really looked inside. Well, we had most of the components done, and decided to roll the fuselage out in the driveway, and put the wings and tail feathers on, just to mock-up to see if everything fit. When this lady came by on her “walk”, she stopped dead in her tracks, and said , “I thought you were building a canoe.” Apparently the main thing she had noticed was when I was building the fuselage.

Larry

Photos The “canoe”, vertical fin, engine

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Bill K Old timers response: quiet indignation, along with a little respect. Some people just don't like it when you rain on their parade!

Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Lorentzen came from New Jersey to Phoenix to take possession of the new hangar at Scottsdale, and called me to meet him there. Needless to say, I was really excited, I wanted to get started working on his airplanes. The Fly Baby project would have to be “put on the back burner” for a while, much more interesting things to do at this point. The date was mid- December, and Eric asked when did I want to start work, maybe after New Years? I said, “how about right now?” He said, “O.K. , it’s up to you.” He gave me money for a “petty cash fund”, and soon went back to New Jersey where the Levolor main office was, he was traveling in the company Lear Jet.

There was nothing in the hangar, so Sandy and I “hot footed” it to Home Depot, and bought a 4x8 sheet of ¾ inch plywood, some 4x4 inch square lumber for legs, some casters, and built a roll around table. We knew that we would need this, don’t ask me why, it just seemed like the thing to do. There were some built in benches in the hangar, so I brought a lot of my tools from home.

Semi-trucks started showing up with big crates and a badly damaged Nord 3202 stuffed inside. The damage was done by the way it was jammed into the trailer, and a new engine had been mounted on a “stand” that was pretty inadequate, and had collapsed, causing some damage. We weren’t really upset by this, we just wanted to get started putting an airplane together.

Back on post 17, I mentioned the crates of parts that had pieces of several aircraft mixed together, Howard DGA, BT-13, Chipmunk, Stearman, Nord, and Sea Fury. Eric had said that he wanted the Nord built first, before I could get my hands on the Sea Fury, so it was obvious that Sandy and I had some sorting out to do. The Levolor hangar was a big double style, so we put the big pieces in the east side, and the crates in the other, and we began unpacking. The entire Nord rebuild was done by only Sandy and I, as well as the sorting out of parts. I bought a “cherry picker” hoist to lift the heavy pieces, and the rest was done by hand. We got most of the stuff out of the crates, and sitting around on the floor, and Sandy asked how we were going to figure out what was what. I said that things that looked American would go in one pile, English in another, and French in yet another pile. Sandy looked at me thinking I had “lost all of my marbles”, and said, “how do you tell the difference?” I picked pieces here and there, and placed them in piles, and told her which was American, English, and French, and told her to look at the parts carefully and she would see the difference. I had worked on American cars, and English cars, and each country seemed to do things differently, whether chassis or engines, so anything that didn’t seem to fall into one of those categories, must be French!

There was something else that helped, I found out that the Germans had taken over the Nord factories during WW2, and built Me-109’s there, and I had seen a 109 partly dismantled in a museum or something, and I had built a R/C model of one of them for someone, and had some cut-away drawings and photos for documentation. Many of the parts from the crates bore a resemblance to these Me-109 drawings, and photos, so they had be French/German. This method of sorting out parts may sound strange, but trust me, Sandy got the hang of this very quickly, and the two of us completed this chore in no time at all.

Another semi trailer full of Bristol Centaurus engine parts was left on the north side of the hangar, this was stuff that Eric had bought along with the Sea Fury. We had no use for this junk at this time, so we just ignored it.

Our focus now was on the Nord 3202, I had never seen one of these, not even a photo, so I had no idea what it was supposed to look like. There were some strange looking pieces in the Nord pile, but I told Sandy we would figure out where they belonged as we went along.

Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

The Nord wing was fairly intact except for the fact that the nut who loaded it harpooned the leading edge with a forklift, fortunately missing the ribs and spar, and the fabric was badly tattered, although that would be replaced anyway. It was a one piece wing, so it was a bit of a struggle for Sandy and I to handle, but we managed. We removed the old fabric so that I could inspect it thoroughly, then set it aside so that I could focus on the fuselage while Sandy was removing the fabric on the tail feathers. She had quite a job to do because the fabric was not rib-stitched, or screwed in place, but was held in place with steel clips about an inch long that were a real bear to remove. We had worked together removing these clips on the wing, so she knew the drill, and got it handled.

The fuselage was a tube frame affair, with sheet metal panels from the front bulkhead to the rear of the back seat, and plywood bulkheads and stringers for the fabric from there to the tail. Unfortunately, most of the bulkheads and stringers were missing, so I would have to guess what the rear of the airplane was supposed to look like. This might be a challenge, but I would think it over while I was inspecting the tubing structure. It was in good shape except for three broken tubes near the front of the airframe. I think this damage was done in the loading process in New Jersey. I welded some new tubes in place, and cleaned it up real good, and determined that it was airworthy, then sanded it lightly and shot it with primer.

The engine damage was next on my list, and I found that all four valve covers were damaged, and the supercharger tube to the fuel injection was beyond repair, so I would make a new one. I took the least damaged valve cover and built it up with “Bondo”, to be used as a pattern for having some new ones cast in aluminum. Lee and Bill Richardson had a machine shop just across the taxiway, and I had Bill machine the covers after getting them from the fellow that did the castings. I was tempted to have my name cast into them, but thought better of it. That might have been a “hoot” somewhere along the line, if someone bought the Nord and found Burton valve covers on his Potez engine.

I will post some photos of what I had to work with, and complete, without any manuals or even a photo to work from.

Larry

[bluffman]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Covering the fabric part of he wing was a problem since it was so hard for Sandy and I to handle, so I came up with a plan, I would paint the metal leading edge, then do the fabric work, then paint that part. It worked quite well, although a bit unorthodox.

I didn’t like that dishpan thing behind the prop, so I bought a spinner from Aircraft Spruce, and adapted it to the nose, which made it look more “zoomy”. Of course the instrument panels and complete interiors were highly detailed, and the tinted windows were Lorentzen’s idea, which made it much better here in the Arizona desert.

The instruments were all in French, oil pressure in “piazza’s”, I think 1 piazza was 16.4 PSI. I just painted green, yellow, and red marks on everything, and told everybody that flew it, “keep it in the green”. There were still no manuals, except one that I acquired, that was a pilot’s manual for flight maneuvers, which was in French. It dawned on me that the FAA guys couldn’t read French either, so I created my own manuals with the help from an engineer at Dassualt, in France. Eric had just bought a Falcon 50, so this guy was eager to help. I figured out one part on my own with a little French/ English dictionary. It translated, place the bottom over the top, and then the top over the bottom. Obviously this was a roll. Oh, there was another one, “feux de route”, which I figured out was “light of the way”, navigation lights.

As I said before, Sandy and I did this whole aircraft ourselves, except for one thing, I asked a fellow installing hangar doors across the taxiway to help us roll the wing over, which was like a gift from Providence, because he was Brad Miller’s father, and he told me about Brad’s experience with fuel injection, and telemetry.

I don’t know why I decided on the paint scheme, it was pretty complex for me to do from a wheelchair, what with the masking and all, but Sandy and I “got er done”.

This Nord was a French Air Force aerobatic trainer, and it was sure fun to fly. Eric had told me that I would have to go up with him on the first flight of the aircraft that I restored, which was fine with me, but when he came out to do the first test flight, he changed his mind, saying that he didn’t want to be concerned about me. I told him to take off, and circle overhead in case of a problem, but right after take-off, he headed northwest of the Scottsdale Airport, and when he was still in sight, we all saw him do a roll, and kept on going. He was gone a while, and when he taxied onto our ramp, he was smiling. After he climbed out, I asked him what needed to be fixed or adjusted, and he said, “don’t change anything, it’s perfect.” I couldn’t hardly believe what I was hearing, how could I possibly have put that pile of parts together with no manuals, and get it right the first time? Well, I was two for two, and this was quite a confidence builder. I told Eric that I was ready to take on the Sea Fury, but he said, not yet, I have another airplane that I want rebuilt. I asked what it was, and he said it was a Percival Prentice. I said that I had never heard of one of those, what the hell is it? He said that he had seen it in St.Thomas , and it was the ugliest airplane he had ever seen, so he bought it, had it ferried to Florida, and had found a guy to fly it to Scottsdale. I thought to myself, why would anybody buy the ugliest airplane he ever saw?

Larry

[Red]

Re: Critical Mass - Blind Man's Bluff = SPLIT THREAD

Larry,

Fascinating read! What is the white #75 in the background?