By: Budd Davisson Photos by: Tyson Rininger
The Thorp T-18 is just a year short of being 50 years old. Does that make it an antique or a well-experienced but still very current homebuilt design? We opt for the latter since many are still under construction, and plans and partial kits are available from Eklund Engineering, www.ThorpT18.com. The T-18 is just as useful now as it was in 1963; designs such as the T-18 are essentially ageless.
There is another angle to having a homebuilt design being half a century old: Lots of them are being rediscovered as projects or simply abandoned airplanes. Lee Walton's airplane could be considered to be both a project and an abandoned airplane. Lee, a corporate pilot turned software engineer from Houston, Texas, said, "Thorps have been in my family since I was very young. Dad and I built one beginning when I was four and fi nished it when I was eleven. We fl ew it all over the country together; it's the airplane I learned to fl y in.
EAA EXPERIMENTER 19