Experimenter is a magazine created by EAA for people who build airplanes. We will report on amateur-built aircraft as well as ultralights and other other light aircraft.
Issue link: http://experimenter.epubxp.com/i/81495
You Can't Keep a Good Plane Down Lee Walton and his newly restored T-18. "When Dad passed away, we sold the airplane to a close friend, Wendell Green, in Fort Worth and made him promise to not change anything, and he didn't. Twenty-two years later, in 2009, I took it to the Sun 'n Fun Fly-In and won Grand Champion Custom Built; that was 29 years after it was built with no changes done to it." Lee graduated from college with a computer science degree but decided he'd prefer a career in aviation. With that goal, he started fl ying corporate/charter, but after fi ve years, he discovered that in the corporate aviation world his schedule still wouldn't allow him to engage in the kind of aviation he loved most. "It wasn't until I switched over to software that I had time to consider owning an airplane," he said, "and the fi rst one that came to mind was a T-18. Wendell still owned Dad's Thorp, but I couldn't bring myself to ask him to sell it to me. However, he knew of a Thorp airframe that had been sitting in the back of a hangar for more than ten years. I looked at it, and even though it was incredibly fi lthy, it didn't look bad at all. "The airplane had been a fl ying airplane, but at one point it had been damaged when it came down in a cornfi eld. That chewed up the belly and the ailerons, but not enough to make them unairworthy. They were, however, not built straight and had too much Bondo in too many places. I reskinned both outer panels to get them straight, using a parallel-bar jig to hold them square." John Thorp's Design John Thorp conceived the T-18 as an economical, easy-to-build, around-the-patch airplane that could be towed home. (By pulling pit-pins, the wing would drop out of the bottom and would be cradled lengthwise along the top of the fuselage, top side down.) However, it's highly unlikely that even one T-18 was built to that concept. The original drawings showed the aircraft with an open cockpit, with a converted, $125-surplus Lycoming O-290-G ground power unit engine driving a fi xed-pitch prop. The cylinders were exposed J-3 Cub style. 20 NO. 1 / SEPTEMBER 2012