Source: 2022 Q1 Beartracks, Todd Stock
Built half a Lancair 235 with my dad back in the late 1980’s, but was torn between going retro (a LongEze) and really retro (a Bearhawk Patrol) for a bucket-list ‘ease-into-retirement’ build (retirement = cut back from 100 hours a week to maybe 60-70 and spend even more time in the shop). The why of picking the Patrol?
Let me explain…
In the late 1970’s, I was a military flight instructor at Fort Rucker, AL (affectionately known to us Army flyers as Mother Rucker due as much to the place’s roll in birthing service pilots as to the reality of living and working in rural southeast Alabama. While the beaches of Panama City and Destin/Fort Walton were a few hour’s drive away, and the Big Easy a three-day weekend destination, my idea of fun was a J-3 down at Wheeless Field that I could rent wet for $16 an hour. While Alabama might not be every 20-something military aviator’s idea of big fun, it was a fascinating place from 50 feet above the Pea River on a summer’s evening, popping up into a return-to-target on the sharper bends and seeing how low I could manage on the straights. The area was used by the Army for tactical flight training 5-6 days a week, so no one was too surprised to see that sort of low altitude stuff… lots of friendly waves from the bass fishermen provided I eased up a bit when overhead.
I had a ball flat-hatting around southern Alabama, southwestern Georgia, and the Florida panhandle in that J-3, and the memory of that experience – along with the idea that the guy that dies with the most diverse set of skills wins – decided the issue. I’d never done much sheet metal or welding work, but had had mine and a couple other people’s fill of sanding and filling composites, so the combination of required skills to get a from-scratch Patrol airborne was ultimately what sold me.
A check went out to Bob on January 11th, 2022, and most of February was spent buried in MDF dust and working through the forming process with scrapes of aluminum from previous home and shop projects or the local metal place’s scrap bins.
The middle of last week, the first metal order from Spruce arrived and a day later, I got to work reducing three 4 x 8 sheets of .025 to the rough-cut stock in the shot.
Yesterday was ‘Mod the $80 Harbor Freight Leaf Brake Day’ which coincided with the ‘Learn to Flux Weld Shop Stuff Day.’ Some really ugly welds ensued, but enough with reasonable penetration to do the job on reinforcing the pressure plate and allowing repeatable setbacks.
Net steps are getting the 032 and 020 ribs out and the routing to final shape done… wrapping the router table area of my shop in plastic to keep the chips contained is a definite plan, along with keeping that stuff out of the smoke containment system of the 2-1/4 hp DeWalt router in the table.