Last weekend I went to the Golden Age Air Museum at Grimes airport in PA. A pleasant grass field an hour away. They don't have a lot of aircraft but do have many projects. Most interesting was a Curtiss Jenny. The fuselage and tail are essentially complete allowing for a detailed study of the construction of this craft. The structure is all wood with double wire bracing everywhere. Longerons are ash while the rest is spruce. All the wraparound fittings have lightening holes in them. Copper sheets are wrapped around wooden members where bolts go through; they are nailed on and the ends are soldered together. It would be hard to make the structure more complex.

They do have a flyable Taylor E-2 and an Aeronca C-3. The layout of the control cables was direct to the stick; simple and very visible. Also, since the gas tank is above the pilots knees, they put a heavy pad on the back of it to protect your head in a crash and mounted the instruments deeply recessed below it.

They were giving rides in a 1931 Kinner Bird CK . This is one of only 39 ever built and is a 4 place biplane with 3 passengers in the front pit. The Bird was built in Brooklyn and trucked to Roosevelt Field for assembly. It's hard to find a prettier biplane than a Bird. You'll have to go a long way to see another.

I missed the Monster Garage building of the flying auto. I forgot the first program and was in the middle of PA for the second, but I'm sure that they will repeat it. The July issue of Popular Mechanics has a story on it and a cover picture. Why they chose such a heavy car I don't know.

The Monster Garage project was cute to watch, but the magazine article tells the real story. Even though it did fly for a short distance, you would be hard pressed to call it a plane. More like a ground effect vehicle. Grimes sounds like a good place to stop, got to put it on my list.

Hatz: wings waiting for ailerons, which will be started real soon. Armed with a friends Starduster II plans, construction photos of Pitts Special wings at the Steen Aero Lab website and some cardboard templates, I finally figured how I am going to make them. That was the hard part. Now the easy part, make them. I am surprised how heavy the 11’ wing panels are. The steel compression tubes and drag/anti-drag wires and fittings amount to a sizeable percentage of the total weight. Bert Sisler did a great job of doing without those items in the Cygnet.

The annual Hatz fly-in in Wisconsin is the weekend before Oshkosh. I would like to go and see how others handled a lot of details. I have something else going on that weekend, so I may not make it.

Steve is in the U.A.E. until around 7/4. The daytime temperatures are off the scale. He is playing with construction equipment, welding, fabricating, etc. I wonder what the density altitude gets to when it is 130 on the runway. They operate tankers from that base.

Went to the 891 fly-in at Sussex on Sunday. Not much going on. E.C. Moore had his Rans there, it is a real beauty. It won best fabric at Sun-N-fun last year.

Happy Flying