Builders.
The Contents of the box in the picture are a complete set of Lycoming and Continental cylinder wrenches. The were once every day tools of my late friend Dick Philips. He gave them to me 12 years ago. It was something of an honor, Dick was a bad-ass aircraft mechanic of the first order, and the gift came with the unspoken understanding that I had learned things from him, and had the obligation to give his life’s work some immortality and continuity. Dick had already been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him.
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Although I am an Embry-Riddle trained A&P for more than 30 years, and have owned both Lycomings and Continentals, I don’t do that much work on them. I have enough stuff to do with Corvairs, that I could work them and installation components 10 hours a day for every day I have left on earth. I came across the wrenches cleaning up, and spent some time thinking about Dick, now gone a decade. Time for the wrenches to move on, continue the validation that the skills and ethics of hard core aircraft mechanics are perpetual.
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Kevin Purtee is known both as a very accomplished homebuilder and pilot of his corvair powered Pietenpol, but also as a combat military pilot. In recent years he has continued to fly helicopters in the civilian world, but has expanded his skill sets to flight instructing and A&P maintenance. Perfect candidate for continuity of Dick Philips skills and values. Into the box they went.
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By deciding to build your own aircraft, and build the engine for it, you are reaffirming all the things that made Dick Phillips’s post war career in aviation meaningful. Your life is better for it, better for deciding that aviation for you will not be just another consumer experience. Stay with it, invest in yourself with skills and understanding, and if follow the path long enough, you just might turn out to be someone’s Dick Phillips.
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Dick Phillips was my friend and neighbor here at the airpark. He was something of a mentor to me, not fully on mechanical matters, but on how a man of ethics conducts himself in a world that presents daily, a string of petty, small and corrupt people. By example, he led his life on his own terms, and he didn’t care if it wasn’t popular nor apparently lucrative. There was nothing a man would gain by giving up being himself.
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I have included below a story I wrote after his passing. It is worth your time. Some of the photo links expired in the last decade, but the moral of the mans life is still there.
Ironic postscript: Dicks original place at our airport was a super cool 40′ x 40′ concrete hangar with an A frame house on top of it. It sits on one acre, right on the southern end of our runway. After he passed, his widow revealed that Dick driving a 35 year old truck and being frugal was a facade; he was actually quite wealthy, and had secretly donated cubic yards of funds to peoples aviation education. She said that Dick had loved the place, and asked me to find any good person for it. The money wasn’t important, she just wanted someone to enjoy it as Dick had decades earlier. She asked for $50K, and was willing to hold it as an interest free loan for 10 years. The first person I offered it to was Mark from Falcon machine, my friend in WI who rebuilt Corvair heads for years. After 30 days he declined, saying Florida was “Too full of rednecks” . The next day I offered it to Ron the drummer, who signed the papers that afternoon. He has lived there every day since. With the escalation of property values here, he has been offered six and a half times what he paid for it, but he doesn’t care. He views every day of his life here as invaluable, he doesn’t see the world as dollar signs. Dick would have concured with that perspective.
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William
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