Category: Uncategorized

Builders,

There was once a time when the word “Truck” designated a vehicle that was defined by doing work. Somewhere along the way to suburbia and middle age  Americans forgot the simple joy of basic trucks, and went down the path of making them expensive, complicated, difficult to work on, and devoid of sensory experience. There is an aviation analogy of how we went from enjoying a J-3 as a great plane to discovering that a $200k euro-912 gps LSA is only a better experience in the eyes of an AOPA editor.

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I got my drivers license in 1978, although I have owned a number of Chevrolet Corvairs and two 1960s Buicks, the majority of my driving has been in Chevy and GMC trucks.  I have never owned an import, nor have I ever owned a new car or truck. Between payments, insurance and service I never had, perhaps a saved $250k. Not really a lot spread over all those years,  but I would argue the reward was the self reliance.

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In 38 years of driving, I have only called a tow truck once. I have plenty of friends who always bought new, swore by import quality, never drove stuff after it was 5 years old, all because they “need something reliable” , and I am pretty sure these guys always had triple A and used it at least every other year. 

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For what it’s worth, I have caused exactly one accident since 1978. In 1992 I side swiped a parked car. I have been a passenger in a few others, but I have not even scraped another car in a parking lot, in spite of these trucks having no modern ‘safety ‘ features. Avoiding accidents has a lot more to do with the driver than the vehicle, but you could never explain that in s society where very few people ever see things as their fault. .

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Above, the suburbans dash after the western tour. Remember when a truck could be its own log book, tool box and trash can?  We have given up more than we have received, and that is the essential message of simplicity.

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Above, my ’59 GMC making a practice run at the actual Englishtown NJ drag strip in 1984. It was geared so low it hit terminal velocity (57 mph) in 600′. It ran 23.35 seconds in the quarter mile. Don’t laugh, it beat a stock Super Beetle that day. I used the truck  to recycle cars during the period of astronomically high scrap prices in 1983-84.

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Below is a selected list of  my old fleet. The number in parentheses is how old the truck was when I got it, followed by the price I paid. The second line is engine, trams and axle ratio.

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It’s ironic that people couldn’t understand why I drove a 17 year old truck in high school, and today my suburban is 23 years old, my pick up is 30, and my Corvair Convertible is 50 this year. It is a hard day when you suddenly realize you have become that “crazy old man with antique cars” you remember from your home town. 

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59 GMC wrecker (23) $400 

235 six, Muncie 420 4 speed, 5.57

Driven 40k, traded for Thermoquad carb.

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64 K-10 suburban (19) $600

283 v-8, Muncie 420 4 speed, 3.73

Driven 20k, sold for $600

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65 C-10 fleet side (17) $400

283 v-8, Muncie 420 4 speed, 3.73

Driven 75k , sold for $450. 

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77 Gmc K-2500 (6) $1,500

350 v-8, THM-350 auto , 4.11

Driven 100k, sold in parts.

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83 GMC S-15 4wd (3) $4,500

2.8L v-6 , BW T-5 five speed, 3.42

Driven 200k, sold for $400.

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86 GMC C-1500 blue (13) $1,600

350 v-8, THM-400 auto , 3.73

Driven from 160k to 300k, scrapped.

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86 Chevy C-30 white (21) $2,450

350 v-8, THM-400 auto, 4.11

Driven 70k, being converted to 3-53t

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86 Chevy C-20 red (26) $2,000

350 v-8, NV-4500 five speed, 3.42

Driven 60k, still in service

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93 Chevy S-10 4wd, 4dr. (13) $1,300

4.3 v-6, 4L60E auto, 3.42

Driven 40k, given away on I-95 , 12/24

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93 Chevy C-1500 suburban (20) $1,700

350 v-8, 4L60E auto, 3.42

Driven 55K, still in service

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Builders, 

In this political season, opposing perspectives will attempt to portray the other side of the aisle as nothing short of evil. Tonight I share a New York Times obituary and a disturbing souvenir from the Wynne family china cabinet as a reminder of what real political evil actually is.

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Above, a silver plate from Commodore Vong Sarendy, Chief of Naval Operations of the Cambodian Navy, presented to my father in the summer of 1974.  It was to express his country’s gratitude for my father’s extraordinary efforts to thwart the Cambodian Communists in his country’s civil war. It was a bitter presentation, as US support for the democratic government was faltering, in spite of JFK’s call to arms that we would “Pay any Price, bear any burden and meet any hardship to insure the survival of liberty.” Sarendy said to my father that the Americans could go home, but he and his family would stay and fight to the death. Within a year, they had perished, the Khmer Rouge owned the country, and the Satanic Pol Pot began a systematic genocide that took the lives of two million people, 25% of the people in the country. During the four years it took to fill up the 20,000 mass graves,  China was Pol Pot’s tireless supporter, supplying tens of thousands of soldiers to assist him. 

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Above, the NYT obituary of Sydney Schanberg from July 10th. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his work attempting to warn the western world that the Khmer Rouge were as vicious as the Nazis. His writings were the basis of the 1984 film “The Killing Fields. ” Schanberg is in the center smoking. On the right is his assistant Dith Pran who went on to survive four years in some of the most brutal tourture camps of the 20th century.

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Today was a good day for my family. It was the first day my father was home in three months.  After dinner, where he was restored to sitting at the head of the family table,  we  reminisced over past moments with 3 of the 4 children present. We later put dad to bed, and the last thing he softly said was “I didn’t think I would make it home again.”

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It is now the middle of the night, and I sit a quiet watch at his bedside. My sister will relieve me at 6am. Through the long night I will type this and spend the hours looking for the words to express my father’s absolute hatred of Satanic totalitarian political movements and the carnage they have caused to humanity.

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From the time he swore into the US Navy at age 17, my father has been willing to give anything, including his life, to defeat   Evil regimes. Then it was the Facists and the cult of death Hirohito preached. Today it is ISIS, and somewhere in between, in the 1970s it was the Khmer Rouge.  The earth has supplied an endless stream of Satanic tyrants,  but in my father’s view, this didn’t justify accepting   the existence of any of them. 
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Tomorrow I could turn on any cable news station, or read countless Face Book pages, and within minutes I could see someone call their political adversaries Nazis, Evil or Satanic.  This might be just a sad joke, except for the fact there are Americans among us who know what real evil is.  I am not a blind fan of either party or their candidates, but I can discern between today’s crop of  ethically challenged  offerings and a purely evil  entity like Pol Pot. No matter who is elected in November, our country will go on, and anyone who suggests we are headed for the national nightmare Cambodia experienced is paranoid or emotionally unstable.

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A few miles from my house is a  simple convenience store called “Hwy. 17 Beverage.”  When I walked in ten years ago, the  owner and family patriarch was slightly stunned that I could tell is family was from Cambodia.  He mentioned that no other neighbor in rural Florida had understood this. He went on to say he had survived his country’s own holocaust, but had come to accept that the great majority of the  people born in his adoptive country didn’t have the slightest idea of how fourtunate the are. When I think of this man watching a national debate or reading extreme political opinions on Face Book,  I cringe, and harbor the hope he has a great sense of tolerance and a generous sense of understanding .

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Builders, 

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Above, I hold my father’s hand as he sleeps. This is the hand which held me the day I was born, the hand which taught me to write, the hand that shook mine the day I graduated from College. In this hour I sit beside his bed and consider with great humility, just how small my life would have been without him. 

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Pearl Buck was an American woman with very progressive ideas on the value of human lives, particularly the lives of the voiceless impoverished of Asia. In 1938 she was awarded the Noble Prize for literature, for her novel “The Good Earth.”  Buck was deeply concerned with the rights of women at a time when the world was not.

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After WWII, Buck used her power and wealth to set up orphanages, schools and adoption agencies across Asia, focused on caring for mixed race children who were treated as unadoptable and without human value, not just in their countries, but sadly in ours as well. 

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The year I was born, there was a girl born in the slums of Manilla. As an Amer-Asian she had  no value nor future in her society.  By great fortune, the Pearl Buck Foundation had a place for her. A cynic could question the value of such places, even say it isn’t an Americans place to impose our values in other cultures. A cynic could do this, but I can’t for the simplest of reasons: that tiny girl in Manilla is today the highly experienced pulmonary Doctor who is directing the care of my father tonight.

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In a season where it has become acceptable to proclaim that America is either a commercial enterprise worshiping wealth or a playground for empathy-free narsisists, it is good to pause and remind ourselves the America which is worthy of our devotion is actually a set of ideals, focused on the human rights of individuals and the common humanity of people. 

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While there are is large number of people born in this land who have willfully forgotten this, I can assure you there are many people in the world who understand that America, although flawed, is still the shining city on the hill, a land of ideals which has produced and shielded many champions of human dignity. A person exposed to just popular culture and media could cynically question this, but I have met a woman in New Jersey who could change their mind.

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-ww.

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Builders,

I made it back home on July 3rd. We have about 15 days in the shop it make parts and prepare before departing for Brodhead and Oshkosh.  It was a great trip, I directly worked with more than 120 builders, who made a lot of progress and learned a lot, all while having fun with other traditional home builders.

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The pink line on the map is the route track, the arrows a places I spent the night in route. Only one night was in a motel, the rest was staying with friends or camping.  The high tech graphics package here is a map from Cracker Barrel and a crayon. It appealed to my grease monkey level of sophistication.

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The suburban pulling the trailer of tools got 10.5 mpg average on the trip, not great, but not bad for a truck that cost $1,700 when I bought it from Northrop Grumman 34 months and 54,000 miles ago.

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During  the trip I flew commercial two round trips across the continent, and drove a 1,000 mile leg from NJ to FL. All totaled, it was about 19,000 miles of travel March 28 to July 3. 

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For all the builders we worked with, the engines run, and the house calls made, not one person paid a single dime. The trip is a demonstration of my commitment to traditional home builders, now in my 27th year in our industry.  When Internet personalities claim I am solely motivated by money, and that I don’t place builders interests first, let  our 2016 Western College Tour stand as evidence to the contrary. If you want to make progress and achieve your own goals in home building and flying, it is a smart bet to follow proven people rather than the council of critics.

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Builders,

I took the morning today to stop at the Zenith factory in Mexico MO. and see Sebastien and crew. Although we will be in the same spot at Oshkosh in 3 weeks, we wanted to coordinate plans for Zenith’s 25th open house in September.

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Our contribution to the event is Dan Weseman and myself run a complete Corvair assembly and test run, start to finish on Friday.  This will not be a traditional College, but it is an excellent opportunity to observe in detail our procedures and techniques. The event is free and doesn’t require signing up. We will be doing the work in the same spot were Dan and I ran Corvair College #34 last year. We will have more details in the next week, but I suggest getting a look at Zenith’s website and planning on attending. 

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After lunch, I began the last leg of the western tour, which started with my departure for Texas on March 28th. 

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It is over a thousand miles to our place in Florida, but I know the route well. My first trip to Zenith was in 2003 to pick up our 601XL kit. In the following years I have been back 14 times for open houses and Colleges . The section from Mt. Vernon IL to Jacksonville FL is the same path we take to and from Oshkosh, the same route we took to the SAA fly ins , and to some of the KR gatherings. In the last 25 years I have driven 40 or 45 round trips on it. In 21 days I will be headed back north to Oshkosh on the same route, like an old migratory bird.

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Above, a photo out the side door of my hanger in Florida. A little dog comes out to see what’s going on.

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Update: Sept.9, 2016

Craig’s plane has been flying since the week after Oshkosh. It has about 20 hours on it. It has required a few detail airframe adjustments, a normal expectation on a plans built plane built by a first time builder. When I inspected the plane on my trip, I made a number of small suggestions that the FAA had missed on their ‘airworthiness inspection’  (they are just looking at paperwork ) I also took a great number of digital pictures that I shared with the Designer Bob Barrows at Oshkosh. Bob, took the time to further suggest refinements to Craig. To his credit, Craig didn’t get a defensive attitude, he took the advice, and this is a significant factor in his test program advancing smoothly.-ww.

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Builders:

Continuing East, I stopped in central Iowa for a six hour house call / inspection on Craig Owen’s 2,850cc Bearhawk LSA. It received it’s airworthiness inspection directly from the FAA the day before. It is the first Corvair/Bearhawk. There are several others under construction.

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Above, Craig Owen’s Corvair Bearhawk LSA. It was built from plans, it took 39 months, and was Craig’s first plane. He is determined,  and  looks upon learning new skills as a challenge, not an obstacle. He is currently finishing his flight training in an Interstate Cadet, a good  trainer for the Bearhawk  in an excellent example of good decision making, he has an experienced pilot  to fly the test time. Although the FAA lost its mind and made it legal to bring owners as non essential passengers on test flights, no  sane person does this.

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First take away: The FAA inspection inspects the paperwork, and has absolutely  no assurance of airworthiness.  the people they send and many DARs  have missed things that killed people on first flights. A plane having an Airworthiness  certificate still needs experienced builders to look at it and an owner willing to accept suggestions of improvement.

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Second take away: on the net this week, there will be  some personality trying to sell the idea that I am just motivated by profit, and I don’t care about builders, and I am an opinionated jackass.  When reading that, ask how making free* house calls on a 7,500 mile tour ( Craig’s is mile 6,250 ) of free Corvair Colleges is evidence of being a person driven by profit who doesn’t care about builders?

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Full disclosure: the house call wasn’t really free, Craig paid for my hamburger and fries at his local diner….and I do plead guilty to being an opinionated jackass, but it happens that my 27 years of working on Corvair engines makes my opinions on them valid, even if I made fun of someone’s favorite celebrity or politicians, didn’t respond to their FB friend request, or publicly corrected them when they were saying it was Egypt that attacked the USS Liberty. I do those things just to keep my Christmas card list short.

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Builders,

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Above, Rt. 12 headed in North Dakota. The landscape displaced all thoughts of life’s concerns elsewhere. In 125 miles of driving I saw only one other car, going the other way. Places like this never seem lonely to me, that is something I am much more likely to feel crowded places and cities.

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North Dakota was the only state I had never been to. Getting to every state had been a small goal of mine for a long time. I have actually driven to 49 of them, including riding to Alaska. It gives a a continuity to your appreciation for distance, climate and geography that arriving on a commercial flight doesn’t. 

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Likewise, I have been to almost all of these places either by motorcycle or old truck with the windows rolled down, methods of travel that put you “in” the setting. 

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I have stayed in people’s homes and  camped out far more than I have patronized corporate motels, eaten in dive diners more than restaurant chains,  had more beer in VFW halls than tourist spots. My grease monkey wardrobe is out of place among Oshkosh’s embroidered polo shirts, but out here in working rural America, it is a standard uniform were people’s actions matter more than their appearance of affluence.

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I live in a State with a tourism economy, and it is very obvious that people who travel with the mindset and mannerisms of tourists never get much of the actual feel of my state, certainly no understanding of what makes it unique. I detest the way that Corporate consumer culture has homogenized much of our country,  but you can still find all the strong character that has resisted this as long as you are willing to slow down and listen, and trade the mannerisms and expectations of  a tourist for the eyes and empathy of  John Steinbeck or Robert Persig.

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Builders, 

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The airport in Livingston Montana is on a plateau several hundred feet above the town. Looking at any point on the compass provided a view of 10,000′ mountains. Above is the view to the south.  Yellowstone National Park lies on the same heading, 30 miles away.  Home in Florida is still 2,650 miles away.

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Above the Yellowstone river on an empty I-94.

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Builders;

The last stop on the West Coast of our Corvair tour has been Portland Oregon, were I met three Zenith builders. We planned to rapidly finish the assembly on their engines on Saturday, and run them on Sunday at EAA chapter 105s facilities at the twin oaks airport. 

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Above, L to R, Vance Lucas, Alberta, 750 builder; Daryl Habit, Oregon, 601XL builder, Spencer Rice, Oregon, 601HD builder. Spencer just turned 18, but has been plans building for 3 years. He earned a private pilot license and flew to Oshkosh in 2015.

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Above, Vance and his 3,000 cc / 120 HP engine during the perfect break in run. His 750 is nearly done. Vance also attended the Corvair Colleges we held at the Zenith factory in Mexico MO.

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Above, Daryl stands with his 2,700 cc / 100 HP engine just after a great run. The only thing that eclipses this moment is the fist flight of your plane.
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Above, Spencer wrenching on his 2700 cc engine on Saturday. We did the assembly at Spencer’s home, and all enjoyed the hospitality of his family. All three builders now know their engines inside and out, they are the builders of these engines, not just the owners.

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Above,  Daryl at the last step, adjusting the valves. Corvair engines all have hydraulic lifters, and set once on assembly they run the full life of the engine without further adjustments.

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Above, Daryl strikes the traditional “Captian Morgan” pose we do for fun when your Corvair runs. He began the assembly last month at Corvair College #38 in Cloverdale CA, at Zenith’s west coast facilities

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Our excellent relations with the Zenith factory started 13 years ago when Grace and I bought, built and flew our 601xl, the first Corvair powered Zenith. Since then we have assisted more than 100 zenith builders to build the engine and take it flying. It isn’t for everyone, but for the people who choose to work with us, we offer excellent support, like driving across the continent to run your engine with you, which btw, we do for free. If you have ever wondered where my strong ‘fan club’ comes from, the answer is we built it one builder at a time, at events just like the one above.

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Builders: 

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A Grumman, now retired from two careers , rests in the field next to the airport at Weed California. Last light of the day illuminates 14,000′  Mt. Shasta in the distance. Western tour rolls on. 

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