As Bob Highley suggested in the FB group, I am finally starting a project thread here on .NET! I have been lurking this forum and the FB group for a while now but let me introduce myself. I'm Pete Geraci and I've been a mechanic for 25 years, starting in the Air Force, a few years at a GA flight school and then corporate jets for the last 18 where I've mostly specialized in avionics. I earned my private certificate in 2005 and have flown when I can although not nearly as much as I would like! That said, 2020 I was ready to start a father/sons project building an RV-14(boo I know!). Like many people, COVID changed a few plans and I decided that might have been a bad time for a major project. Talking with one of my friends at work, he told me the tale of a Thorp, how he came to own it, what his plans were, and how life events had taken his ability to really devote the time to it.
So, What started as helping a friend shed the cost of storing it, ended up with it occupying my garage for the last 2 years. As best as I can understand, This airframe was build by James Dewberry of Alabama and received its first CofA in 1972. According to the dataplate, it first flew with an O-290 and spent more time getting modified than flown. According to the airframe log it took nearly 21 years, 1993, to reach its first 40 hours! It then flew quite a bit for a while but was disassembled for storage in January of 2002 with 256 hours. The logbook is quiet for 11 years when suddenly it was fitted with a Lycoming O-360, went back to phase 1 for a few hours, and the last airframe logbook entry is the end of March 2012, when at 261.3 hours, it was returned to phase 2.
The owner at the time had trouble with ground handling and ran off the side of a taxi way (I'll go into my theory on that another day, no spoilers FB!). June of 2012, he removed the damaged Hartzell CS prop/governor, dialed the crank(.002), and installed a Sterba FP wooden propeller.
My friend traded his Cessna 152 for this, looking forward to the "Thorp Experience"! Unfortunately, a fuel leak developed in the custom built fiberglass fuel tank. He purchased the plans at that time with the intent of fabricating the fuel tank as drawn to install it and quickly discovered that the original builder had gone off the map with a custom tank, mounts, firewall supports, a set of modified Cessna rudder pedals and brake cylinders. The fiberglass tank was also smaller (I think 15 gallons), allowing for a full depth center avionics stack after the panel was relocated aft approximately 5 inches. So what started as going back to a plans built tank has tsunami'ed.
I was initially asked to evaluate it, see if it was even worth saving. The sad reality is, if the guys working for me weren't cheap, it would easily be beyond economical repair. For that fact, it would probably be easier and cheaper to buy the kit from Cubes and build! But, it landed in the lap of a nostalgic coot that has a knack for breathing new life into old stuff.
The tach, covered in dust sitting in a box of radios and gauges, reads 270.3 hours. The wings hang in racks from my garage ceiling, the tail feathers on the back wall. The engine found my homemade stand and the fuselage is casually hanging off of both ends of EAA 1000 inspired workbenches. A care package from Cubes showed up not so long ago with a new firewall and some misc. parts. So the question is, how good is an avionics guy at sheet metal!
