In June of 2014, Erik Hokuf and I took a road trip to Carthage MO to look over a very large collection of aircraft parts collected by Bob Hood. Mr. Hood had recently died and his nephew was working to sell off the inventory.
The parts were stored in a couple of large hangars located on what was once Meyer's Field, a busy airport with several active crop dusting operations. The airport was closed in 1996 and is now surrounded by Lowe's and Walmart making it totally land locked. The remnants of the runways are visible on Google Maps (
here).
I don't really remember why we made the road trip, but it was probably related to Erik's warbird restoration business (
AirCorps Aviation). At the time Erik was interested in a Stearman project and during the drive down to Missouri we agreed on some sort of partnership.
The hangar had a few semi-complete aircraft inside (a Beech AT-11 and a Super Cub for example) but was mostly filled with Stearman parts, We picked out the best looking tubular fuselage, a good set of landing gear, a set of exhaust shrouds and a few other odds and ends. The fuselage we bought appealed to us because it had been only very slightly modified for crop dusting and it still had a mostly full bird cage attached. The bird cage is the set of metal formers to which the fabric attaches creating the rounded shape of the fuselage.
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| Ours was hanging closes to the wall, over the door. |
We couldn't bring the fuselage back with us, so I made another trip the following week and swung by Peru Indiana to grab a Continental R-670 engine core that Erik owned. The R-670 is a 220 HP 7 cylinder engine that was the original engine on many Stearman.
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| Hauling fuselage and engine from Missouri to northern Minnesota |
Over the next couple of years, Erik and I continued to collect parts with the intention of building a flying airplane starting with just the fuselage we purchased. Building an aircraft strictly from parts is very ambitious, but we continued to acquire components here and there. Erik bought a significant cache of spare parts at an auction when the Red Baron Pizza Stearman Aerobatic team shut down. I negotiated the purchase of a hangar full of dusty parts located at the Lake. Elmo airport just south east of St. Paul. This purchase included two Stearman data plates and registrations. One of those I sold to someone else with a similar project and one I kept registered in my name. The registration and data plate I kept was for an N2S-5 variant of the Stearman. The N2S-5 was the Navy version and was supplied originally with a Lycoming R-680 225 HP engine.
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| Example of the St. Elmo parts cache. Everything covered with bird droppings |
We stored everything in a storage unit in Bemidji MN and at the AirCorps Aviation facility. At the same time, AirCorps was rebuilding a Stearman that had been flown by George H.W. Bush while he was doing his initial flight training in St.. Paul. This aircraft was restored by AirCorps to what is probably the most original condition of any Stearman and is an award winner. Erik and I were fortunate that when AirCorps had to fabricate a hard to find Stearman part for the restoration, they were often able to make an extra that we were then able to purchase and tuck away.
As part of the Bush Stearman restoration, AirCorps acquired a fuselage fixture that is used to ensure that any repairs done to a fuselage will result in a straight flying airplane. We had checked that the engine mount and landing gear would bolt up to our fuselage so we knew it wasn't too bad, but there were a couple of tweaks caused by a ground loop or two over the last 75 years. We took the fuselage fixture and fuselage to Javron in Brainerd MN where a couple tubes were replaced and all other dimensions and fitment were checked.
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| Fuselage sitting on top of the fixture at Javron |
