Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater

Fri, 22 Jul 2011

Biplane Dreams

If you've been following along for a while, you'll be aware that around 2006, I spent a lot of time thinking very hard about building a biplane. The linked page is largely obsolete as far as which model I'd select, but otherwise goes through my thought process pretty well.

Building a biplane is an utterly senseless thing to do. It's an exercise in silliness. Even with my new revised thoughts on the matter, it would still be a $20k build minimum, and the monthly costs would be ridiculous, probably on the order of $400-800 a month before ever starting the plane.

Yet, my aversion to doing senseless things hasn't particularly made me any happier. Certainly some senseless things haven't worked out like I might have hoped (for instance, racing a motorcycle really wasn't my cup of tea, for all the reasons I'd expected). But I spend a lot of time not doing things because that would be a silly thing to do. Buying new motorcycles. Asking girls out. Trying new things. Even trying new bicycle routes. Silly.

But none of that has brought me happiness. Oh, I have a kind of ho-hum, "everything's going just fine" baseline happiness going on, but without peaks and valleys, I can't tell the difference any more.

The problem, of course, is that most times I diverge from my established habits, I'm reminded why I established them in the first place. New (bigger) motorcycles are heavy and inefficient and generally suck for the kind of riding I do. New bicycle routes have extra hills or take longer. Girls, when asked out, often say no in the kindest but most crushing way. For every upside, there's a stronger downside.

And so, I've successfully argued myself out of building a biplane, for the gazillionth time. Only that's not really all that fun. Sometimes it's fun to just follow a whim and quit being so goddamn sensible all the time.

This is hardly a promise. But I can't escape the thought that I would truly enjoy spending a large amount of time working on a very demanding, precise project that will one day turn into an airplane of my very own.

The Random Biplane Thoughts

I started this adventure, way back in 2006, by discovering a Loehle Spad XIII. I quickly discarded that as being too small for me, among other things. I lingered for a long while on the Fisher Celebrity, a mostly wood design, but eventually decided it too was too small. I finally decided that the Acrosport II was the right thing, then calculated what it would actually cost, and gave up on the idea.

Now, 5 years later, my thoughts run along similar lines, but I am more aware that what I don't want is an aerobatic plane. Those are fine for them as likes 'em, but that's not what I want to do. I just want to putter around in the sky. So now I'm thinking about a Ragwing Special II, another all-wood design that's described as being a good puttering-about-the-sky plane, as oppose to anything with acrobatic pretentions.

I was actually looking forward to learning to weld on a project like this, so I might consider making the fuselage out of 4130 instead of wood, if such an option is available.

Engines are another total toss-up. See the discussion on that biplane page I linked at the top, it's still pretty much all valid. Some of the choices have downsized, and I'd consider an AeroVee into the mix, but there's still no clear winner. There's no such thing as a good compromise between cost, weight, power, reliability and maintenance cost. Every engine excels at one or two of those things, and sucks hard and one or two.

The bottom line of all this is that I'm still in a weird exaggerated-clown-shrug (™ Alex B.) state of mind about the whole thing. I want to do it. I can't justify it. I can't believe what a fun-crusher I've become. Lather/rinse/repeat.

Posted at 00:20 permanent link category: /aviation


Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater