By Budd Davisson, EAA 22483
This story first ran in the November/December 2019 issue of Vintage Airplane.
The tradition of naming sons after their fathers often causes confusion. In addition, it makes it difficult to tell the story of a given Taylorcraft when both Tom Jr. and Tom Sr. have owned several. And that’s what this is: It’s the tale of two Toms and three, maybe four, Taylorcrafts, one of which, a prewar BC-12-65 Deluxe, was brought to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2018 by Tom Jr.
Tom the elder has a long, long history in sport aviation. So long that it predates the birth of EAA. “My dad owned a drilling company, and we had a grain farm,” he said. “In 1946, at the age of 14, I went to work for the drilling company and, though [it’s] not in my logbook, I also had my first flying lesson in a brand-new J-3 Cub. In 1948, the company bought a 1946 PA-12 Cruiser and built a runway on the farm.
“I worked for the drilling company until I was drafted in 1952, when I spent 16 months in Korea at the government’s expense,” Tom Sr. said. “In 1955, I got serious about learning to fly the Cruiser and got my PPL in ’57. In 1960, EAA Chapter 16 moved to Effingham, Illinois. I joined the chapter and became EAA member 9196. The chapter decided we were going to build a Stits Playboy, but by 1963 interest had waned, and I wound up buying and finishing it myself. As the Playboy neared completion in 1967, the drilling company decided to sell the PA-12.”
It is the rare airplane builder who doesn’t actively look for a new project right after finishing one. An empty workshop is a sad sight, and Tom Sr. knew that.
“One day,” he said, “I told the owners of a ragged, but flying, prewar Taylorcraft B Model that I would like to buy their airplane if they were interested in selling. Shortly after that, a windstorm came along and damaged the hangar the airplane was stored in. Then they disassembled it and sold it to someone else. I missed my chance.
“I knew the new owner and asked him if he wanted to sell it and got the answer you hear so often in this kind of conversation: ‘Nah, I’m going to put it together someday.’ You know the rest of the story.
“Apparently, ‘someday’ never arrived because I saw it on a trailer being trucked through town,” Tom Sr. said. “Someone had beaten me to it. But I recognized the truck pulling the trailer as belonging to one of my customers, so I at least knew who had it. You never know. As it was, however, I was building an upholstery business and a new family so, to be realistic about it, I didn’t have the time to restore it, even if he sold it to me. But that didn’t stop me from thinking about it.”
According to Tom Sr. the new owner put the airplane back together and began flying it, but after a few years it was taken apart and put back in storage. “Almost every time I saw him, I asked if he was ready to sell the airplane, making sure he knew I wanted to buy it,” he said. “Then, one day right out of the blue, he called and asked if I was still interested in the airplane. He was having health issues and had others begging him to sell them the airplane to clip the wings Duane Cole-style. He didn’t want that to happen to the airplane and knew I would be a good caretaker. That was in 1983, and I drove down as soon as I could to pick it up and began working on it.”
What Tom Sr. seldom mentions is that when he sold the Playboy, he acquired another Taylorcraft, this one flying, on trade. It stayed with him for less than a year.
Enter Tom Jr.
“By the time Dad bought the Taylorcraft to restore, I was well into aviation,” Tom Jr. said. “I was less than a year old the first time he took me up in the back of the Cruiser, and as much as a 4-year-old could, I helped him out with the Playboy. Around the neighborhood I was known as ‘the kid whose dad has an airplane in the garage,’ which I thought was cool. Whatever he did, I tagged along. By 14, I had taken my first lesson in a new Piper Tomahawk and soon was getting instruction in the 7ECA Citabria Dad had bought. After I turned 16, I started working at the local airport mowing grass and cleaning, gradually working my way into the shop. Out of high school I continued to work at the airport for a year before going to school to get my A&P. After that, I went right back to the airport to work as a mechanic. In 1996, big changes happened: I purchased the FBO and became manager of the Olney-Noble Airport in Noble, Illinois, and, among other things, became a Flight Design dealer.
“While all of this was going on, I was also flying Dad’s Taylorcraft and decided I wanted one of my own,” he said. “While I was working at the airport as a teenager, the mechanic had a Taylorcraft. One Saturday morning, he took me for a flight. Upon returning he sent me to town to pick up lunch. By the time I returned, the wings and tail surfaces had been removed. As often seems to be the case with projects like this, it wound up in storage. Who knew that a few years later, in 1988, I would wind up buying this airplane? My original intent was to clip the wings and make it aerobatic, but it was too historically significant. It still had the original round control wheels and big tachometer. In fact, all of the instruments were original. Plus, it had been in the World War II CPT program. With all that going for it, how could I butcher something so original? So I spent a few years restoring it, took it to Oshkosh in ’94, and won the Grand Champion Antique award. Being only 30 years old, I was very surprised.”
Tom Jr. eventually bought a clipped Taylorcraft project, but between family and business obligations, he doesn’t have time to work on it, especially since he can fly his dad’s Taylorcraft. He also bought a BC-12D needing an engine overhaul, but that was a business deal.
An Airport Fender Bender: Another Restoration
When Tom Sr. tracked down and bought his BC-12-65, he found it wasn’t just any prewar B-model Taylorcraft, of which there were 2,400 built with either Continental, Franklin, or Lycoming engines before the war shut down civilian production lines. About 900 were built in 1941. This one, however, was one of the few designated as Deluxe. “No one actually knows exactly how many Deluxes were built, because they were built alongside the trainer models,” Tom Sr. said. “There are about 150 still on register with the FAA that were likely Deluxe models.
“The Deluxe versions had lots of cosmetic upgrades that you don’t expect to see in a Taylorcraft,” he explained. “T-crafts are usually thought of as utilitarian, meat-and-potatoes airplanes. The Deluxe versions, however, had art deco touches like wood-grain trim and chrome accents inside and out. Plus, its upholstery was much higher grade. The whole effect is what you’d find in something like a Packard limo of the day. While this airplane didn’t have most of the original instruments, it did still have most of the Deluxe trim, and I kept it as intact as possible while restoring it and flew it that way for nearly 18 years. Then I had a little problem at the airport.”
When someone restores an airplane, they strive to keep it safe from all possible threats. From weather to hangar fires to ground loops and beyond, there are about a million things for owners to worry about. Some things, however, are simply out of their control.
“It was a warm September evening in 2005,” Tom Sr. said. “I had gone to the airport to help a friend troubleshoot a rough-running engine on a Jungster 1 biplane he had built. The Jungster had been nestled behind my Taylorcraft in the hangar so we moved my airplane out and pushed it to the side to test-run the little biplane. The biplane was turned away from the hangar and chocked so as to not have its prop blast blowing into the hangar. I propped the engine to start it for him and was standing by the wingtip as he ran the engine up to full power. The pressure on the brakes bled down, and because the tires were low on pressure, the airplane jumped the chocks.
“The owner in the cockpit couldn’t get the vernier throttle pulled back quickly enough,” he said. “The airplane lurched and was headed straight into the hangar, so I instinctively tried to stop it by grabbing the wingtip. It turned 90 degrees, knocked me down, and ran right into my Taylorcraft. It totally chewed up the right wing, beat up the cowling and prop, and dinged the door on that side. It was really a mess! But I figured I had built it once, so I could do it again. But this time I’d do it a little differently. Luckily, no one was injured.”
“Dad called me the next day with a tremble in his voice to tell me that his airplane had been torn up,” Tom Jr. said.
“In the nearly 20 years since I restored N29654 the first time, we had learned a lot about Taylorcrafts, and it was bothering me that some of the things in my airplane just weren’t right,” Tom Sr. said. “So I decided to tear it all the way down and do a restoration, trying to make it better than it was the first time around.
“I started by building up a new wing that involved new spars and some ribs and the strut on that side,” he said. “The prop went back to Sensenich to be rebuilt while I tackled the rest. When I did the airplane in ’87, I was pleased to see that it had so little rust, so the fuselage wasn’t a problem. Also, I had put new leading and trailing edges on, but with the new damage, it only made sense to bring the wings up to ‘new’ condition. The right wing, of course, was trash anyway, so that had to be done regardless.”
From his time running an upholstery shop, Tom Sr. knew a lot of people with the right skills and resources to help him restore the Taylorcraft’s interior.
“The instrument panel from the first restoration wasn’t in very good shape,” he said. “I had covered it in vinyl, and the center panel and glove box doors were made of wood. So this time around I had David Wenglarz of San Pierre, Indiana, make me new outer and center panels along with new glove box doors. He also helped with repairing the cowling. The center panel and glove box doors were supposed to be wood-grained. So I called on an award-winning car-restoration expert who used to work for me, Chris Davis from Charleston, Illinois. He did such a nice job, they look almost like real wood.
“In researching the interior, it became obvious that the carpet wasn’t quite the right color, so we found the appropriate tan material,” he said. “The seat upholstery, which was unique to the Deluxe versions, took some digging, however. I eventually found a guy who had an actual seat cushion, with its original fabric, from a Deluxe. It turned out that it was mohair, like so many cars of the time, but it had a striped pattern in it. I’m not sure I’d ever seen that before, but we found some that matched almost exactly.”
For brakes, Tom Sr. fought the urge to go with modern Clevelands, as so many do, and stuck with the unique brakes his airplane was originally equipped with. They are mechanical drum brakes, but the lining is riveted to the inside of the drums rather than being on the shoes, as is usually the case. The shoes themselves are bare steel. Also, the first time he restored it, he installed right side brakes, as you’d find in some Taylorcrafts.
“The nice thing about Taylorcrafts is that they are simple airplanes mostly built by hand,” Tom Sr. said. “Similar to rebuilding a Cub, quite a few of the parts are available from Univair or Wag-Aero, and those that can’t be found can usually be reverse-engineered and built because they are so simple. The prewar Taylorcrafts are somewhat unique in that they used built-up metal truss-type ribs like a Cub. The postwar airplanes have stamped ribs. The early airplanes also have a different vertical fin and rudder and three hinges per side on the elevators instead of the two, like the later models. Also, the Taylorcraft community is a very tight-knit group, and if the part isn’t available, someone knows who can make it. This is not necessarily true of the chrome trim on prewar Deluxe T-crafts, however. I was lucky, as I had the original cast grills. My airplane, being a very early production model, had handmade, cut-to-length chrome pieces with soldered ends. The later ones were stamped and custom-made for Taylorcraft. So those take some digging to find.”
Tom Jr. learned about airplanes and how to fly from his father, and his kids are learning from him. This is a wonderful thing to see. As the old saying goes, “A family that flies together, stays together,” and what we have here is an EAA family dominated by Toms and Taylorcrafts. That’s a good thing! A very good thing.
Budd Davisson is an aeronautical engineer, has flown more than 300 different types, and has published four books and more than 4,000 articles. He is a flight instructor primarily in Pitts/tailwheel aircraft. Visit him on www.AirBum.com. For more from Budd, read his Shop Talk column every month in EAA Sport Aviation.