By Chuck Griffiths, EAA 1059322
This piece originally ran in the January 2021 issue of EAA Sport Aviation magazine.
My wife, Mary, and I met while I was living and working as a mechanic and flight instructor at Poplar Grove (then Belvidere) Airport in Northern Illinois in the early 1990s. I owned a homebuilt Pitts S-1C and fell in love with biplanes in general. When Mary got her commercial certificate, one of her favorite jobs was flying freight in Beech 18s, and she quickly fell in love with the sound of those R-985s.
Life and kids interrupted our flying for several years, but we eventually purchased a Piper Archer thinking our kids would love to travel in our own airplane. It turned out they weren’t as enthralled with flying around in little airplanes as we were, and we started thinking about other airplanes. Thinking back to our favorite times together at Poplar Grove we started dreaming of owning an antique biplane with a round engine. We didn’t think we could afford to buy one, but I was pretty confident we could find a project that we could complete and have flying in a year or two.
When we found out that 140Y was being sold by the EAA museum, it seemed like the perfect project. The fact that the airplane was assembled was a huge plus to us — it took a lot of risk out of the process. Oshkosh is close enough to our old friends in northern Illinois that we luckily were able to recruit volunteers to help us disassemble 140Y and truck it home to New Jersey. We ended up racing Hurricane Sandy to get home just before they started closing all the highways to large trucks.
Once we got home and started further disassembly, I had overly lofty goals — it’s really easy to imagine making new parts to replace every piece that’s not perfect. I credit my friend Harry Fenton with helping me realize that a better goal is using everything that’s airworthy and understanding that an antique airplane can and should keep some of the history it’s developed along the way. When we first uncovered the elevators, for instance, I realized that early in its life one of the elevators was replaced with a later revision part. My first thought was to build a new elevator to replace the older one since the idea of mismatched elevators kind of bothered me. Harry nicely reminded me that they were both approved parts and the airplane had been flying like that for most of its life. Once I came to embrace that thinking, I was happy that I left the original on — it’s airworthy and part of the unique history of this particular airplane.
140Y is also unusual in that it has fiberglass cowlings. They are nicely made and have held up well since they were installed, but for a long time, I wanted to make aluminum pieces to replace them for the sake of originality. One day an older gentleman poked his head in the hangar and said, “Hey you’ve got an RNF in here.” We quickly came to realize that not only did this fellow, Orville Wright Williamson, recognize the RNF, but he was the person who built the fiberglass cowlings back in the ’80s. Having met Orville and learning more about his passion for building fiberglass parts for antique airplanes, I’m really proud to have the cowlings he built on our airplane — just another piece of its unique history.
For the re-covering we used Superflite fabric and Randolph dope. Superflite because our good friend Marc Mills had some he was willing to donate to the project, and dope because we decided early on that we really wanted it to have a period-looking finish.
The airplane came with a pretty low-time 125-hp Warner. We really wanted a starter on the airplane so either one of us could go fly without having to find someone to prop us. A few years into the project we found a freshly overhauled 145-hp Warner with a Y-150 Eclipse starter. The 145 conversion is pretty popular on the RNF so it seemed like a pretty easy decision.
I could not have completed this project without Mary’s constant and creative help. We glued every piece of fabric working together, and we did all the rib stitching in our dining room. The Waco manual suggests the right way to put the wings on is to have one man stand on the cockpit, and then “at least two men will be required to place the upper wing in position and a fourth man will be required to support the lower wing while the upper is being secured.” Mary and I put the wings on without any other help, so it’s clear that one smart woman is worth three men when it comes to putting a Waco together!
That project I imagined as being a year or two worth of work quickly turned into eight years before we got 140Y back in the air, but it really turned out to be a much richer experience than I could have imagined. It tested all my mechanical skills and tested us as a couple, but there’s no question that it was worth the time and money we put into it.