re: "Dorothy" - Choppergirl's $38 Volmer Jensen VJ-24W antique ultralight motor glider
Ug, my own thread. Too soon!
For someone such as myself, who is typically not a loss for words, let me think on this a bit before I post some long essay where I invariably put my foot in my mouth somewhere....
I think what daunts me the most, is just the enormous size of wingspan at 38 ft, 55 inches wide, half a foot thick.... I just can't wrap my brain around how huge the wings are, which are going to present me with some considerable problems... in transporting the glider to and from an airstrip and setting her up every time I want to fly... I've been wrangling how I am going to over come managing *that*...
See, I don't have my own airstrip or hanger (our farm is covered in pecan trees), and though the local EAA airstrip is only 7 miles away, and my best friends house where I could park my plane is only 1 mile from it... still, I am going to have to trailer it to and from the airport every time I want to fly, put the wings, and take them off. Imagine me trying to balance one of these wings over my head, trying to slide it on, even with some kind of big sawhorse on one end as an aide, and getting the struts bolted on without dropping the whole mess and have a strut spear through my wing and ruin my day.
Anyway, meet Dorothy, my 1980's
Volmer Jensen VJ-24W I bought on ebay for $38 December 2015:
Check out those wings! Geez Louise!
What made me finally commit and click buy was (1) she's all aluminum, and aluminum don't rust in the same way iron rusts, it makes a nice ruby hard coating (2) bolt and rivet construction, little welding (3) very slow docile flyer, perfect for someone learning to fly as a first plane (4) used a 15hp engine, which I thought meant I could get a little engine much cheaper than a big engine; that doesn't really turn out to be the case in retrospect (5) no matter what, it'd be $38 more worth of airplane than I already owned. (6) I was getting heartsick watching too many flying videos; I'd never fly no matter how many videos I watched, the only real solution was to go out and get a plane. In other words, better get busy living, or get busy dying (7) wow, lots of colorful interesting history re: Volmer Jensen and Irv Culver, the designers. Volmer built the first Star Trek Enterprise model in the TV show, which is now in the Smithsonian, and
Irv Culver who designed the wing, coined the name Skunkworks at Lockheed. He also worked on the P-38 Lighning (which my grandfather flew) and SR-71 blackbird. Culver apparently said Jensen's gliders were the most fun projects he ever worked on. I assume he's the same Culver as "Culver's Props"....
Just about the entire frame is there, minus only the wing ribs on one wing. I don't know what happened there in its past, I can only imagine some gardner pulled them off to use them as garden stakes? Who knows, Anyway, they are all identical in size and I have the other side to use as a jig template.
If there is any galvanic corrosion between the alluminum tube rivet holes and the rivets or bolts, I'm not seeing it (yet anyway). Nothing seems loose. All the steel rivets need to be replaced, as they are rusted and shot out, but that's just a matter of drilling them out and putting in a fresh one (coated with something to stop galvantic action).
I had other emergencies I had to take care of, so I stuffed her in the barn out of the weather after I got her home and took pictures. I really haven't even begun working on her... still very much a diamond in the rough.
Last night I mocked up in Erector Set, how I would of built the pilot cage, from alluminum "L" channels, and kept everything "square", if I were designing this as a kit to be built by someone else. Starting from a clean sheet of paper... as opposed to what Volmer Jensen did, grafting on a cockpit, wheels, and motor mount onto his foot launched / swing from your armpits original VJ-24 three axis controlled glider, to make the VJ-24
W:
Brainstorming a folding wing (You say Autocad... I say... 1970's Erector Set! Kind of limiting myself to what Volmer Jensen would of had access to):
Bringing her in my kitchen today:
All the welded 4130 is in the welded undercarriage, begging for me to disassemble it asap and halt the rust in its tracks, hit it with a whizzer wheel, and some electrolysis or Evaporust in the hard to reach places, and repaint it:
I looked in those tubes today to check how bad the rust was "inside"... yuk... made a nice home for lots of bugs over
the years as well as graveyard for same said bugs, behind the storage shed from the guy I bought it from, who originally bought it at a scrap auction....
See, this part below, I would of just all built with aluminum "L" channels, in a nice square box, to replace this crazy mess. Put on a full face motorcycle helmet, and I'm banging it all up in that area... there is no headroom. Imagine if I were to auger in with no helmet, :-( what my head might hit:
I am thinking... hedge my bets. Keep the original pilot cage all original and historically accurate, don't touch it, and as a fall back if my prototyping with new materials doesn't work out. Build a new cage, nice and square, to similar dimensions of the original, with a nice channel for the tail boom to slide up into, let the CG fall where it may for now, and then once I get an engine on top then I can move the center of lift backwards and forwards... to fit... I assume the average Center of Lift should go over the average Center of Gravity (with a pilot in + fuel). I kind of want to target both the variable weights of fuel and pilot on the Center of Lift.
I don't know, its a quandry.... hmmmrrr....
That, and I spent my last bit of credit card credit to buy this, so its... muling and thinking phase... and elbow grease work right now. I don't even have the $ to buy a big box of avex aircraft rivets at the moment. I did get some Citristrip, so I can get started taking the old paint off. Paint is not going to stick much to aluminum anyway without magic alluminum prep work which I'm going to get into learning (my painting skills are limited to brutally amatuerish rattle can jobs with rust converter primer first), so I'm going to leave the aluminum unpainted, but repaint anything steel.
The bolts don't look too bad, I guess I can electrolysis most of them, and put them in Evaporust to finish the job. I saw something neat on Youtube the other day, where you can toss them into a vibratory tumbler with ground walnut shells which does a 95% job at removing rust and oxidation. Don't have one of those yet.
Once I get some replacement rivets, that should be all I need to get it to a clean skeleton condition like AZcully's (who I have never met yet, but by a stroke of good luck, only lives 150 miles from me near Atlanta - what seredipity for possible future builder collaboration):
I don't have plans yet, but I know who to buy them from for $25... at least the VJ-24 top part.
~ ~
Another thing that kind of daunts me, and I'm not afraid to say it, and I'm certainly a long way off from it... if at all... is I'm probably scared ****less to fly this thing.... not to mention, scared of heights. Don't get me wrong, I've dreamed of flying all my life, flown in my dad's tail dragger with some hairy grass strip landings, and am always glued to the window in big commercial airliners.
But after watching hundreds and hundreds of ultralight videos, I now know what to expect I'll see and feel looking out from the spartan lawn chair cockpit of this thing as she takes off with the rev of that prop blasting a gale storm in my face. I'm a pretty tough cookie and not much scares me, but leaving the ground for the first time and gaining altitude is going to freak me out. I ride motorcycles all the time so I'm not worried about my dexterity or skills to maintain level flight. But I can imagine myself holding the stick and maintaining that safe accent angle, as the ground pulls away and I'm going to be getting sick to my stomach. Do my best to manage an uncoordinated turn once I have plenty of altitude, and come back around and set her back gently upwind on the runway as possible.
Then I'm probably going to climb out of her, run 30 ft away, drop my helmet on the ground as say "holy **** that thing is dangerous!" Not sure if I'll ever do *that* again.
This from someone who was the most badass VSTOL futuristic combat helicopter pilot for 5 years inside a video game... which you could turn on a dime balanced on a pinhead, but not without risk of flipping it over and plunging to your death... that was my airspace.
So I guess the last idea I am having, I mentioned somewhere else, was the idea to crowdfund Dorothy... since I'm dead broke. Lots of people try to crowdfund their plane with no success... basically they are saying, hey, I don't know you A from Adam, but fund my dream!
Um, no. That doesn't get me excited, if I saw that.
But if someone were to say to me, hey, fund this plane, and you own a share in her and can be an airplane owner too. Now that might interest me. Esp. if I was still a sketchbook dreamer. Because then I'm a part of it. Maybe even I'd get a chance to see her in person some day, follow her exploits online, work on her, sit in her, taxi her down the run way, or even learn to fly in her... 1/100th or 1/20th share in a plane is more plane ownership, than none at all.
Sort of a poor man's community owned airplane. Like, think something an African tribe might do. I kind of want her to be legendary. And I kind of lucked into her, so I feel kind of guilty too of not sharing in on the ... er... fun... ahead *rolls eyes when I imagine all the hours of work*. You get kind of heartsick, you know, and frustrated, watching others fly when you're own chance of ever flying... seems to be nil.
So, this crazy project of mine, is not something that would appeal to the guy with a Pitts Special in the garage of his Airpark home. I'm thinking... other broke people like me

The goal. To build the cheapest possible Bare Minimum Airplane (Flying Go Cart) to call our very own.
It may be a stupid idea that gets mired in a morass of trouble in the future. Community owned anything usually spells community neglected everything. So my jury is still out on the idea, but I typed it out so I can hear feedback on it....
Otherwise, I shall work on her as I get the time and money, as a build as I go project...
What is really daunting I didn't foresee, is just how steep the learning curve is, when it comes to all the science and aerodynamics behind construction, flying, maintenance, and navigating airplanes. Whole books are written on it. I've only skimmed those. Then there are all the incidentals. I shouldn't know 1000 different airplanes by sight, what a Lee wave is, or a Glory of the Airman, or a flat spin, or a Cumulus cloud, or V-speeds, a Hammerhead Turn, what the colors of the lights on airplanes mean, the firing order of a Radial engine, or what a bad rivet job looks like... but I do... now
I'm kind of that yucky point of a project called "the very beginning". So yes, I am procrastinating plenty and sitting on the fence thinking far too much rather than just diving in and attacking and 'doing'... at this point anything I did anywhere on her will make her better and there's no shortage of places to begin.
Waiting for April to come along though.... would be much nicer to work outside...
~
I guess I may be a surprise newcomer to some... maybe I'm slightly familiar to others... I've been posting on Youtube ultralight and homebuilt videos for the last couple of years... left plenty of footprints all over Youtube videos of Light Sport Aircraft...
More pics and info here:
http://air-war.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFwIhwdSVVs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyYOazgOOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hMmMAPfnh8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXJ9iNz7j8E