About us
I started out in the aviation world at age 3, yes I am sorry to admit that I wasted the first three years of my life. I am not going to admit how much time, money and effort has been spent on plastic model aircraft, control line aircraft, radio control model aircraft and ones not much bigger that you can sit in.
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I started on scratch building a Sonex aircraft back in 2013, it took me three months to get the courage up to buy some aluminium and actually make a leading edge wing rib. From that moment on, I offer proof that any fool can make stuff if they put their mind to it. I test flew the aircraft for the first time in June 2019 after about two thousand hours of work. It is not the recommended practice, however I have test flown every single one of my model aircraft and I was damned if I wasn't going to risk my own neck in my own aircraft.
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My wife is an incredible person, we have worked together for most of the time that we have been together. She blames me for most of the scary, wackadoodle activities that I have conned her into. But she has the best stories to tell around the dinner table with our friends and family.
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I started my working life as an apprentice motorcycle mechanic partly because my Dad said that aircraft mechanical work might be more unreliable. I loved motorbikes anyway. I had spent $70 of my hard earned pocket money on a bike worth at least $50 when I was 13 years old. I should have kept it, they are a collectors item now. I have over 40 years of experience fixing bikes, trucks, cars, planes, tools and a multitude of gadgets. I think that I have been a grumpy old fart my entire life who hasn't wanted to waste money on buying a new thing, when it should be possible to fix the old one. I'm not going to let some monkey con me into buying a new blower vac. I am proud to admit that I spent several hours turning up a new spindle and repairing the starter assembly on a Chinese blower vac that cost me $150 to buy in the first place. Some bugger stole it from my trailer two weeks later......
My latest project is a Taylor Monoplane. This is a wooden aircraft designed by John Taylor in the late 1950's in the UK. It is a timber design, as he was a bit of a scrounger like me. The UK was still subject to rationing after WW2, timber was relatively cheap and he used bits and pieces that were easy to hand in 1957. Well the world has changed since then, in Australia you just can't go down the road and purchase spruce in the sizes needed for building an aircraft. Just buying spruce is near impossible. I am using Australian Hoop Pine for mine, several planks roughly 1" x 8" x 10' long is what you see here to make most of the fuselage, spars and wing ribs. I reckon about 15% has ended up on the floor as saw dust after cutting the timber roughly to size and then feeding it through a thicknesser to get the exact size needed. I started this project as I am going back to my roots. I built a 1/4 scale model of the aircraft when I was about 19. The history of it is amazing, check out the youtube link to see why.​
