Dealing with the Junkyard Dog

I was looking at a long, very beat up aircraft fuselage that had no wings, no tail, no landing gear and the cockpit glass was completely broken out. The whole thing was graffitied over and there were holes and missing panels on nearly every square foot of this thing. One area, near the tail at about the one o'clock position of the engine section, there was a huge hole from the demilitarizing done to it when it was sold for surplus scrap.

I asked Ed again how much they'd spent on acquiring it, "$25,000" he said, with Ed's classic smirk on his puss.

"And you want to do what with it?" I asked him.

"Yea, I know, it looks like a piece of junk right now, but we'll get her fixed up. Are you willing to help us out?" he asked with a serious look on his face.

"Well, yea, but when and where?" I asked.

"We'll get together on Saturdays around 10 A.M. here at the airport." he said.

Over the course of four years we very slowly and persistently replaced pannels, screws, rivets and fabricated parts needed in order to make the aircraft into a car. For a while we were outdoors on a side area of the Spanaway Airport, enduring the cold and wind of the northwest weather in the winter. Of course, there was also the beautiful sunshine and warmth of the summer months when we could get more work done. During 1999 & 2000, the hulk was housed for free in a hangar at Thun Field; a Peirce County airport in South Puyallup, but that only lasted about a year until it was rented to someone who had a "real airplane" to store it in.

All during this early stage of restoration, Ed and Keith had managed to acquire a contract with the U.S. Air Force at Edwards AFB in California. We had learned from credible sources that our airframe had once been used as a chase plane for the X-15, the SR-71 Blackbird, and the XB-70A supersonic bomber that was discontinued after a photo op had a catastrophic air incident which took both it and an F-104 Starfighter out. A requirement of the contract with the Air Force was that we had to have a university endorsing us. After making contacts at the University of Washington, we managed to get a professor of physics to step in, providing us with techincal consulting services. This contract provided the project with a large inventory of spare F-104 parts that Ed had paid to have shipped up to Washington state. We began rummaging through box after box of parts, gauges, pannels and landing gears.

While we were making arrangements with PPG Paints and Bates Technical College to have the fuselage painted with the "streaking eagle" on both sides and the rest in viper red, little did we know that other things were in the works to set the project back at least two years or more.

Eventually, Ed was able to rent a hangar in a residential airpark in Spanaway only a few miles from his house. It was big enough to be in out of the weather and still have room for all of the tools and equipment needed to do the work. It was finally approaching completion to a paintable condition in the spring of 2002