Mark would accept nothing less than superior workmanship, even
with details that would normally be concealed behind exterior
panels, such as this wire bundling.
“I went through 300 sheets of
sandpaper in various grades,
just on the wings alone . . .”
NX279Y attracted scores of appreciative admirers,
and the Gilmore family was a bit overwhelmed with the
accolades, since their lives have been so closely intertwined with the biplane project. “The last several days
have been unbelievable in the amount of compliments
that have come,” Mark said. “You’re kind of in a vacuum
when you work on a project; you really don’t realize
what you’ve done until other folks come around and
critique your work.”
The genesis of the project was actually long ago, in
the early 1980s, when Mark, EAA 322796, was flying
radio-controlled airplanes at the airport in Anderson,
Indiana. Tom Ferraro gave Mark a ride in his Skybolt.
That flight planted the biplane seed, and years later, Jim
Wright, a fellow EAA Chapter 226 member and Hatz
builder in Anderson told Mark about a fuselage that was
for sale. It happened to be a Marquart Charger. Another
EAA friend, Mike Finney, lent him several old EAA magazine articles about the Charger. That did it.
Mark, a manufacturing engineer, bought the fuselage
in October 1987, which, he says, “was a blind leap of
faith, because other than the articles, I had no idea what
it was, or how it flew. I’d never seen one, and it wasn’t
until 1992 that I ever got a ride in one—and it wasn’t
until 2006 that I even got to fly one. I wondered if I could
build it, but I had seen other guys building airplanes, and
thought, ‘Well, if they can, I can.’”
