A casual examination of the landing gear shows it isn’t the usual
Piper bungee gear. Kenny says he
really liked the coil spring system
on the Hatz, so he copied that suspension system and reports that it
works well.
PARTS SURFING
But he couldn’t have done it all
without the Internet. “I absolutely
depended on eBay for a lot of the
parts, including the engine. It was an
O-235-L2C from a C-152 or Tomahawk. It had 1,800 hours on it and
is a 2,400 TBO [time between over-hauls] engine, so I just cleaned it
up and put it in. It’s running really
strong, and I think it’ll run past
TBO with no problem. Even if it
doesn’t, it’ll take me forever to fly
600 hours.”
EBay also yielded the wheels from
a Cherokee 140, three props (it took
him a while to get exactly what he
needed), the spinner, the tail wheel,
and other minor components.
“The eBay brake rotors were a
little rusty, so I chucked them into
my wood lathe, turned it on, and
took my body grinder to them while
they were turning,” he says. “They
came out clean and true. I tend to do
things in a very basic way, like bending the rib flanges over a die I made
from a fence post.”
The crossover exhaust (made from
mild steel tubing) was another hand-fabricated unit, and the windshield
is stock Super Cub.
“I bought the windshield before
I started the boot cowl, so I could
make sure they fit together.”
WAKE-UP CALL
What Kenny glossed over was that
before he got back into airplane
building, he started sky diving and
by 2000 had made 832 jumps.
Then, out of nowhere, he got a
hard awakening.
“I was diagnosed with cancer in
my neck. At the time, I thought that
cancer and sky-diving accidents are
both things that happen to other
people, so I quit sky diving,” he
says. “All the medical stuff slowed
down my progress on the Hatz at
the beginning, but getting back into
building was good for me. Then in
