ft. * like airplanes and flying." After he and his wife, Connie, were married, Bud finally realized his ambition to fly. He bought a Cessna 140 in 196

Transcription

1 BY JACK COX The Antique Reserve Grand Champion at EAA Oshkosh '90 was Bud Pake's 1941 Monocoupe 90AF/L... which put a lot of knowing smiles on the faces of veteran vintage airplane enthusiasts. Bud is himself a veteran of the hobby, and for those who know him, the reaction was, 'That guy has been bringing beautiful airplanes here for years... it's no surprise he won a major award." There was, however, some confusion at Oshkosh '90 regarding the Monocoupe. A lot of EAAers probably walked right by it thinking, "Well, I see Bud brought his flat engined 'Coupe back this year - looks as good as ever." What 50 NOVEMBER 1990 they didn't realize was that the airplane had been totally rebuilt since they saw it last. They kept on walking because it had been finished in the same yellow and stock Monocoupe red trim as before... and because it had looked so good when Bud took out his pocket knife and began stripping fabric off it three years ago. Bud was born in Rolla, Missouri, but has spent most of his life in and around St. Louis. He became interested in aviation at an early age, but did not receive encouragement from his parents, who thought flying was a dangerous endeavor... so he got involved in building race cars and dragsters instead. That was a lot of fun but not very profitable, so Bud eventually took a job with McDonnell Aircraft. Factory work, even on something as fascinating as airplanes, was a grind, however, for someone who had been accustomed to less structured work and work rules, so soon he left to start up his own business rebuilding and repairing automobiles. "With the heavy traffic in a large city, there's never any lack of business," he says with a wry grin, "so, you can work as much as you want to." That, of course, translates into something like "... being your own boss means you can determine the amount of time you want to spend on fun things

2 ft. * like airplanes and flying." After he and his wife, Connie, were married, Bud finally realized his ambition to fly. He bought a Cessna 140 in 1967 and soloed it that year. It was also about then that he became aware of Monocoupes. Based at the Creve Coeur Airport on the west side of Greater St. Louis, he naturally came into contact with Jim Harvey and Basil Mullins, both of whom owned flat engined 'Coupes, but at first he regarded their airplanes as no more than fabric covered machines similar to his 140. However, after seeing Bill Hutchins' flamingo pink Clipwing blasting around the pattern at Rockford in the late '60's and reading an article on John McCulloch's Little Butch, he realized that Monocoupes were something special. The next time he saw Jim Harvey's AL-115, he looked it over very closely... noting the legendary robustness of the airframe and all the standard factory speed fairings that had helped make Monocoupes the terror of their horsepower class in 1930s air racing. His show of interest quickly got him a ride in Jim's 'Coupe... and his conversion was instantaneous! "I just couldn't believe what a tremendous airplane it was. It was so much faster for the power than my airplane, you could do aerobatics and it had such a solid feel... well, after that I just had to have one." Wanting one and having one were to be separated by several years, it turned out. Monocoupes were too expensive for him for a time, and, actually, there just weren't that many of them for sale even if he had been blessed with a bulging bank account. Like a lot of Monocoupe lovers, Bud initially satisfied his urge by buying the next best thing... a Luscombe. He owned a couple of them in succession, finally ending up with a really nice 90 hp 8F with flaps and every factory option. He really loved the Luscombe but being quite tall, was never totally comfortable in it. And... it wasn't a Monocoupe. All through this terrible period of Monocoupe deprivation, from the late '60s and into the early 70s, Bud was keeping a little subtle pressure on one of the owners of the Creve Coeur 'Coupes. Basil Mullins had bought his NC38922 in Chicago in the late 1950s and had always kept it hangared and well cared for... and having been converted along the way to a 135 hp Lycoming, it was a highly desirable airplane in Bud's eyes. He wanted it badly... but being a card-carrying Monocoupe lover in his own right, Basil was not ready to sell it. The airplane had been built in Orlando in 1941 by Universal Molded Products, one of several firms to own the Monocoupe manufacturing rights during the 1930s and 1940s, and was a ^ohewccu^t # Bud and Connie Dake SPORT AVIATION 51

3 one of 44 new 90 Franklin powered Model 90AFs built before the onset of World War II shut down civilian aircraft production early in The 90AF was a redesign of the earlier Lambert powered 90A, differing mainly in the switch to cables to actuate the ailerons. Earlier Monocoupes had a big pushrod running up one side of the cabin. After World War II, Monocoupe was sold again, this time to Robert G. Sessler & Associates, and was moved to Melbourne, FL. There, the 'Coupe was re-engineered once again, this time to take the 115 hp Lycoming O of them were built before the company's doors were closed for good. This set the precedent for using all the increasingly larger 4-cylinder Lycomings that would come along in the '50s and '60s... and was how Basil's 90AF had become a 90AL with a Lycoming O-290D in the nose. One of those 10 postwar 90ALs would also play a significant role in Bud and Connie Dake's life... but that's getting 52 NOVEMBER 1990 ahead of the story. Bud kept after Basil and, finally, in 1972 he was able to buy NC He had to sell his beautiful Luscombe to do it, but at long last he was a Monocoupe owner! He and Connie flew the airplane for a couple of years, then took it apart and refurbished it from stem to stern. The fabric was still in good shape, so the work was directed toward replacement of all the hardware, cables... anything that was subject to wear. For nearly 15 years the Dakes would fly their Monocoupe some 1,300 hours... going everywhere with it, doing aerobatics, giving rides and just plain flying for the sheer enjoyment of it. With its modern engine, Bud says the 90AL has been the best of all worlds... it is a legitimate antique that allows them to park on the show line at fly-ins and compete for trophies, and at the same time it is an eminently practical transportation piece, always ready to go at the touch of the starter. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the more enjoyment the 90AL provided, the more it churned up in Bud the desire for another airplane. It only served to whet his appetite for the ultimate Monocoupe... a 110 Special, or as Monocoupe aficionados call them, a "Clipwing." A lot of the trouble began when John McCulloch took him for a ride in his Clipwing, Little Butch, and as Bud tells it, "After that, I was ruined for life... I had to have one of those, too." For those of you who have not yet been exposed to the Clipwing Monocoupe legend, that wicked little device was the invention of one Johnny Livingston, a very successful racing and air show pilot in the late '20s and early '30s. After the 110 Monocoupe (110 hp Warner) was introduced in 1930, Johnny and other pilots literally mopped up with them in the stock classes at the National Air Races that summer. The following year, he showed up at Cleveland

4 He even had a set of absurdly tiny wheels and wheel pants he would install once at a race site for the competitive events. The result was a racer probably capable of around 175 mph... as opposed to the 130 or so of a stock Model 110. Unfortunately, however, Johnny had painted himself into a corner. The modifications nullified the airplane's type certificate, thereby taking it out of the stock racing classes in wnich he had been so successful and put him up against all-out racers that were much faster for the power. Nevertheless, he was still able to cop a couple of seconds and a third at the 1932 Nationals. Not content to be an also-ran, however, he decided to have his own all-out racer built (by Cessna) for the 1933 season, so he sold his Clipwing Monocoupe to Jack Wright. Wright promptly sent the 'Coupe back to the factory for further improvements and to have it certified in the short wing configuration so it could once again race against factory builts... and spent that summer blowing off everyone in sight! He was clocked at a speed of mph at Chicago in July and set an official world speed record that winter in Miami for airplanes of the Clipwing's power and weight with a passenger aboard of mph. In 1934 Wright and John Polando entered the Clipwing in the MacRobertson London to Melbourne race, but were forced out after various misadventures with Middle Eastern bureaucrats. The airplane was later sold to Ruth Barron, who was killed in it near Omaha. The with his NC (later NR) 501W considerably warmed over and proceeded to win six races, place second in two others and win three dead stick landing contests. All told, he went home with $6,180 in prize money... at a time when the average U. S. steel worker was making about $600 per year! Determined to blow away his competition in even more dramatic fashion in 1932, Johnny had his 110 cycled back through the Monocoupe factory for some special modifications, the most obvious of which were the installation of a then-new 145 hp Warner, a streamlined landing gear... and a wing cut down from the standard 32 feet to 23.2 feet. An absolute fanatic and intuitive genius on aerodynamic drag and rigging, Johnny further improved the airplane himself by fairing in every juncture on the airframe and ensuring that every flight surface... and even things like the tail wires... were at the optimum angle of incidence for speed. SPORT AVIATION 53

5 'Coupe was on fire when it crashed and the belief has been that a cigarette ignited the highly flamable nitrate dope used to finish the fabric in the cabin. Johnny Livingston... yes, he was Richard Bach's inspiration for the name Jonathan Livingston Seagull... was also a crack aerobatic pilot, and before selling his Clipwing, carved a new niche for the design with the high speed air show routine he was able to do in it. All Monocoupes were grossly overbuilt... there has never been an AD note on the airframe of any of them... but when the one-piece 110 wing was clipped and the already beefy wing struts were cut down and mounted at a really acute angle, the resulting Clipwing was about as indestructible as an airplane can be. With the 145 Warner, there was virtually nothing Livingston could do to hurt it... and the resulting aerobatic show he put on, featuring then-incredible vertical performance, really made more of an impression than the aircraft's ability as a racer. As a consequence, when other sportsmen began placing special orders for factory built, certified Clipwings, it was mostly for use as an aerobatic airplane rather than as a racer. All told, five type certificated Clipwings were built before World War II and two more afterwards, including the very last Monocoupe to go out the factory door (just an hour or so before the sheriff arrived to padlock the place, incidentally!). The most famous of them all was Woody Edmondson's Little Butch, in which he won the 1948 International Aerobatic Championship in Miami. Woody created the Ultimate Monocoupe by installing a 185 Warner and the longest Aeromatic propeller that would fit on the snub nose of the little brute. One of my most vivid recollections of the late 1940s is seeing Woody dive on the Asheboro, NC airport, level out right on the deck, roll inverted... then push to vertical and do rolls until the tiny Clipwing was completly out of energy. We were well into the modern age of high power-to-weight aerobatic airplanes before I would see anything like that again. Now retired Eastern captain John McCulloch would later acquire Little Butch, and after nearly two decades of flying it as a sportplane and doing occasional air shows, he donated it to the National Air And Space Museum. (John, incidentally, is currently resurrecting the third Clipwing to be built... the one originally constructed for Monocoupe president Clare Bunch.) At that time, in the early 1970s, there simply weren't any Clipwings on the market for Bud to buy. Only three were active... Little Butch, N36Y; NC15E, which had been restored by Dick Austin of Greensboro, NC and subsequently sold to the founder of the Levitz furniture chain (who later donated it to the EAA Aviation Foundation); and Bill Hutchins' N16E. None were for sale... and Dick Austin had acquired the paperwork for those that had crashed, intending to build new airplanes literally around their nameplates. It appeared that Bud's desire for a Clipwing would go unfulfilled... unless he chose to go the route of Dallas Warren, who had built up his own Clipwing, N2347, using a 90A fuselage. The more he looked into this angle, the more it began to appeal to Bud. For starters, the cabin and, especially, the tiny doors of a factory Clipwing were really too small for a person his size, and using a much wider late model 90A fuselage with its wide, round bottom doors would be infinitely more desirable and practical. Ultimately, Bud made the decision to build up his own 110 Special, and one evening in the fall of 1976 he picked up the phone and answered a Trade-A- Plane ad he had been carrying around in his billfold for almost a year and a half. It was an offer by an Odessa, TX owner to sell a damaged 1948 Monocoupe 90AL... for a reasonable price, it turned out, so Bud bought it over the phone. Not wanting to make a career of building up the airplane, Bud quickly marshalled his friends and resources and began work on the various parts and components that would be needed to make the conversion. The stock 90AL wing was found to have been destroyed in the accident it had suffered in Texas, so Harmon Dickerson was!o

6 given the task of building up a totally new clipped wing. The major damage to the fuselage frame had been in the cluster where the right gear attached, so that was turned over to Harold Lossner of Des Moines, who Bud considered to be one of the best tube men around. Harold cut out the old cluster, welded in another and went over the entire fuselage frame pounding it back into alignment. When Bud went to retrieve the fuselage, he and Harold plumb bobbed it through all axes and found no measurement to be more than 1/16th of an inch out of perfect alignment. When John McCulloch heard about the project, he told Bud the airplane would just have to have a 185 Warner... a conviction he held so strongly that ultimately he let Bud have his own spare 185. (This was a much appreciated sacrifice that would be repaid in years to come... John's current Clipwing project will be powered by a now rare 185 Warner that he got from... who else... Bud Dake.) The Clipwings that had been converted to the 185 Warner had used Cessna Airmaster bump cowlings, which were also very hard to come by. Fortunately, however, some fellows in Bloomington, IL had tooled up to spin new ones and Bud was able to buy one complete except for the bumps. He had to use Cessna 195 bumps, but they worked out fine. On the advice of John McCulloch, Bud bought a set of new Cleveland 6:00 x 6 wheels and disc brakes, but rigged them up to work off the stock heel pedals, which he prefers over toe brakes. He also retained the tiny tailwheel that is so characteristic of the Clipwing Monocoupe - and which he also had on his 90AL. The Aeromatic prop was sent to Univair, who overhauled the hub and built new blades. All this build-up for the start of the restoration/conversion took about a year. "Every time I needed something for the airplane, someone would say, 'Hey, I've got just what you want,'" Bud recalls, "until one day, there was nothing left but to begin putting the thing together." The airframe was covered with medium weight Ceconite and finished in hand rubbed butyrate dope... twice. Bud was just not satisfied with his first cover job on the fuselage and every time he looked at it, it offended him a little more. One night he simply walked out into his garage shop, opened up his pocket knife and walked around the fuselage, slitting the fabric as he went. The second time around he got the fabric on the way he wanted it. The Clipwing was painted black with orange trim... including the three stylized M's (for Monocoupe) in echelon on each side of the fuselage that are said to represent teals, the fastest members of the duck family... after which the classic pinched down aft fuselage of all Monocoupes was supposed to have been patterned. Don Luscombe, the entrepreneur who founded the Monocoupe company, is said to have believed this fuselage shape was responsible for his airplane's speed. The Clipwing's hand rubbed finish has been a source of amazement for all who have seen it. If there has ever been a better finish on an airplane, I've never seen it. Most observers assume it is polyurethane with several clear coats over the color... but it is nothing more than old fashioned butyrate dope and an incredible amount of elbow grease. Factory Monocoupes were known for the quality of their finishes, so Bud was simply continuing the tradition. When it was finally completed in 1981, the Clipwing was licensed by the FAA as a homebuilt. It does not sit well with Bud to be classified as a replica at fly-ins, but having a Repairman's Certificate that allows him to do all the maintenance, repair and annuals is definitely a plus. In this age in which finding a mechanic who knows how to work on tube and fabric airplanes and radial engines is getting to be pretty difficult, the Repairman's Certificate is probably the thing that makes an airplane like Bud's Clipwing feasible to own. First, you build a Clipwing Monocoupe... and then you have to fly it. Particularly with a 185 Warner on SPORT AVIATION 55

7 - CO ^ 0) the nose, the 110 Special is one of the hairiest beasts the government ever certified. This is due mainly to the fact that the big engine effectively blocks most of the forward visibility. To land the airplane, the pilot must carry a slip right down to the runway in order to see much of it. The touchdown and rollout are strictly by feel and peripheral vision. And bad as it is from the pilot's seat, the view from the passenger side is downright awful. With the airplane in a left slip and the pilot hunched over trying to peer around the engine, the passenger simply never sees the runway ahead. This was the experience Bud had when the time came to fly his Clipwing... a couple of right side rides in Little Butch. "I guess I was a little psyched out for the first flight. After riding with John McCulloch, I couldn't figure how I was going to land the thing. And, of course, I had heard all the hangar talk about Clipwings... how they would bite you at the slightest provocation and how all of them had ended up on their backs at one time or another. It really had me worried." It was bad enough that Bud had all this on his mind when he taxied out for his first flight in the Clipwing, but things got worse... much worse... shortly after liftoff. The newly overhauled Aeromatic prop wouldn't shift out of low pitch initially, and when it did, it flopped all the way to the high pitch stop and 56 NOVEMBER 1990 stayed there. When he throttled back through 1,600 rpm, the whole airplane began shaking so badly that "... the pitot tube was just a blur!" At some point during all this mayhem, the oil in the prop hub blew out and streaked back onto the windshield... so Bud had to make his first landing peeping out through the swing-out side window. It was an exciting ride, but went surprisingly well. After cleaning up the airplane, replenishing the oil in the prop hub and readjusting the counterweights, Bud went up again and flew the airplane for about an hour. He hasn't had a problem with it since. As it was finished up, the Clipwing was a beautiful airplane. As are all Monocoupes (and J-3 Cubs), the interior of the cabin is doped fabric. This bit of austerity is counterbalanced by lush leather seats and an instrument pane! and floorboards of birch plywood "... stained until my wife liked them and finished in a clear liquid plastic I bought in a hardware store. I thought it would scratch easily, but the stuff has turned out to be virtually indestructible." The airplane does not have radios. "It's strictly a 'map in the lap' airplane," Bud says. "That's flying to me, just being up there with your airplane and the elements. I don't fly for business, it's strictly for fun." Bud has subsequently installed an Apollo 618 loran in a spare instrument hole, which works great despite the fact that the Warner does not have a shielded ignition. When he bought the 90A from which the Clipwing was built, Bud got the wheel pants and all the original metal fairings. Some of the fairings were used, but the rest, including the pants, are so hard to come by today, that he put them on the shelf in his shop and used fiberglass replacements instead. Asked about the flight characteristics, Bud says, "I wouldn't say the Clipwing is an easy airplane to fly around the airport, because you can't see out of it that well... especially when you put the tail down to land. The vertical tail is so small that when you add power, say when you're turning base to final and you feel you are a little slow, it just wants to fly sideways. You add rudder... and the ball zips over to the wrong side of the cage. It's best to slip it in and keep your turn going right to the ground, then kick it out just before it touches. You land it 3-point and keep the stick in your lap. On grass it's a pussy cat, but it's another story on pavement. If you've got a right crosswind, especially on hard surface, where you have to keep the right wing down, then you can't see the airport. I just try to stay out of these situations as much as I can. When I've got a right crosswind, I'd just as soon land downwind so I can see. "I've done loops and rolls in the airplane, but I don't snap it and I don't intend to ever spin it... not with those

8 tiny tail surfaces. It has the fastest roll rate of anything I've ever sat in. You can do slow rolls with just a minimum of stick movement and it turns the world around as nice as can be." Bud and Connie flew the Clipwing for a year and about 50 hours, taking it to Oshkosh, Sun 'n Fun and other fly-ins... then in 1982 disaster struck in a most bizarre way. An Ercoupe pilot landed at Creve Coeur one day and for some reason, got out and left the airplane sitting with the engine running. In a few moments, the throttle jiggled open... and away it went across the airport and right into Bud's hangar door. The Clipwing and the 90AL were inside and the Ercoupe's prop chewed through the door and into the Clipwing's right wing. The impact slammed the Clipwing into the 90AL, putting a big dent in its lower cowl, damaged an aileron and smashed the elevator against the back wall of the hangar. Miraculously, the prop did not damage the Clipwing's main spar, even though it ripped up wood on both sides of it. Apparently, it struck the strut and strut attach fitting and bounced past the spar before getting into the wing again. In any case, the wing had to be virtually rebuilt... only after the 90AL was repaired so the Dakes would have something to fly. Needless to say, the Ercoupe episode was something Bud and Connie would just as soon forget about today. The only positive thing that came out of it was that Bud repainted the 110 Special's wing in a scheme he likes better than the original... black with orange leading edge scallops. During the 1980s, Bud was able to indulge his fancies in some additional sportplanes. He had always wanted an open cockpit biplane, so for a time he owned a single seat Great Lakes with a 185 Warner. Connie didn't think too much of that, especially when she had to drive to a fly-in, so eventually the Great Lakes was replaced with a 1931 Waco QCF-2 powered with a 220 Continental. It has two seats... and, in fact, room for three if the two in the front seat are well acquainted. The Clipwing Monocoupe satisfies Bud's need for speed, but he also savors the joys of low and slow flying. For that he has a big ol' 1930 Stinson SM8A, a four or five place (again, depending on the friendliness of the back seat occupants) cabin monoplane. To house his growing fleet of vintage airplanes, Bud now has a 50' x 50' hangar at Creve Coeur. This will accommodate five airplanes, and since he currently has only four, obviously something has to be done to fill the remaining void. A Waco Taperwing project has already been acquired for that purpose,

9 but it will be at home in the shop for a while before it is ready for the airport. With airplanes aplenty to fly, Bud decided in March of 1987 that it was time to pull his old faithful 90AL out of service for a complete restoration. The airplane still looked good and flew as nicely as ever, but the fabric was getting quite old and the Lycoming was getting a little tired. The engine, incidentally, was now a 150 hp O-320 that Bud had earlier installed to replace the 135 hp O-290 that was in the Monocoupe when he bought it. The first step was to strip the airframe down to bare wood and metal... which revealed several interesting facts. Bud knew from the logs that the airplane had been damaged by a company representative before it was ever sold. Apparently, it had been put on its back, then run back through the factory for repairs before being sold. Bud found that the main spar has a splice on the left side and the rear spar has one in the center section. There are also some tubing splices in the fuselage back near the tail. With the Monocoupe's reputation as a ground looper, it is rather remarkable that that there is no more damage history in the airplane's logs. Between his and Basil Mullins 1 ownership of NC38922, Bud can account for the past 30 years and he knows for certain that no damage has occurred during that period of time... other than that sustained in the encounter with the errant Ercoupe. Another fact revealed in the grand opening of the airframe is that the craftsmanship that went into the building of it was first class all the way. Bud says that over the years he has closely inspected a lot of Monocoupes and that he has observed that those built from about 1937 to 1941 are the best ones. All the 90AFs he has seen have really nice welding and the fairings are beautifully formed. Bud has all the original metal fairings and wheelpants on this airplane. The fuselage was taken to a St. Louis sandblasting firm that does a lot of aircraft work, including the city's police helicopters, and was thoroughly cleaned. After checking all the tubing for internal corrosion, the fuselage and all the other metal parts were primed with epoxy and painted with Imron. There is a lot of wood in a Monocoupe fuselage... stringers, fairing pieces around the upper and lower longerons, around the cabin and covering the doors. All of it was replaced. As already noted, NC38922 has the same tiny factory tailwheel that the Clipwing has, which is actually just an off-the-shelf industrial castor. Bud noticed on the Monocoupe drawings he has that the specified castor had been 58 NOVEMBER 1990 manufactured in 1941 by a firm in Downey, CA. One day just for the fun of it, he called information and asked for the number of the Darnell company in Downey... and found that it still exists (its a Canadian firm that manufactures wheels and castors for the aviation and aerospace industry). He was given the number of a midwest distributor who, in turn, gave him the number of a St. Louis dealer... and in nothing flat he had several brand new castors in hand for both the 90AL and the Clipwing... for only about $17.00 each. Bud says they last about 50 hours on the Clipwing and a little longer in the 90AL, but at such a reasonable price, who cares? Despite its small size, the tailwheel unit is very responsive on the ground and allows the airplane to land slowly at a relatively high angle of attack, so Bud wouldn't think of replacing it with a larger Scott or Maule tailwheel. "It just wouldn't look like a Monocoupe if you did," he says. The only fault he finds with the tailwheel units on his two Monocoupes is that they cannot castor to allow the airplanes to be pushed backwards. Bud has a little device that he slips around the end of the tailwheel bolt to drag either airplane in and out of his hangar. The 90AL has Cleveland wheels and drum-type brakes off a Tripacer, but has them set up to operate mechanically through the original heel pedals in the cabin. They work well, he maintains, with little difference in feel and braking effectiveness between them and the hydraulically operated Clevelands on the Clipwing. When all the structural work was done, the airframe was covered with Ceconite and finished pretty much like the Clipwing was... Cooper products in the build-up and Randolph butyrate dope for the finish. There were no clear coats used... just hand rubbing until the finish looked like yellow glass. The metal surfaces were painted with Du- Pont Centauri. As noted earlier, the airplane was finished in the same factory yellow paint and red trim combination that it was in before the restoration. The only change was to add red scallops to the wing leading edges, as had been done earlier on the Clipwing, and to play a little word game with the manufacturer's name on the vertical fin. It was a common practice in the 1930s for the factories to use the vertical fins of their products as a sort of flying billboard, with the company name and location and sometimes the company logo there to entice new customers. The St. Louis built Monocoupes had "Monocoupe Corporation, Lambert Field, Robertson, Missouri" on both sides of the vertical fin... so in the same location and in the same type style, Bud had his painted to read, "Monocoupe Corporation, Dauster Flying Field, Maryland Heights, Mo." "Dauster" was the person who owned the land upon which Creve Coeur is now located and Bud says a lot of local pilots use that name for the airport. Just above "Dauster Flying Field" in small white letters is " AF S/N 845 based at..." This is, of course, to satisfy the FAA's requirement for data to help identify an airplane that might be suspected of some nefarious use. Up close, the white lettering stands out and is easily read, but from a good distance away it becomes virtually invisible... which allows the original look of the airplane to be retained. You can read the white letters from much further away than you can those stamped on a little metal data plate, so both the letter and spirit of the law have been met.

10 Inside the cabin, new floorboards and a new instrument panel were installed. Bud has always had radios in this airplane because it is often used for transportation as well as just for pure fun. The old, heavy avionics were removed and replaced by a typical "sport aviation package"... a radio (Narco Escort II), loran (Apollo 618) and Mode C transponder (Terra, with an Apollo encoder). The loran is tied into the airplane's old low freq long wire antenna and works well with it... as well as retaining the 1941 look. Largely as a result of the lighter avionics and fabric (the old cover job was Irish linen, with a coat of enamel over dope), the 'Coupe came out weighing 50 pounds lighter than it had previously been. The new empty weight is 1,050 pounds. The engine had only about 1,000 hours on it, but Bud decided to do an extensive top overhaul. All the cylinder assemblies were replaced. In deference to the fact that the Monocoupe, like most sportplanes, will spend 98% of its existence in a hangar, the cylinder bores were chromed. Bud has several propellers for the airplane and uses them according to the mission he is to fly. He had his cross country prop, a 74" x 59" metal McCauley, on the airplane at Oshkosh this past summer. Those of you who remember the article on Jim Younkin's Mystery Pacer (March 1989 issue) may recall that Bud Dake's 90AL was one of the inspirations for Jim's clean-up of his Pacer. There will be a race between these two airplanes at some point in the near future, so while he had the Monocoupe down for restoration, Bud took the opportunity to do some clean-up in the engine compartment. It consisted mainly of building an entirely new, extended cowling with the air outlet closed up a bit, and a really tight set of baffles. The effort apparently produced some benefits, because with the same propeller and tach that was on the airplane prior to the restoration, the max rpm in level flight and full throttle has gone from 2,625 to 2,700, and the airspeed is higher than it has ever been. Just how fast will have to wait until the Mystery Pacer has been challenged. The newly restored 'Coupe was flown again shortly before EAA Oshkosh '90 and, of course, was flown to Wittman Regional Airport for the EAA Convention in late July. When it headed home to St. Louis a week later, the load was a little heavier because it included the much deserved Reserve Grand Champion Antique award. Now... bring on that Mystery Pacer! SPORT AVIATION 59