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“They [the Wrights] knew how to get the most work done with the least amount of weight,” he marveled. Pointing to the sheet metal cover lying nearby (it encloses the engine to keep dirt out and oil in), he said, “That’s typical Wright practice. It’s about as thick as a piece of tin foil.”
The Wright Experience owns three engines manufactured for the first Wright aircraft that went into general production, the 1911 Model B. (About 125 engines were produced.) For the 1908 reproduction, Cone has created an engine casing with the help of a Baltimore, Maryland foundry, using the same casting process the Wrights’ suppliers used. The Model B casing is about the same size as the one on the 1908 engine, but there are significant differences. The earlier engine has a longer drive shaft, Cone learned from measuring the engine in the Museum, and an entirely different ignition system.
In an earlier research trip to the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, Hyde and Cone had rummaged through several shipping trunks transferred to the museum from the Wright factory. Inside were a jumble of parts and some wooden templates that were used as casting models. Cone measured, photographed, and deduced the functions of the pieces—they were unlabeled—then made his own templates and bronze parts.
In September, he held a small bronze flywheel he had made up to its Wright counterpart. “The spokes are a little thicker,” he said of his own. Sure enough, the Wright flywheel looked more graceful. He took from his pocket a bronze “cam follower,” a small connector that rests on the drive shaft and controls a pushrod to open the engine’s exhaust valve. He dropped it onto the 1908 drive shaft: wrench-like, the opening at the base fit perfectly on the shaft, and the piece was the same height as the cam follower already resting there. Cone, shining the flashlight on the piece, said slowly as he studied it, “I see that for some reason my casting does not have the sharp corners of the original.” He seemed slightly mystified. “I’ll fix that,” he said, straightening.
“This is stuff that nobody will see and that won’t matter to anybody but me,” he admits. But Cone doesn’t want to be known as an engineer. “I’d rather be known as a counterfeiter,” he says. He wants it to be exact.
When Cone and Hyde and the other members of the Wright Experience have finished their exact reproduction of the 1908 Flyer—Hyde dislikes the word replica; he says “a replica usually is just a lookalike at a distance, and can be made with any type of materials”—they plan to fly the aircraft just as the Wright brothers did nearly a century ago, for public exhibition. Hyde is looking for sponsors for the flight, and trusting in the public fascination with the Wright brothers, hopes it can take place on the National Mall, not far from where the 1909 airplane is on display, with its engine cover back on.
Comments
Phil Parmelee, a cousin of mine, was in the movie A Dash Through the Clouds, flying the Wright Flyer Model B. That was the plane he crashed in 1912.
Posted by junior parmelee on October 1,2009 | 02:41PM