Largely I'm sure due to the influence of Frank Price, North Central Texas has always been a hotbed of Bückering. Frank founded the American Tiger club and made available drawings for his "American Jungmeister". Aircraft were built from those by Jim Swick, of Swick T'craft fame, and by Sam Burgess amongst others. Sam's Jungmeisters were made famous in many ways: He flew one on a trip to all 50 states,
then he equipped it with an Allison turbine engine and set some time to climb records in it, finally he made the first Vendenyev M14P installation in a Bücker. He was obviously of the "Too much power is almost enough" school of thought.
Recently, I was lucky enough to receive some correspondence from Ben Morphew, (who I used to watch performing in the McKinney airshows when I lived in Dallas in the early 1980s. Quite the best Pitts performance I have ever seen.) Some of that is reproduced below.
Remember to click the Read More link at the bottom to see the whole story!
Steve,
The M 14P model was built by Jim Swick not Sam Burgess. Sam built the other one and later took off the M 14P and put some kind of turbine engine in it or maybe it was the other way around. As far as I know Jim did not have anything to do with Sam's stuff.
The airframe that Jim used to build the M 14P version was originally built for a guy in Houston, Warren Sibira. Warren had a pretty well equipped machine shop but never got around to finishing his Bucker. After Warren died Jim got the parts that had already been built and built it up specifically for the Russian engine. At the time I was putting together those 3 Sukhoi's for Tom Dodson. The final plane got caught up in the moratorium and Jim pulled a mold off of the Sukhoi nose bowl.
Sam Burgess actually built 2 Jungmeisters from what I remember. The first one was the one he flew to all 50 states because he built the thing in Hawaii!!!! That one had a 185 Warner in it.
I think he built the second one with the turbine in it first for some time to climb records and then took the turbine off and put the M 14P on it.
He and Swick were good friends and I'm sure there were construction and ''how to'' conversations but Sam was pretty much on his own.
I've never seen Frank's original drawings but Jim came by the hangar last week and I asked him how many times he went to Waco from Dallas and he said they at least wore out one set of tires during the process!
I was wondering what the Bucker Community thought of these planes but if you look at it closley you'll see just how accurate they are. They could have taken a lot of short cuts but Swick said ''Hell, then it wouldn't be a Bucker" so that kind of gives you the mind set of these guys back then.
The Lycoming engine choice was a no brainer because even in 1972 Warner parts were hard to find. Years ago I took some pictures and measurements of the Krier Kraft and there was this little platform (actually a cut off piece of Stearman foot runner). I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was but I looked back into the fuselage and Harold's fiberglass poles were still back there that he used for the inverted ribbon cut.
After I got home I called Charlie Hillard ( this was around 1993 ) and told him about the trip to the museum. He got a kick out of the story and couldn't believe the fiberglass poles were still there. I finally asked him what the heck was that little platform between the rudder pedals and he said "That was for a complete Warner cylinder with the valves and everything. We were working those Warners pretty hard and we'd plan on popping a cylinder right in the middle of the air show season so we just carried a spare." He went on to tell me that he could probably remove and replace a Warner cylinder as fast now as he could in the 70's.
Did the American jungmeisters have the same stepped down longerons that the originals did?
I haven't measured it but there's different size tubing all over the fuselage.....the tubing in the rear looks like 1/1 or 5/8 and on the firewall there are hefty tubes and then smaller ones. The forward longerons in the fuel tank area look like 7/8th but I've never put a caliper on them.
Knowing Swick the way I do, if the longerons stepped down three or four times I'm sure he did it that way. I was surprised they went as far as they did in the wings with the driven steel rivets, the flanges on the flying wire attach points, and the pins to attach the wings instead of bolts.
Never having flown a ''real'' Jungmeister I'm really not the one to make comments about the flying qualities but I do know one thing, when Frank flew the first one with the 2412 airfoil he wanted his wings modified right then so I guess that says something for the flying qualities of the Swick airplanes. I think I told you this but one of the guys at Braniff, Ed Meier, had some airfoil plots on paper with the same chord lengths and over laid the Bucker airfoil with the 2412 and it was almost identical except for the slight convex bottom of the 2412. Swick built some steel ''profiles'' so John Nyquist could add on thicker cap strips on top of the original ribs and use the steel profiles to plane down the cap overlay to match the 2412 bottom curve.
I've flown mine now for about 5 hours and it feels like the inverted attitude is pretty flat. Some of the old movies on the web site and Bevo Howard's son's web site show a considerable amount of forward stick when the original ones are flying inverted. I'm definitely not disappointed in the way this thing snaps. The only ''original'' Bucker around my area is David Martin. I think he even has the Seimens in it too. Maybe he and I will swap off sometime.
I'm pulling this stuff out of a lot of gray matter that's been buried over the years but I'd say print it and if I've missed something or totally got it wrong then I'm sure someone will correct it. Check your tubing measurements for misprints but I'd go as is. I always wondered what happened to Sam's original Bucker. I'm almost positive the turbine/M14P one was a newly built plane. Remember, about that time frame Marcus Bates had a lot of stuff so maybe Sam got some stuff from Marcus and kick started the other plane.
John Nyquist is supposed to come by this week. I'll ask him some more construction questions. For instance, if I were going to build the elevators or stab I doubt I'd worry about the zigzag ribs and just make bent steel ones like a Pitts but Jim and the boys did the zigzag! That shows some of the lengths they went to when building these things, don't you think?
I never had a copy of Sam's book and I usually rut around the old book places at SNF and OSH and I don't remember ever running across a copy. I don't have the old Sport Aviation's anymore either.
Remember back in the 70's I was a hardcore Pitts guy and the Bucker was getting passed by all the Pittses and Leo was getting the Stephens Akro up to shape so every time I got to fly one of the Dallas planes I liked the way they flew but I knew that when you started them up hill the drag just got in the way. Hell, aerobatics was changing right before our eyes then and before you knew it a guy with enough cash could buy an airplane that was more capable than anything that Leo had ever built. The hassle of building was out of the equation and, if you had the money, you could jump into competition without having to sweat the building/debugging process.
By the late 80's even the Pitts wasn't going to be around much longer because of all the monoplanes showing up and winning a lot of key contests. If you had a biplane you either stayed in a lower category, changed airplanes, or just got out. Fortunately for me Duane and Marion Cole had ''airshowed'' me early in my career and I fell off the competition band wagon real fast. I could do what I did and got PAYED for it. Sounded better than winning a trophy that looked like they had unscrewed the Bowler Guy off of it and put some cheesy airplane in place of it. It wasn't until Sean Tucker, BIG Sponsers, and ICAS changed the Mom and Pop airshow business that Duane, Marion, and I were so used to.
Anyway, back to the Buckers, everyone of the Dallas Buckers had a lot of the ''personality'' of the builder in it and they weren't ''carbon copies''. John bought Jim's 200hp engine when the others decided to go up to the O 540's. Charlie Lamb kept the flat bottom wing and went with the three blade and 300 hp engine. Ken Larson as far as I know never let anyone fly his airplane! Maybe a short hop by Jim but Ken kept it to himself. Charlie was a little more generous but it bit him....I didn't latch the canopy right once and it flew off half way though a routine at Aero Country and another guy ground looped it. I think someone wiped the gear off of Jim's original one but since they knew how to build them they got fixed pretty quick. John kept his at another airport and got tired of the competition scene and just let the plane sit although he would fly it rarely around the airport.
All of the guys were about my age now (57) when the original Braniff went bankrupt so what little flying they were still doing in the Buckers really stopped about that time (1981). Jim sold ''Goldie'' to the Dacy's, Ken finally donated his to the Frontiers of Flight Museum, Charlie Lamb popped off one day when Frank Price was there and Frank bought the thing on the spot. John let his sit....and sit. Only Jim got the bug again with the M14P and used the parts they had for Warren's plane...most of it was in Mike's hangar at Aero Country anyway. Jim had moved to Jacksonville for a time and most of the M14P airplane was built there. Don't know the details of the move down there or the move back. I flew the Sukhoi nose ring down to Jim in the Wilga I owned at the time. We were all on a steep learning curve on the M14 back then and I even arranged the sale of the engine Curtis used for the original Model 12. We were all using different combos of air start systems, air bottles and later propellers. I bought a Hoffman from Hale Wallace but Hale was such a pain in the ass to deal with I went with a Whirlwind prop after I got the Hoffman sold off on the Yak 18T I had for a while. The Hoffman was a great prop....really smooth. The Whirlwind worked OK and looked great but it was built with the modified McCauley hub that MT had originally used. Later, the Kimball's got the MT guys helping and they did all the testing on that with a different hub that made things work better.
I never heard about Celeste not wanting to send the pix and stuff to the EAA but all those guys kind of got a bad taste for the EAA when the thing started to take on a personality of a large corporation. I don't doubt the story though. Frank seemed to be content with the way things were going during the last part of his life as far as his contribution to the US Bucker legacy. He really got a kick out of the M14P airplane's performance when I flew it for what I guess was the last "Tiger Day" we had at Aero Country a couple of years before Frank died. The M14P did a lot to counteract the drag!
Ben
More from ben:
John still has N87P, the yellow one with the 260 lyc. on it. From most of the pictures I've seen it looks pretty much intact but I'll bet its in bad shape. We always called the other Bucker the ''white airplane'' and I don't remember what the N number was....maybe 187P. Frank also said that he had the prototype ''Lerche'' he got from the guy in Switzerland but I was never able to prove or disprove that.
N72CL was Charlie Lamb's plane...the one that originally had the AIO-360-A1A, the dry sump akro engine Lycoming was peddling back then and the flat bottom wing. Charlie even had one of the first Hartzell 2 blade akro props I'd ever seen but by then Hartzell was making akro props for the Decathlon and Pitts S 2A. Originally Curtis was going to build the S 2 with the fixed pitch 180 hp engine but he found out that Beechcraft had already gotten approval for the 200 hp I0-360 A1A with a constant speed prop they were going to use on the akro Musketeer. I guess Beech shitcanned the idea and the engineering data was given to Curtis and Herb Andersen by the FAA, at least that's the story I got. Marion and Art knew about this and all but insisted that Curtis and Herb get the 200 hp engine on it. Herb Andersen told me it was just a paperwork add on to the TCDS after a short fly off period so no S 2's were ever built. The ''A'' meant the 200hp/CS prop. The S 2E Kits used the 180 hp engines. Later on Marion told me that the original 180hp fixed pitch prop S 2 was the best balanced all around akro plane he had flown (when flown single place) including the Jungmann. I reminded him about that conversation a couple of years ago at OSH and he still thought that way. I've never flown an S 2 with a 180 fixed pitch but I do remember the S 2A's were kind of doggie with 2 folks in it. Charlie Hillard told me that when they were filming ''Cloud Dancer'' the S 2A was still nose heavy with that camera bolted on the tail post! I still wonder what the hell happened to Art when he went in. I guess he'd flat spun an S 2 more than anyone in the universe and it still bit him.
From Joe Vasile:
There were three Jungmiesters in TX. One in Temple, and two on the farm in Moody. They were all owned by Frank Price at one time. The one in Temple is the White home built Jungmeister with 6 cylinder Lycomming engine and big three bladed prop. The two in Moody were the Junjmiesters Frank got from Aresti. The one I bought EC-AME / N178P had a 185 warner on it when I bought it. That engine stayed with John Price. It went from the Spanish AF to Aresti to Price and then to me. The other EC-AEX / N87P had a 200 HP Lycomming with a two bladed prop on it the last time I saw it about two years ago. This is the Cantacazene airplane but he never owned it, Aresti owned it and lent it to Cantacazene to fly. Aresti sold it to Frank Price and John's brother David still holds the title. I think the white homebuilt is still the one for sale and John is willing to throw in the Warner and the aeromatic prop that were on the plane I now own to sweeten the deal on the homebuilt airplane. I will ask John and let you know.
John Nyquist came out today and we talked straight for a couple of hours. His son Bob, works at SWA and only lives a few blocks from his dad. I was hoping Swick would come by but its been so hot I'm sure he was working on the T craft in the airconditioned hanger.
John said the planes came in this order, Jim's was first to fly, then Ken Larson, John's plane, then Charlie Lamb. John knew about the web site and really wanted me to make sure everyone knew that none of the planes would have ever been close to completed if it weren't for Jim Swick. He really emphasized that several times and hoped Jim got the credit for getting them started and doing what he did to keep the projects going. John said the only reason his was serial number 5 was that's how many kids he had!!
Everyone of these guys had the talent and ability to build something but Jim was the ''glue'' that kept everything together. Back then, fiberglass was a new deal for them all and John told of how they made the mold and laid up the first cowl. After they pulled it from the mold they set it out in the sun to ''kick off'' and the whole thing just kind of ''melted'' right in front of their eyes. Jim called his fiberglass expert and found out they didn't do something right. John said there was fiberglass, cigarettes, beer cans, and everything else stuck together but the cowl just didn't kick off. He said it was a whole lot funnier telling the story as the years went by but they sure were a pissed off bunch of guys that day!
Jim Swick's importance to a lot of things is understated. John went on and on about how Jim made press blocks for the flying wire fittings, spar laminating table, jigs, fixtures, etc, etc, etc. John said he called Jim about 12 times a day sometimes getting info on spar blank thicknesses and everything else.
John Nyquist and Ben when it was only about 100 degrees in the shade.