In the early 1970's the irrepressible Frank Price (see the article "Papa Tiger" in the downloads section) having failed to come to a agreement to build Bückers in the USA set about designing an Americanized version. Franks American Jungmeister differs from the original as Ben describes below, but basically it had a simplified fuselage structure with a second "jump" seat, wings of a different airfoil section, different landing gear and a few other changes. Other than the airfoil, the wings were pretty faithful to the original with routed spars and complex ribs.
If you hang around mid-cental Texas much, you will hear many stories of Frank's exploits in the Bucker and in particular of trips with his wife Celeste in the jump seat, usually buried under all the junk Frank would take with him to airshows and competitions.
Whether you consider this a "real" Jungmeister or not, there is no denying it is a precious piece of aerobatic history and I have to say that If I were Ben, I would be very, very proud to be it's custodian.
Weather permitting, Ben hopes to have N103N at oshkosh in the IAC parking area.
Steve
The plane was built in 1972 and is the only one out of the five built that still has the four cylinder in it. Jim Swick has his original plane he bought back from Dacy and he still has the one he built with an M 14P on it. Ken Larson's plane is in a museum in Dallas and the one Frank Price's son has for sale is still in Temple,Texas unless someone's bought it recently. N103N was serial number 5 out of that group. All the planes with the exception of the one Frank owned when he died have the 2412 airfoil on it. John Nyquist was the guy that modified Frank's N87P wings to this airfoil years ago. He was the best wood worker of the group and it shows.
This is Jim Swick, Charlie Lamb, John Nyquist, and Ken Larson in 1973.
You can see that Charlie's had the convertible hole opened in this photo.
These guys really went all out to replicate as closely as possible the construction of the Bücker. Swick and the guys said that Frank's "plans" weren't too good so there was a lot of trips to Waco to take measurements and look at construction techniques. They didn't use metric tubing or hardware and the landing gear has a couple of die springs in the drag strut so the gear is pretty stiff and doesn't hang down in flight. They routed the spars, attached the fittings with the driven rivets instead of bolts, and even built the tailwheel as close to the original. Back then Frank had at least two Jungmeisters and a couple of Jungmanns at his place along with a bunch of sub assemblies so they knew what the guts should look like. This airplane still has the original Stits with Poly Tone through the color. It still looks pretty good so I'm not going to recover it right now. It shows its age but hat the heck, I'm not that picky anymore. Like anything with light colors it has a few different shades of blue here and there but I've seen a lot worse. The airplane only has 254 hours total time since new but some of that may be "P51" time. The engine was torn down, inspected and overhauled in 2002 due to inactivity and AD compliance. Tillery only flew it around Dallas when the engine went back in and then he flew it to Houston and hangared it. He still worked on it from time to time, had some radio work done and kept it clean but his son's illness, business obligations, and a rather lengthy ramp and taxiway construction (9 months) kept him from flying it even if he wanted to.
Jim Swick was and still is a master at building things. He's 80 now and still gets up early and goes to work. He's building another clip wing TCraft with one of those little radials made in Australia. Swick built a lot of jigs and tooling for the 5 airframes. Most of that stuff belongs to John Price and is in the hangar in Temple with the white Bucker his dad owned. That airplane originally had an AIO-360-A1A, the dry sump akro engine, but it locked up in less than 10 hours and Lycoming wouldn't do anything about it. Swick, Larson, and Charlie Lamb decided to put IO 540's on the planes, Charlie's, the white one that had started off with that AIO Lycoming, put an angle valve semi 300hp with a Hartzell three blade prop off an Aerostar! Remember the time frame, Hartzell didn't make any three blade akro props. The airplane was nose heavy but I flew it a couple of times and it worked fine. I bet it would do great with a MT on the nose instead of that 100 pound hunk on the front.
Ben