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The Scratch-Building Alternative

Mark Townsend’s seminar will help your I-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-kit project get underway.

By LeRoy Cook

One of the attractions of homebuilding is the opportunity to fly your own aircraft with a minimum of financial investment. Or is that really true? With nicely finished kit airplanes regularly coming in at over $100,000, can it be that the low-cost plane fantasy may be just that—a wistful dream?

To get a better feel for the possibilities of low-cost homebuilding in this age of super costly quickbuild kits, we attended one of Mark Townsend’s seminars on scratch-building from plans, where we learned and relearned many aspects of the budget homebuilding art. Townsend is the owner of Can-Zac Aviation at Kitchener, Ontario (CYKF), International Airport, the Canadian representative for Zenith Aircraft Company and an avid scratch-builder. Zenith is one of the few kit makers that still offers a plans-only option; the company supplies complete kits for the Zodiac CH 601 and STOL CH 701 models, but it will also sell sub-kits,…


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