Unlikely as it seems, I may be one of those giving procrastination a bad name. Certainly it’s one of my core competencies; ask anyone at the magazine involved in the production of this column. In moments of introspection this can lead to guilt, and guilt leads to defeat, and when working on airplanes—especially building a kit airplane—score enough defeats and the plane never flies. Or the airplane might fly but short of what it could be.
And with that cheery thought we’re standing at the rear of my Starduster Too contemplating a sagging tailwheel spring. It’s an apologetically small three-leaf arrangement and its flattened arch tattletales an overload by the six-cylinder engine, three-bladed metal prop and a wall-to-wall crushed blue velour French cat house interior with gold metal flake trim. Let’s not forget the pilot’s expense account lunch habits, either. It’s heavy, to put it politely.
The Tailwheel Spring
The tailwheel spring, on the other hand, is downright dainty. You can find it in the Spruce catalog where its lithe, 1-1/4-inch width and slight arch signal its application to Aeroncas and other Cub-like lightweights. Designed for near ultralights, someone was tripping when they bolted it onto the 1488-pound Starduster.
The results have been predictably awful. The spring takes a permanent sag soon after installation, leading to an all-wrong tailwheel caster angle. Given normal landing speeds the tailwheel shakes like a wet dog when it isn’t tagging the bottom of the rudder. The only surprise here is I’ve put up with it for many years. Decades, actually.
At first I simply replaced the spring with a new one from Spruce and things were tolerable for a while. Years later when that spring inevitably yielded I thought I was too busy to open a new project under the aft fuselage so I bought another new spring because it was an easy replacement. Naturally I started doing wheel landings and holding the tail up for as long as air would allow, and thoughts of that little spring gave me pause around big expansion cracks and grass strips. Even when Dave Baxter, guru of all things Starduster, unannounced shipped me the correct, heavy-duty tailwheel spring I choked, put off by the need to reengineer the spring mounting. The new, wider spring was going to require a new mounting plate and strap, a raised ear steering horn on the tailwheel and a new rudder horn to match.
Eventually along came the current condition inspection, and this time in a mixture of disappointment but also with a surprising amount of relief I saw the spring’s middle leaf was cracked. As in two. Whatever guilt and apprehension I had about my spring problem was resolved; this time I knew I was going to finally do what I must to install Baxter’s big spring.
So what changed? Why was I ready to jump through the hoops to get that new spring installed when previously I’d found something else to do? It would be easy to say I had simply tired of the shaking and sagging and was ready to step up. In a nutshell that is the truth, but only in a nutshell. In the years of putting this moment off I had used all kinds of justifications, some spurious but some, surprisingly, not without merit.
For one thing, changes like this cost money and that’s not something we all have all the time. Now that I’m in the middle of what I knew was going to be the spring change plus a tailwheel overhaul and some navel-gazing regarding the Omni antenna co-mounted with the tail spring, the costs are adding up. I’ve always tried to improve any part of the airplane I end up dealing with, so the long-abused Scott 3200 tailwheel is now part of the “spring swap,” and replacing that assembly’s internals has added markedly to the bottom line on this project. So far the total bill is $1100 with a few incidentals yet to go. Sure, one large is just a standard aviation unit, but back in mortgage, kid and elderly parent days a unit was tough to come by.
Then there is the welding required to fit a new spring mount. As a kid I smoked my share of stick rods in metal shop, but reliable gas much less TIG welding is one of those skills I’ve yet to bag. Plus, for years good welding was available just a few doors down from my hangar landlord, but the tailwheel spring project hadn’t risen to Job 1 before he flew west. That led to some years of a welding drought, at least as far as people I’d want making sparks on my plane. Only after circumstances made the spring change the first priority did a new welding option (and a good one at that) appear. So at least for a while a lack of welding was a handy excuse.
More germane, however, was all the time the old spring was sagging and the tailwheel shaking there were other things to do on the airplane (or elsewhere in life). Most significant of these was an engine overhaul, and getting the noisemaker up front fully functional was definitely higher up the to-do list than upgrading the tailwheel spring. The six-year engine ditty didn’t help the tailwheel financials, either.
To these major concerns we can toss in the usual inhabitants of the procrastination toolbox. Apprehension about tackling a new job and encountering new and perhaps unforeseen, potentially difficult challenges is always a project killjoy for we mechanical cowards. Especially early on the Starduster has taken more than its share of heavy maintenance with attendant downtime so I’ve always been reticent to voluntarily take it out of service for upgrades. I’d rather fly it, and something was bound to go high and right sooner rather than later. When minor nags turned into squeaky wheels then I would switch from flying to fabrication mode.
What feels different lately is I’ve learned not to beat myself up too badly about not correcting faults like an under-engineered tailwheel spring before their time. Rome in one day and all that. Sure, it’s been time to upgrade the spring seemingly forever. But while I’ve been flying around this weak point I’ve also overhauled the engine, ditto the prop, built an entirely new exhaust system, added ADS-B, replaced the transponder, overhauled the radio, upgraded the fuel selector valve, added an engine monitor and GPS nav, replaced the ignition switch, stop-drilled who knows how many cracks and stitched up holes in the fabric among many other things. So, if it’s taken forever to get around to the tailwheel, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been making other improvements in the meantime.
All considered, keeping a homebuilt from the pre-kit era has been a good way to go. Of course, I predate the kit era myself, so the rag and tube construction, WW-II surplus hardware and sometimes humble solutions to construction problems aren’t so quaint to me as to someone weaned on more modern homebuilts. In fact, I sort of like it that way as the museum hardware tangibly reminds me of friends, family and times now gone as I tiptoe into the future. Surely the old bird’s price of entry was a major enabler to my time aloft and it’s provided plenty of that education and recreation Experimentals are all about. If I didn’t quite get around to procrastinating immediately, it hasn’t been for a lack of trying.
