Recently, Engler sold the set of airplanes to Beijing Hangcheng International Investment Co. and will be building a second set to be delivered there in 2017 for a “birthplace of aviation” exhibit mirroring the one that appeared in Dayton in 2003.
Speaking in his newly renovated Wright Aeroplane Company shop in West Milton, Engler said, “We’re constantly in the process of reinventing old technologies.”
“The Wright Brothers could walk out of their shop and turn in any four directions and walk to the industry where the people had the answers to these questions,” he said about the challenges of finding tools, raw materials and methods of creating parts.
“One of the problems that we have that the Wright Brothers did not, is in finding the materials from which to make these airplanes.”
Here are five things Engler has needed to make it happen:
Fabric
Engler said he and his workers have scoured the internet to find the “Pride of the West” muslin fabric the Wrights used to cover their airplane wings but have not been able to come up with a cloth that matches the feel of the original.
Wood
Said Engler: “The straight parts of their airplanes were made from red spruce and the bent parts were made from ash. Red spruce is no longer available. So, we have to use sitka spruce or hemlock. Now we’re threatened by the ash borer. And there is no substitute for ash. In this day and age of composites it’s not going to affect you and I in our home or in our auto or in our airplanes, but it will affect me in my ability to produce an historically accurate replica.”
Tacks
Said Engler: “I had to buy antique tacks to build this next set of airplanes. I found someone who still had a huge supply of Holland tacks, the upholstery tacks the Wright Brothers used to tack the fabric to the spars. The tacks that we were getting, mostly out of China, are not of sufficient quality.
Metal
Said Engler: “We were making a radiator for the 1905 Flyer and we couldn’t form the copper pipes to make the fins of the radiator. So, we went to a metallurgist and he asked if we had annealed the copper and we said 'no.' He said all copper back then had to be annealed to make it soft so you could bend it. So these are examples of things that we keep running into.”
String
Said Engler: “Other things are fading out of existence because they are just not needed anymore. In the 20 years that I have been building Wright brothers airplanes, waxed linen cord has gone from $4 to $30 a roll. Waxed linen cord was ubiquitous to hardware stores in the Wright brothers era. Before the days of duct tape, waxed linen cord was used to stick things together. It’s getting harder and harder for us to get materials that the Wright brothers could just walk out the door across the street to Hamburger Hardware and buy.”
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