The first episode of Monster Garage in which Jesse James forms a team
to build an airplane out of a Panoze sports car occured last night.

Unlike just about all the previous episodes I've seen, this team had a
lot of people. Rather than save a bit of time by scavenging a set of
wings, they actually built their own. One of the engineers designed
an airfoil and they cut out templates, bolted metal between the
templates and slapped it and hammered it into flanged rib pieces.

They rushed some material over to a local machine shop to bend up the
spars, then riveted doublers onto the cap strips and riveted the nose
pieces, middle and tail pieces to the spars. Lots of people working
and a lot of work. In three or four days, they had a wing assembled.

It's impressive, but as usual I felt that the effort was wasted on a
joke vehical.

One of Jesse's concepts is that everything the teams build is supposed
to look basically stock, but do these ridiculous stunts. In this case
he insisted that the aircraft engine be concealed until needed then be
raised for action. This is creating friction between a number of
workers. The guy who is the "chief" aerodynamics engineers told Jesse
that if he wanted this thing to fly, the engine had to be fixed in
place, none of this raise or lower it stuff. Besides, there's a huge
tube extension that has to be built for the tail plane that isn't
going to be retracted, it's welded in place. Jesse, for his part, had
little to add to the chaos, as building an airplane is way out of his
league.

He did have a suggestion as to using a tool that made bending the rib
material over the formers, a slapper, but the one suggestion he made
to having a rib cut so that the material that required shrinking was
eliminated from the blank turned out to be a dud. The material cut
out of the rib was exactly the material needed for riveting, and the
engineers told him so. He just shrugged, as did everyone else, they
all went back to bending metal.

The engine turned out to be an 0-320 out of a hurricane damaged
airplane. 150 hp.

Corky Scott