I maintained my interest in homebuilding however, by continuing my involvement with SAAC and about 1998, I met Chris Condell who was to heavily influence my spare time activities. He was passionately interested in building (and flying) a gyro and co-incidentally, had purchased a set of Bensen drawings some ten years previously. We got together with a third enthusiast - Fergus Kavanagh - and began construction. A year later, we each had a completed Bensen Gyroglider.
Unfortunately, I didn't take many shots of the construction and those I did were before I went digital camera. I'll scan in what I've got and add them to this page as time allows. The pictures of the blade and rotorhead construction should be the most interesting. For the blades, we set up a primitive production process and built a total of twelve blades - two sets each. I reckon that twelve blades is about the minimum for an economic build cycle. If you just want one set, it'll be far cheaper in the long run to go out and purchase. The blade building occupied eight weeks, not counting finishing for painting. That took another two weeks per set. We each did our own finishing, painting and balancing.
Early in 1999, I had a blade strike while kiting on the hill behind my home. The damage included blades, cluster plates, tow boom, pushrods, rudder and fin. The rest was salvageable, but only for use as a glider. This set me back almost nine months including initial depression and finishing another set of blades. I'll be replacing all of the remaining structure before I add the engine. Here are some recent shots of the rebuilt glider. The replaced parts are fairly obvious due to either being unpainted or a different colour.
While I was rebuilding, Chris and Fergus were towing. We had access to a 650 Metre grass strip and over six weekends in the Summer of '99 they accumulated about two hours each of airtime with about 250 takeoffs and landings. Yes, that's approximately 30 seconds airborne for each flight. We're currently looking for a large pasture which would allow continuous circular towing. No luck so far.
Here's a shot of 'Overhead Stick' Fergus concentrating hard;
Here's Chris organising a return to Terra Firma, with much clenching of teeth (and cheeks). You'll have to excuse the picture quality, it was taken, (by Paddy Flanagan) from the rear side-window of my old Lancia Prisma, going 35MPH in atrocious conditions. We had an onshore wind gusting from 15 to 25 MPH which made life quite interesting. You can see from the cars tyre tracks, how far offline Chris was, at touchdown.