Mark Langford's KR2S

June 19, 2008 2:58 PM

I love nicely done home-built aircraft. I discovered Mark Langford's website over a year ago but forgot to bookmark it. Thankfully, I recently found it again. His dedication (obsession?) is obvious. I can't get over how many parts he custom built for his plane. He suffered an engine failure in his Corvair engine at one point, and I loved how he took the engine apart afterward and gave a full rundown about what happened.
posted by eratus (8 comments total)

I love crazy obsessive people who do cool fun things.
posted by Divine_Wino at 3:32 PM on June 19, 2008

Great site that I shall enjoy perusing...I love home-built plane sites.

But my first thought after looking over his posts is regarding not one, but TWO crankshaft failures while in-flight and having to glide in for a landing. Personally, I don't think I would have had the time to rebuild my engine for a crank failure to occur again because I'd be too busy cleaning my shorts from the first time...Apparently he has more time on his hands than me.
posted by JibberJabber at 3:38 PM on June 19, 2008

Home built planes are awesome, the 90+ percent of people who attempt it only to have a half built plane cluttering up their garage for 10+ years aside. I had a rocket engineer coworker who built a Long EZ, and it was his baby. He was a bit obsessed with Burt Rutan, and wanted to become a stock option multi-millionaire so that he could start a company to build reusable space vehicles with Rutan as the head engineer. The stock options didn't work out, but he sort of got his wish anyway.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:31 PM on June 19, 2008

Gorgeous build. My old boss has been doing this for a while.
posted by phrontist at 5:09 PM on June 19, 2008

If you're into this and haven't already, I highly suggest checking out Robert Cringely's Plane Crazy. It was made by OPB, maybe you could find it at your library...
posted by pwb503 at 5:45 PM on June 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

From the article:

This worries me a little, because I don't think life is supposed to be this good.

I love it when people feel like this.
posted by eclectist at 7:19 PM on June 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

Tony Bingelis wrote several books on building aircraft. Highly recommended, even for general gear head types not specifically building airplanes.
posted by Tube at 10:43 PM on June 19, 2008

I know Mr. Langford's son, and Mr. Langford. He really is that awesome in real life, and the obsession is hereditary. The younger one left an aerospace engineering program at a top school to, well, go build planes, instead of going to class.
posted by whatzit at 5:46 AM on June 20, 2008