About a year ago, once I had started learning to fly gyros, I contacted a guy I met at a party years ago and suggested we get his Bensen flying. He'd had it maybe twenty years. He wrote back and said that if I had the time to re-build it, I could have it for free! His circumstances had changed and he needed the space it was taking up. All it would cost me was the fee to get it shipped down from Glasgow.
I contacted the Civil Aviation Authority, who were very helpful and suggested that before I went to the expense of transferring the registration, I should talk to the Light Aircraft Association about the viability of putting the aircraft back on the register. I contacted the LAA and also an inspector. However, unfortunately it transpired that the registration had been issued prior to the intended motorisation of the aircraft, which had been built and flown as a glider. They suggested that no progress was made with making it a powered machine because the would-be builder was probably told what I was being told, that having been built as a glider, the project had not been overseen by an inspector, so that it could never be signed off. You'd never be able to say for sure that the specified materials had been used, or that the drillings and fixings were as specified in the drawings, etc. I was urged not to proceed with it.
Inevitably I was very disappointed. I contemplated selling the rotor-blades and the engine, the Montgomery cockpit pod, engineering-shop manufactured engine frame and paperwork, etc. But I ended up just putting it all away in my workshop for now.
Until.....
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