I Bought The Cheapest Airplane On The Internet

so sitting this hanger behind me is one of the cheapest airplanes that I could find to buy on the internet and like some of my worst decisions I've ever made and some of my best wow I bought it sight unseen and that was a little over a year ago welcome back to rebuild rescue so it turns out the airplane I was searching for was pretty much right around the corner [Music] [Laughter] the kickbox one was born in a small town in Boise Idaho in 1984. the kefarts model 1 is a lightweight two-place aircraft with a gross weight of 850 pounds a typical empty weight of 426 pounds and a typical useful load of 424 pounds that means that a kickbox one can carry its own weight usually it's powered by 64 horsepower Road tax two-stroke two-cylinder 532 the model one cruises at 65 knots and has a stall speed of 31 knots with excellent stall performance and the ability to operate from short and unimproved airfields in 1984 there was only six models of Kit Fox One built since then there's thousands flying and operating today so now all we got to do is get this thing home how are we gonna get this thing home we can't fly well let me show you this is like one of the coolest things about a Kit Fox is literally the wings are held on by a pin and they swing back and rotate back into place so that way you can pretty much just throw it up on a trailer and transport it wherever you want you don't have to fly it but I'll bet you this little airplane is a ton of fun to fly and we're gonna find out [Music] okay all right so we got the kit box all loaded up now it's time to head back to rebuild rescue hanger [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] so if you guys have never seen a Kit Fox before this is pretty much a snowmobile engine not pretty much I mean it really is a snowmobile engine they had this same engine in snowmobiles it just has a gear reduction Drive Unit it is a twin cylinder it is liquid cooled so it's a little bit different than what you're going to find on you know today's standard airplane they're usually all air-cooled but it has a little radiator here one of the cool things about that is if you want to you can put a regular heat exchanger inside the Kit Fox which is really neat a little bit more dependable in in my opinion than you know an air exchange that comes from the exhaust that can be dangerous if you get a crack in the exhaust you can get carbon monoxide poisoning and fall asleep while you're flying which is not a good thing I see that the wooden prop here I was looking at it almost looks like it has a crack starting here so we'll uh we'll inspect that a lot further um and obviously make sure that's safe but it sat for a long time somebody did fly this at one time I'm not sure who if you look down here at the tires I mean it's got It's got a 20 inch tire on this little airplane so it really is made for off-field stuff like grass strips I think the wheel is a Douglas wheel off of a go-kart so they steal some parts from all kinds of different places if you look at the tubes here the tubes are well my fingers bigger than this too but it's all chromoly welded other than that it's cloth and it's wood it's got two fuel tanks it's got one in each wing and I don't know you might burn two gallons an hour or something so it's really cheap to fly some of these are pull start like the The Starlight which you guys remember that we found in the basement of a garage we're still waiting on paperwork is back there that one has a pull start I think it has the same engine that this has so this does have electric starter on it which is so much nicer than the pull start it's back here if you look at it the exhaust is a little rusty it's it's a little dirty but it's really going to clean up well but we have a ton of inspecting to do before we fly this for sure this is one of the first series so for the size of the airplane the wings are actually really big and the fold out feature which you guys saw you can fold these Wings up and throw it on a trailer say you want to go out to like Utah or something you obviously don't want to fly this all the way to you all the way to Utah so you can throw it up in a trailer and cruise out to Utah and you know check out all the different flying that you can do there and and all the different canyons and stuff it's a really light airplane I mean it's 800 I think 850 pounds 900 pounds so you know it's it's it's really light if you get into some winds you better be paying attention because you're going to have to be putting some inputs into it or you know you're going to be all over the place the suspension on these and I can't see it from up here but I can see it I think from down here and this is just like the ghost or Freedom they call them bungees it's just like a cord on a bungee strap and it's wrapped around here and that's how this suspension works but we're out here and it's like really windy and the whole airplane is rocking all over the place somebody spent some time and a little bit of money on the panel I mean it's it's got a Garmin uh 196 in it it's also got a Garmin GTX 327 got a narco com here a 120 Tso and of course we have our AirSpeed vsi altimeter we got some exhaust temp in there for a two-stroke very important we got water temp which is a little different it also does have a hundred and 39 hours on we got two controls we got a mic switch over there in the pilot side and there's our pedals and we got brakes on the left side only fuel on and off switch I'm not sure what this switch is here and pretty much I'm a pretty big guy I'm about 225 pounds and I'm six foot I haven't tried to get in this yet I'm gonna try to get in here and see if I actually fit not sure how you would get in one of these either [Music] all right so so I'm in it's a good thing that this crossbar up here uh gives you some Headroom and actually give me a little more Headroom on the right side so this is the flap control here which if you guys look as I actuate that that controls the flaps I'm gonna try to get over on the pilot side here yeah so when you're when you're in here you are definitely in here uh it's not it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be though it's it's really not that bad [Music] um so so oh yeah I could squeeze this you are definitely not squeezing in here bro that is crazy so this is like women only pilot and and women only to have control like full control I'm a little bit I don't know how that works I don't know how much you really need as far as control one of these but you figure if I keep my knee over if I keep my knee over on this side I almost feel like I need to fly with my hand under here now this has really thick cushions and the same with the back it's a really nice nice seat though it looks like of fuel cutoffs here and then it's got these disconnects right here too these disconnects are to disconnect that tank like a quick disconnect the one on this side here though was I saw was broken so right there's the gauges for the the right tank and then over on the other side there's the gauge for the left tank if you want to know how much fuel you have so I think the Kit Fox 7s or I think my kit Fox 5 they made the fuselage a little bit wider and a little bit deeper I really got to go check one out because for me that's a little tight it's flyable I think I could fly it by myself with someone else it might be a little bit difficult unless it was like just a really small person but again I'm a big guy so uh but I again I'm actually surprised I actually fit in there like looking at it I didn't think I was going to foreign [Music] a couple things that you need for any any engine to start I don't care whether it's an airplane it's a boat it's a car it's a train well maybe a train might be a little bit different you need air you need fuel and you need spark if you don't have those three things it's not going to start you also need compression you also need to make sure the timing's right but even with really low compression things will normally start if the timing's off it won't but that does have to do with the spark that's some of the things we're going to check we're also going to go ahead we're going to get the coil out and we're going to crawl up anything that might need loosened up that way it has a chance to work you know so we definitely got to get the penetrant out [Music] so it's really windy out here today and all we can hear is all these doors squeaking so I want to see if I can quiet some of them down we're out here I was getting some curl on here and honestly it's flying back in my face and the whole Kit Fox is kind of going all over the place and it's really windy so we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna get it back into the hangar hey so you guys don't hear all this wind noise and also so I don't keep getting a face full of coil so it's we have like 24 knot winds right now I think I could take this thing and point it that way and pretty much hover out here right now should we try that maybe we try that can we hover we'll tie it down now we better not do that so the first thing we'll do we'll we'll pop the spark plugs out we'll go ahead and we'll check for corrosion in here and just check and see what the inside this owners look like nobody knew how long it's been since this has been flown or started so I'm really not sure on the total condition of this why does that have like a huge I've never seen one that's all right I got a backup and then we'll check the fluid on the Gear Drive [Music] so it's a good sign it looks like somebody had put a bunch of anti-seize on there so that plug actually looks pretty good yeah and if you look it's a b8es so this is literally a normal two-stroke motorcycle spark plug I used to run these in some two-stroke race cars I had all the time I'll put one and two over here so not only does the do the threads look good but the plug the burn of the plug looks good and on a two-stroke engine that is so important but it looks pretty much perfect the heat range looks perfect yeah so that's that's a good sign a good sign of how it was running I don't know how it would run right now but [Music] it should be bottom dead center we should be able to look right inside there yeah so let's grab our scope I'm gonna get these out of the way I'm just gonna check one cylinder at one time [Music] and that is exactly what you want to see so that's the cross hatch of the cylinder walls and I mean it looks brand new now on the Hobbs meter it shows a hundred and some hours now I do have a ton of information of books and stuff from this but I have a feeling this might be a hundred and some hour since new engine one of the things that you'll see down there if you look down and you see those ports again this is a two-stroke engine so a two-stroke engine it has uh ports like piston ports uh instead of having any type of a valve or anything like that so uh there's a lot less things to go wrong basically with it really good that's in like honestly it's like I didn't expect it to be in that good of shape yeah it's it's in like perfect condition you can hey we can even go down in one of the ports here really good if you guys look on the top of the Piston even there's not even any Carbon on there I have a feeling that this engine has a 130 some hours on it since new cylinder one looks really good the plugs look really good I mean there's not even a reason to clean those plugs they're really that clean um I wasn't going to take these wires off all the same time but I am going to do it just because I want to check and and make sure we have spark as well so I want to have these plugs out when I check when it Sparks I'm just going to put them on different parts of the engineers hopefully this cylinder looks as good as the front one does again it's got anti-seize on there which is a good sign somebody was taking care of this the burn that's a little bit richer if you look at the color of the electrode there a little bit richer but you can also tell on a two-stroke and a four stroke if you look on this electrode that bends around here there's a heat mark on there so you see that heat Mark a perfectly burning plug that heat Mark is going to be right about at the middle of the bend of the electrode that tells you it's a way to like read the plug it tells you how hot this electrode is when it's running the engine this is running good it's a tiny bit on the rich side you could basically lean this out a little bit more uh the one thing on this Engine versus an airplane engine it is these carburetors they're they're set where they're set at with the jetting there's no way really to adjust them from the cockpit so once you start it you got throttle you don't have to worry about and your mixture or any of that stuff which is nice but then sometimes it is nice to be able to lean it out a little bit too oh that is so nice it is perfect cross hatch there's no rust in there there's barely any carbon great great condition this thing looks really good perfect cross hatch you can see a little bit of the uh cruel mixed with the Annie sees stuff running down the cylinders there but wow I mean it's brand new it's brand new this airplane barely has any time on it I mean I think it was a hundred and some hours um and I think I'm pretty sure we're gonna find that this engine is an original 100 and some hour engine so there is all kinds of life left in this thing the cylinders look great so let's move on to let's hook these spark plugs up and let's check them one at a time and make sure that each coil was firing and make sure that the whole ignition system works right because we know we have everything in here is good so we just got to make sure it's got spark now uh we'll check the carburetors make sure they're opening check the air filter assembly um and we'll know it has air and then we'll just have to go ahead and check and make sure that we have some fuel and then I I think we can try to fire it up so I'm not sure which one of these switches in here is ignition plan's going to be to switch them all on it's even got some battery power left all right so the Masters turned on it's got power the avionics um I didn't turn the avionics on we'll get to that a little later thank you oh and there's one thing that I forgot to mention some of you guys might be thinking you know what about the crankcase oil what about the oil for the engine you didn't check that so it is a two-stroke engine and because it's a two-stroke engine it doesn't have any crankshaft oil the oil that would be in the bottom end of the engine on a two-stroke actually it gets lubricated by the fuel so there is either a pre-mix which I'm not sure if this has a a pre-mixed tank or if this actually has you know where you got to mix it before you put the fuel in kind of like a weed whacker but um but yeah so you don't have to have any oil here we do get to check the drive oil though on on the front of here which is I think it's an 80 or a 90 weight gear fluid so yeah before you post something in the comments about me not checking the crankshaft oil or the engine oil hmm sure what this is I'm going to hit the switch and see if the starter works everything clear out of there yeah all right so I'm thinking these are the mag switches here it did spin over but it's definitely spinning over pretty slowly and that's what the spark plugs out I doubt it would have enough battery power to turn this over if the plugs were in so now I just got to figure out why I don't see any Spark oh right there we have spark so I just saw that it did have some spark right there all right so we do have spark on that one cylinder it's a little bit of a weak spark though like so that spark is uh it was like a red spark you want to see a blue spark out of a spark plug so each cylinder right now is getting spark but I'm only getting sparked from these two coils here I'm not getting any Spark from from this coil or this coil which is what I would consider the secondary coil but I do see a little bit of corrosion on the contacts and and and some of the wires more so over on this one so I don't trust it as much but I do know that all you need is spark on one of the plugs for it to run for it to fly you know we want to make sure that's good but the other thing too that you want to do before you start this is you definitely want to make sure that when you switch those coils off that it cuts a spark because I haven't worked on this before and I don't know if I mean maybe the switches aren't even hooked up and I go to shut it down something happens when we fire it up we don't want it like taken off without being able to emergency shut it down but I did flick off the switches we have zero spark on any of the coils we know that it's got It's going to have good compression we know that it's got Spark so now let's check let's get these plugs back in and uh I think we'll check for air and then we'll get some fuel in it and check the oiling system too I have to admit you know when I started looking at this when I started checking out all the kit foxes and the new Kit Fox sevens it's pretty cool airplane I I could see us getting one and the one I was looking at I really liked is the one with the Yamaha Apex the turbocharged like 180 horsepower or 200 some horsepower there are some really cool machines this tank right here is like a holding tank so the fuel will come down from the wings into this tank and then it feeds the engine from this tank here I'm assuming it's uh just in case you know depending on what angle you're at you're flying at it's going to have plenty of fuel in this container right here so you're not going to run out of fuel in the air which is a really good thing let's just pull this off we'll take a look at the carburetors we'll make sure that they're working [Music] the air filter looks to be it's a k n air filter and it's it's in great shape like it almost looks new sounds like it's so windy here today it sounds like the hangers are going to fall in if you look down here at the carburetors they're actually open right now so let's see if I pull the throttle back this slide should go all the way down and they are so if you look here these are the idle adjustments for these carburetors there's two carburetors so they have to be equally adjusted which there's some measuring you can do there and there's some flow checking you can do but there's an adjustment here an adjustment here working properly and they even look like they have a little bit of film from the two-stroke oil being in there that's why their cylinders look so new although it's been sitting because every time you run one of these because it's a two-stroke literally it's feeding oil into those owners so when you shut it off there's oil inside the cylinders you really rarely see a two-stroke engine that is it that is sealed up and taken care of with any type of corrosion or rust inside the cylinders because you always got oil in there this is almost too easy I'm not running into anything really bad do you want me dump some bird poop on it that's what we're missing it feels kind of weird because everything is really going well and everything's looking really good we need like we need some bird poop or a nest or two so I can feel better about everything yeah everything everything looks everything looks really good I two of these coils aren't firing and it looks like there could be a little bit of a questionable wiring going on here one of the things I'm a little worried about is this right here so if you look here this is the grain of the wood but we're definitely gonna have to have this checked because the last thing that we want is this prop separating here so while I'm thinking about it I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna grab some oil and put some two-stroke oil in there and I'm also going to look it over and make sure I don't see any kind of leaks or anything so we got a little racing bean oil I used to uh run this in race cars I used to drive and a little different getting antifreeze to put in an airplane and then we do have some gear oil just in case that that Gear Drive system needs uh needs some oil and we're definitely going to need this if we're gonna start it up get this air filter on there get it nice and tight see if this actually has any coolant in it at all you see a little bit of coolant down there but it looks like it could use some it's got this cool little overflow bottle here and I don't see anything in that you should always see a tiny bit in one of these overflow reservoirs I'm going to go ahead and top that off all right so really the next thing we got to do is we got to get these the fuel tanks hooked up if you look there's a connector here and a connector here it's a quick connect but the one like I showed you earlier over there is broken so what I'm actually going to do I'm going to stick a screwdriver in that and tighten it up and we're not going to use that left wing tank we're just going to use the right wing tank we're going to get some fuel in there and you know and we're going to fill it up maybe just quarter tank or something enough to get down to this sub tank and then we'll make sure that we do have fuel getting over the engine then we'll put the plugs in and we'll check the gear oil and then we'll try to start it but Harris and I were talking and Harrison said you guys are probably a little bit curious on if the avionics work but I think it's the fact that Harrison is curious to see if the avionics worked and iron too so let's get in here and we'll power everything up let's see if they work it had a little power it was down though so let me go ahead and I'll get this avionics Master on or the master for the airplane so we have AV fpst nav GPS uh we got fuses on everything this is a really cool little panel I like these light up so let's go ahead and there's avionics power and the GTX 327 is lighting up and it went out so my thought is we probably don't have enough juice yeah so I'm gonna go ahead and grab something to to get power in here [Music] please get a fresh new battery installed yeah we'll wait to put that on just in case we drain it down and have to put a charge on it all right if that did indeed powered up a little bit better ooh all right GTX GPS hey look at that yeah the 196 works so this will work once we get outside it's it's it has to be able to see because we're in the building let's see if where the com port's at this is the end this goes back to the antenna I found really coming out we're at right here oh my gosh so so for about the last 10-15 minutes I was looking to see where the connection was and right there it is but it looks like there's only a connection for the pilot so we checked everything out with the avionics everything seems to be working really well we won't really know if the radio works till we get it outside so next what we got to do we're going to put a little fuel in this tank I'm gonna change some of the fittings around over here because of that one fitting being broken over in the other wing and we're going to get the spark plugs back in here you know we already know that the fuel pump the electric fuel pump works even if the manual fuel pump doesn't work the electric fuel pump is going to work and we'll be able to see if we get fuel down here to the gasket later and there's actually some really stale old fuel in there just a drip or two in there right now so I'm going to just take another quick look around and just make sure there's nothing I'm missing I don't want to add fuel to this and have something start leaking out so but it looks good I should be able to just go ahead and unhook that Wing over here just have this Wing hooked up for now until we get some new fittings but I am going to go ahead and take a picture of this so I remember how it was routed before in the future here we're going to be replacing all these fittings here they have some plastic fittings I don't really like them I'd like to see some metal fittings especially when it's over your head and there's fuel in there and we're going to replace all these fuel lines too with just some new lines because these are a little bit hard you can tell they're getting a little brittle when you do the condition inspection on the fox we're going to go over the whole thing well that's not good so if you guys look here if you look at this hose cell dry crack that is uh it's one of one of the reasons I mean you get an airplane you're not familiar with you got to go through all this stuff there's a ton of stuff we got to look over on this because it sat for so long pretty much anything rubber or plastic or anything like that is going to get all torn out and replaced all right let's get these plugs back down in there get my torque wrench on here perfectly torqued so we'll probably be replacing these spark plugs with the BR AES from NGK because it has a resistor plug-in I would assume when this was built they probably didn't have the resistor plugs what that does is there's a built-in resistor inside the spark plug and it'll keep it from having RF interference definitely bad I'm sure it comes across on the radio on this so obviously at some point I will come back and I will torque these and make sure they're at the right torque values we'll actually torque the head nuts too and check those make sure they're correct and go over the whole thing as far as torque values I would not fly one without a bean torque all right let's check the uh the gearbox fluid make sure that that's good [Music] so it has two Marks here there's a Mark here and there's a Mark here I think when I was reading the manual there is a high and a low make sure I have those mags off so we're going to check the fluid and make sure we got fluid in the gearbox all right plenty of fluid in there and that fluid looks to be new a little later on we'll definitely go ahead and change that and just get fresh fluid in there but I feel good starting it up all right so everything's buttoned up everything looks really good so we're gonna pull it out we're gonna lock the wings back in place we're going to get some fuel over in that right wing make sure it gets down to the tank and then we're going to see if this thing will fire up in the for the first time in I don't know how long so it could be I mean it was built in 80 around to 84. um I have to look at the logs it could have been fired up uh back in 1990 how many years ago would that be that'd be like 30 some years ago so this thing might not have ran for like 30 some years I don't know um after I look at some logs some of the receipts I'll have a little better idea but as you guys can tell it has been sitting for a long time so so we'll see if this thing fires up there's no reason it shouldn't I'm just really surprised we didn't find any any worse things so far yeah oh wait a second look there's a little bit of fuel in the lines so a little bit of old fuel line so there's a primer in here okay so that was just taking Fuel and sending it right down in here so I might have just flooded it we'll see with with old fuel I didn't think there's any fuel in there [Music] [Music] get some pliers you got it yeah dude on the jar opening championship hey harry with the Wind [Music] so that does keep the tank pressurized those little nozzles there as if you see you see the fuel coming up right here it does still sound empty I don't know if that pump should be quite that loud there's one way to tell if it's going to fire up and that's to try to fire it up let's go ahead and give her a break check oh yeah brakes work good man this thing's just swaying right in the left sitting here all right let's power this thing on let's see if it will fire up fuel pump all right let's throttle off we'll give it a little bit of throttle I got the brakes on we get a choke on this thing which is a little bit different we'll turn a choke on I did prime it so I doubt we'll need it I'm going to go ahead and pull back on this stick all right let's try this out all right we're too far right up I'm so excited to fly this thing I actually fit in here pretty good and she shot right off that was like way that was way too easy well she did shut off though so let me figure out what that was let me see if I can keep this thing running [Music] so it looks like the voltage is charging it's got a negative draw so there might be something here where the ignition the charging system needs some attention because this should be this should be up here there we go so the battery that we got is a little low we turn these on we get a positive amp flow and we got a positive charge that that battery is a little low it is going to charge up though so we'll be good to go so we got water temp the exhaust tab I think it needs a sensor but water temp is coming up so that's good that means everything's flowing I was a little worried about that having an old water pump we got positive charging you can tell that the owner's style strobe lights takes a lot of energy if you look at it takes it down to a zero amp charge so we'll replace that with an LED system that that takes a lot less voltage yeah so everything worked out really well like looking inside that engine it looks so brand new and I just figured it was going to run good if it wouldn't look that new I would have pulled the carburetors apart too and looked at the floats which is something that we got to do but man that it fired right up it fired right up you could smell that old fuel I think after some of that old fuel got out of there yeah I think it was good to go I think we got to see if it'll Taxi what do you think [Music] it's a little dirty I think she'll clean up real nice foreign traffic kickbox one is taxing up to 2-9 Chester County traffic all right guys so this thing actually runs really really well pretty much everything works on it there's a couple things we've got to do to it yet and we have to annul it and we have to okay so there's a lot of things we've got to do yet before we can fly it but I really think we got one heck of a deal I want to thank Sam for hooking me up with this deal and yeah I'm really excited about it really excited about this airplane this will be a really cool Cruiser and I can't wait to get a flying again so if you guys haven't done it yet make sure you hit the Subscribe button make sure you like our videos give us a thumbs up and of course turn on notifications so you can see the next adventure that is rebuild rescue take care

Channel: Rebuild Rescue

Views: 771,189

Keywords: Rebuild, Repair, Build, renovation, Auction, copart, cheapest airplane on the internet, i bought, cheapest, airplane, plane, facebook marketplace, barnstormers aircraft sales, ebay, internet, buying an airplane, will it start, will it run, kitfox, kit fox, kitfox 1, 1984 kitfox 1, stol plane, experimental plane, rebuild rescue

Id: EAZC4s2YPeg

Length: 39min 44sec (2384 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023