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It’s All About the Craft for Helena’s Paul Gordon
By Connie Daugherty There is an aviation treasure tucked away inside a blue hangar at the Helena airport. Paul Gordon has spent thousands of hours over nearly three decades preserving aviation history in the form of restored, airworthy antique planes. “When I finished my first airplane, all of a sudden I was empowered,” he recalls. “Wow, I did that, I can do that!” A quiet, unassuming, but uniquely talented craftsman, Paul literally knows these
planes from the inside out – every bolt, every nut, every weld, as well as the history of the model and the individual story of each specific plane. “This one was a 1931 American Pilgrim from Alaska,” he says indicating the lightweight metal frame for the fuselage and floorboards. When the rescued plane came to Paul all that was even partially intact was the engine compartment. For 60 years before it came to Paul, the plane sat near the Yukon River where it crashed. He has carefully machined, crafted, and assembled each piece of the fuselage himself. “There are no plans or blueprints for this plane,” he explains. You have to be a detective to find information and parts for these old planes. There were only 26 Pilgrims built and Paul has worked on three of them. One is in a museum in Alaska and this one is destined for a museum in Port Townsend, Washington. Paul does have a maintenance manual for the plane. “It has photographs, but it doesn’t have drawings of parts.” And it is the parts that this plane needs. When he was working
on the first American Pilgrim, he needed special clamps to hold all the woodwork. Paul assumed that he would have to figure out a way to duplicate the original hardware, but much to his surprise, the company from 1931 is still quietly in existence and surprisingly still makes the same clamps. Reconstruction of an antique plane is more than just the mechanics of putting the pieces together; it is about bringing to life a concept. “Conceptualization is really, really important,” Paul explains. “You have to have a mental picture of what to do before you ever do it.” As a youngster, Paul did not know exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he did know that he had been born in the wrong place – Westchester, New York. He also knew he liked to tinker with motorcycles and work with metal. “As a teenager I was fascinated with welding,” he says and he took his first welding course when he was twenty. Over the next several years, he held a variety of jobs, and many included some aspect of welding. As soon as he was able, he left New York and headed west. Paul worked on fishing boats off the Oregon coast for several years, and then worked with a geologist in Utah the southwest. But finally, he decided he needed a real trade. Paul relates, “I spent quite a bit of time in various colleges taking machining, welding, and engineering courses,” (Continued on page 42)