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From: c.s.kimball@worldnet.att.net
Date: 3/9/01
Time: 8:29:38 PM
Remote Name: 12.73.170.228
My dad (Bud Kimball) called the other night to talk about your article on the H-1, and when he had seen the original. Talked about how they had not used Phillips head but single slot fasteners, and the slots were all aligned with the fuselage axis/ airflow. What he did not mention, and seemed most pertinent to me was the use of the R-1535 engine.
My brother found a PW R-1535-7 in a junkyard in the Tacoma area in about 1972(?) and we purchased it for scrap value (I think 8 cents/lb) as we realized the rarity of the 1535 engine. The engine had been used by a Technical college in the Tacoma area (Bates?) for years to teach students how to work on radial engines and sold by the college to the junk yard as scrap. Dad negotiated for a while on selling it to the Smithsonian but the deal fell through when they found they already had another one, and didn't see the need for two. We stored the engine in the back of our hangar until Dad was closing down his business and sold or donated it to a guy at a school in the San Juans that was trying to start a small aviation museum. He held the engine for a few years and sold it to someone in Nevada (Reno or Las Vegas??) I wonder if that engine is the one being used for the H-1 replica. The only other information I have on the engine we had is that it had a 1942 date, which if I remember correctly was a military acceptance date and a “distant” photo of it sitting in a truck when we sold it in early 1979.