By Carey King
"You ever watch 'Sanford and Son,' those TV guys who have
that junkyard?" Ernest Carter likes to ask.
"Sanford said, 'There's junk, and then there's junk.' Well,
I'm like him. I'm one of those junk fellers."
Surrounded by stacks of wood, tools, machines and scraps in
his furniture shop on Buff Creek Road, Carter said he operates
on the "pile system."
Ernie Carter tests the jet engine he built from scrap metal,
hypodermic needles, car bolts and a recalibrated blood pressure
gauge.
"Everything's in here somewhere. It just
might take me some time to figure out which pile it's in."
It takes no trained eye, however, to figure out what a few of
Carter's piles are for. Model airplanes of all styles and colors
dangle at steep angles from the ceiling. About 5 feet long,
each appears to be frozen momentarily as it zooms overhead.
Carter, a fourth generation woodworker, has been constructing
furniture since he was a boy. He builds the old-fashioned way,
shaping pieces by hand on a homemade lathe powered by the water
wheel turned by the creek outside his shop.
Carter poses with his model of a Beechcraft Staggerwing G17.
To the left, the tail of a World War II-era German Focke-Wulf
can be seen.
He loves his work, calling the furniture "some
of the finest you can get." But work hasn't prevented him
from dabbling.
"I've always been interested in flying machines. No telling
how many I've built," Carter said.
"In third grade I started out nailing some pieces of wood
together and then slinging it around. Then I got my first remote-controlled
plane in eighth or ninth grade," he said.
Since that time, Carter has dabbled in everything from models
of helicopters to hang gliders to full-size airplanes.
"I built a big one once, one to ride in. But I sold it
after I crashed another big one by flying into some power lines,"
he said. "After I broke my jaw in five places and had to
eat through a straw for 10 weeks, I figured I'd had enough of
a close call with the big ones."
Since the accident, Carter went back to building model planes.
"How much time I get to spend on it," he said, "depends
on how much pocket money I have."
Modeling can be expensive. At a South Carolina convention Carter
attended a few years ago, he saw a 12-foot model of a Concorde
jet selling for $70,000. Another high-priced item at the show
- a jet engine priced around $2,500 - caught Carter's eye.
Never one to purchase something he can create himself, Carter
decided to build a jet engine in his shop.
"I'm a scratch builder. Sometimes I work from a blueprint.
Sometimes I build from pictures. So I got myself a book on jet
engines last fall," he said.
After reading the instructions, however, Carter decided to abandon
the project. "This is too dangerous, I thought. I'm not
going to build this."
Jet engines, he discovered, are so risky that they are difficult
to insure with the American Model Airplane Association.
"They carry a big fuel tank and run hot. If one crashed
into a house, it'd burn the house down," Carter said.
Despite the risks, Carter found it difficult to abandon his
project. "I'd get all hot on it again and go right back
to it. I'd work when everybody else was sleeping, when phones
weren't ringing and there was no one to bother me."
Carter began building in January and finished two or three weeks
ago.
Calling himself a "jerry-rigger from way back," Carter
said he spent very little money on the project because friends
helped him get parts.
"I probably spent a few bucks for scrap metal, but most
everything was homemade. A doctor friend got me some hypodermic
needles for the injection nozzle. For the gauge, I recalibrated
an old gauge from a blood pressure cuff my dad had. The shaft
was made from a car bolt from the junkyard."
Since the engine required stainless steel to withstand high
temperatures, Carter carried a magnet in his pocket when he
journeyed to the junkyard. "If metal's stainless, a magnet
will stick to it," he said.
Machining the metal took much longer than the wood Carter normally
works.
"I'd heat it red hot, put it in bucket of ashes, and start
forming it. It's hard to weld, hard to form and hard to machine.
You need a good set of insulated gloves," he said.
When Carter finally finished the engine - at 4:30 one morning
- he decided to test it out.
"I took it right here outside the shop, started it, then
burnt up my arms and the table it was standing on. I didn't
mess up much during the project, but when I did, I just wanted
to cry."
Most of the kinks are worked out now, but Carter said he still
has some tinkering to do before he puts the engine into an airplane
body.
"I've got to perfect it yet. I've got to get the hot spot
out so it'll run smoother. I don't want to crash it, based on
the work put into it," he said.
If Carter ever does fly the engine, he'd like to put it in a
model of a plane featured in a James Bond movie.
"It'd be a 10- to 12-foot plane, a half-scale BD5-J. The
original has a 17-foot wingspan, so this one would be about
8 feet across."
Carter said his friends are eager to see the engine in action.
"My brother said, 'Build (the engine) a plane, if you don't
do nothing but taxi it around the field."
Finding flying space for a jet is one of Carter's chief concerns.
The field Carter and flying buddy Lloyd Sellers have used in
the past has been narrowed down to a corner, with the Budweiser
plant and the Blossman gas company taking up the rest of the
space.
"They frown on me flying at the airport. And there's a
'sale-pending' sign on the field in Bryson City where I used
to fly," he said.
Surveying the piles of treasures stacked around his shop, Carter
said, "I'm a hermit. I stick close to home. I don't even
go into town. But I've just got to find some space to keep this
flying desire pacified."
