One Bite At A Time
By Patrick Tandy

“People think this car is less safe, but it’s actually safer than your normal car,” says Bob Lennon as he straps me to the passenger seat of his homebuilt Cobra roadster using the five-point harness. “The objective of that is to keep you in so you don’t get out.”

The Towson-based trial attorney straps himself into the driver’s seat and then fires off the supercharged Ford 5.0 fuel-injected high-output engine he cannibalized from a 1987 Mustang GT to let it warm up. From some primal corner of my brain the Rip Chords set the tone: “Spring, little Cobra, getting ready to strike…”

“People call them kit cars,” he explains. “I don’t like that terminology. Most people into it don’t like the terminology because it sounds like it’s one of these little model kits.”

Indeed, but there’s nothing “little” about the rumbling beast sitting in Bob Lennon’s garage. And it lends credence to Lennon’s next project – borne of a decidedly loftier ambition – sitting in pieces in the crawlspace eight feet overhead.

“I’ve built it to be a Jekyll & Hyde car,” Lennon says. “It’s actually easy to build a race car. It’s easy to build a street car. It’s hard to build a car that can perform at the track that you can still drive on the street.”

Just beyond the garage door, the sunshine has run any potential April showers out of town.

“Baseball caps are essential,” Lennon says, firmly planting one on his head. “As you’ll notice, there’s no roof, or sun visors.”

And there aren’t: only a modicum of machine with which to negotiate the unforgiving ground beneath and the boundless sky above.

“I’m running a roll bar, as you can see,” Lennon adds, pointing over his shoulder as he punches the gas a few times. “If we flip over, this should keep us from smashing our heads.”

And with that he throws it into first, and away we go…

Suffice it to say, Lennon’s Cobra can make the legal speed limit faster than you can say “license, registration and proof of insurance.” And he makes use of it.

“A lot of people have what I call trailer queens,” he says. “Cars they build to look at. They don’t run them at the track and they don’t run them on the road. It’s their sculpture. That’s cool, but if I wanted a sculpture, I’d build a sculpture. I want a car; I built a car. And cars…you run cars.”

And in doing so you wear them out. “It’s not the same car I built in ’97,” Lennon remarks. “The rear end has been changed, the rear suspension, shocks, wheels, tires, exhaust system, the fuel injection system – they’ve all been changed. I built a new dashboard for it. The carpeting has all been changed. It’s always a work in progress, and it’s never finished.”

In a sense, Lennon’s lifelong mechanical inclination has been a work in progress, since his days growing up in Fells Point, the son of a career fire apparatus technician for the Baltimore City Fire Department.

“He was a diesel mechanic that worked specifically on fire trucks,” Lennon says of his father. “He would work on cars at home. My job was to hold the flashlight. Sounds insignificant, but it’s very significant because you’ve got to hold that flashlight right where the mechanic wants to see. The next step is anticipating which wrench he needs before he asks for it, so that it’s already in his hand before he can ask you for it. So in doing that, I became pretty comfortable with working on stuff in cars.”

And those early days behind the light instilled a work ethic that Lennon exudes to this day. “When I grew up, I worked on my own cars,” he says. “When something breaks, I fix it. People say, ‘You’re a lawyer, why don’t you just pay somebody to do it?’ Well, that makes some sense, but there are a lot of problems with that. You still have to take your car to the mechanic. You have to drop it off. You have to leave it. You have to come pick it up. You don’t have a car in the meantime. You don’t really know what he did. When I do it, I do it when I want to, on my schedule, in my garage, with my tools, with the parts that I choose to put on it. And I know what’s done when it’s done. It’s a confidence you can’t buy.”

But for all of his youthful enthusiasm, Lennon doesn’t take chances, and time has matured his need for speed.

“It’s very easy to get really dangerous,” he says. “What I’ve learned since I was a teenager allows me to drive this car. If I had this when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t be here.  I’d be dead.”

But Lennon is very much alive, as are visions of building the faster, tougher, more powerful four-wheeled machine.

“I would call them dreams at this point,” he muses. “They become plans when I start spending money on them. If I called them all plans…there are just too many.”

Besides, Bob Lennon has other things in mind.

“A lot of people go to the airport and sit there and read The New York Times,” Lennon surmises as he pulls the ladder down from overhead. “I like to stand at the window and watch the planes.”

Pieces of sheet metal, wood and other building materials – some measured, some milled – fill the crawlspace above Lennon’s garage. Only with a healthy dose of a layman’s imagination will the pieces in their current state ever fly.

“Most people are really enthusiastic about it,” Lennon says of friends and family who know what’s on his mind. “Some of them just don’t believe it. They’re dumbfounded: ‘What do you mean you’re building an airplane?’”

But as Freud noted, a cigar is sometimes just that, and when it comes to building an airplane, Lennon means nothing more, nothing less.

But where does one begin?

“The plans are the most important part of the whole thing,” Lennon says of the two-person Sonex he’s crafting from the roughly 100 painstakingly detailed chart-sized pages, which, he explains, can be purchased directly from the designer. “We have a saying in the airplane-building business. You build a plane just like you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.”

The plane, which by Lennon’s estimation should take approximately three years to complete, was designed by John Monnett, a legend in the realm of “homebuilts.” “I’m really comfortable with the designer and [his] plans,” Lennon admits. “They’re the best in the business. When you first look at it, you don’t see it. But if you live with it for a little while, it starts to make sense. These plans become like my bible. I live with these plans.”

For Lennon, the Sonex is the next logical step of a lifelong passion for planes.

“I started hearing that people could actually build their own planes, and it opened up a whole world for me,” he says. “I started going to the bookstores and pulling everything about aviation off the shelves. And as you know, you can find all kinds of stuff on the Internet. And then a monumental thing happened in my life: I went to Oshkosh.”

By Oshkosh, Lennon is referring to the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture, a weeklong aviation extravaganza held every July in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. “It started with a bunch of homebuilder guys in the ‘50s who would go meet in this guy’s basement, and it just bloomed,” Lennon says of AirVenture, which, according to www.airventure.org, attracts over 700,000 people and about 12,000 aircraft from all over the world. “For this particular week, this is the busiest airport in the world, including O’Hare, JFK and LAX.”

“The place is crawling with astronauts,” Lennon says with all the wonder of a sweet-toothed kid in the world’s largest candy store. “You’re very likely to meet somebody who flew the shuttle. It’s full of fighter jet pilots, especially from Vietnam - Korea, also.”

Like an addict starving for a new kick, Lennon found in Oshkosh the fix that satisfied his need to build, his need for a fresh challenge. After deciding on the Sonex, he set to work last September on portions of the tail, cutting, bending, drilling, deburring and riveting metal.

“I like aluminum,” he says. “I feel good about aluminum. It becomes very personal. Seriously, it gets in your fingers. It gets in your hair. It gets in your nose.”

And Lennon takes the work seriously, leaving nothing to chance. Tools of all persuasions fill his garage – hand tools, power tools, Boeing surplus – and when one doesn’t quite suit the purpose, he simply modifies it so that it does. He checks his angles with a second protractor to verify the work of the first; he has multiple torque wrenches for the same reason. To keep the metal surfaces clean and free of corrosion, Lennon cleans the parts with carburetor cleaner then cleans the carburetor cleaner off with brake cleaner. After removing the brake cleaner residue with normal dishwashing liquid, he takes care of any leftover soap with a shot of ordinary isopropyl alcohol.

“You know how they say, ‘Take care of pennies and dollars take care of themselves’?” Lennon posits. “Well, take care of thousandths of an inch here and your plane stays in the air. Start lowering your standards and you’ll have all kinds of trouble.”

“I have a bin of parts upstairs that were not made to spec,” he continues. “Hopefully, you just make one part. Sometimes you make two. Sometimes you make three. There are parts [of which] I’ve made four.”

When the time comes, Lennon will assemble and install an 80-hp engine (a modified Volkswagen, also designed by Monnett). “It’s made to run at one sustained speed, which is different than a car engine,” Lennon explains. “It’s made to be extremely dependable. Nothing tricky. This car has a lot of fancy gadgets and tricks on it, but if I break down on the side of the road, I’m cool. If I’m at 8,000 feet and my engine dies, I need to start looking for a place to land because I’m coming down.”

But it’s just that sort of cold certainty that appeals to Lennon.

“As a trial attorney, and as a person, I’ve always been really broad-pictured,” Lennon says. “I try to see big concepts and movements and trends. This [plane] is so far from that it’s funny. I use a micrometer; I’m measuring thousandths of an inch. After I think of really broad strategic concepts for litigation, I come here and try to measure millimeters.”

“It’s a different mindset,” he continues. “It satisfies the same need because you’re doing something that feels good because you have something you can hold in your hand, as opposed to litigation strategy. When you strategize, you don’t have anything. It’s a concept. What have you got? An endless concept. And three years from now you might have a check from an insurance company. With this, you clean a part, refit it, put it back together, build it, and it goes in a circle, or it goes back and forth. It does what it’s supposed to do.”

“This will be a fun plane,” notes Lennon, who estimates the financial layout for materials for the Sonex to be something around $25,000. “I’m building it to build it. I’m not building it to own a plane; I should make that clear. If I want to own a plane, I’ll go buy a plane. You can buy one for $15,000. It might be older. This plane will cost me a lot more. If I included my hours, especially at attorney billing rates, this would be a $200,000 plane, minimum.”

“If you can build a car, you can build this plane,” Lennon says. “If anything, building this plane requires patience and determination. Perseverance is the word.”

But the perseverance such a task demands discourages Bob Lennon no more than the conspicuous absence of one seemingly critical detail.

“I’m not a pilot,” he says. “I don’t have the ticket, as they call it.” He pauses, as though reviewing a schematic in his head, or checking his angles for the 43rd time.

“But I’ll have it by the time the plane’s done,” he adds with a satisfied grin. “Trust me on that.”

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Publications : Bar Bulletin: May, 2003