__It’s not often that an amateur aeronautical tinkerer will hit upon a business idea so perfectly suited for the times that it advances, almost overnight, to become a runaway success story. Such was the case in 1971, when a young engineer from Oregon named Richard VanGrunsven tried, in his own words, to “build a better mousetrap” and in the process unwittingly laid the foundation for what would become Van’s Aircraft, the most successful aircraft kit-manufacturing company in aviation history.
By VanGrunsven’s own recollection, he wasn’t trying to spark a kit-building revolution when, in the mid-1960s, he got the idea to modify a Stits SA-3A Playboy — a stubby and underperforming single-seater designed in 1953 by Ray Stits, considered by many as the father of the homebuilding movement — with a cantilevered aluminum wing, bubble canopy and 125-horsepower Lycoming engine that replaced the Playboy’s original 85-horsepower Continental.
