Workshop Clearance After 40 Years: Why a 72-Year-Old Former Jet Engine Mechanic Is Letting His Handcrafted Wind Spinners Go for a Fraction of Their Value

2 days ago  |  by Henry Lambert

Off Brandt Pike in Dayton, Ohio, former Wright-Patterson Air Force Base engine mechanic Frank Delaney has spent the last four decades building masterpieces — hand-forged stainless steel wind spinners that have outlived dogs, marriages, and most of the backyards they were first hung up in.

At the end of May, all of that comes to an end. The small brick workshop where Frank has been balancing rotors by hand since 1984 has been sold. Demolition starts the first Monday of June. Forty-eight luxury condominium units will rise where his lathe still sits today.

What's left are 87 finished Flying Ace wind spinners — and one decision Frank made that most craftsmen in his position would never have made.

Dayton, Ohio, at dawn: Where steel still has a soul

The workshop in the old brick yard measures barely 400 square feet. On the walls hang tools whose wooden handles have been polished smooth by decades of use — inherited from Frank's father, a railroad machinist who worked the same bench for thirty-one years before him.

An old cast-iron stove crackles softly in the corner. On the workbench sits Frank's life's work: a row of stainless steel wind spinners in various stages of completion. The rotors gleam in the low morning sun. The smell is oil, steel, and cold coffee.

Frank runs a thumb across a freshly sanded edge. “You know what really gets me?” he asks, without looking up from the steel. “It's not the shop. It's the quiet. There's a certain quiet in here at six in the morning, before anyone else is up. You can hear a bearing seat. You can hear a rotor find its balance. You lose that, you can't get it back.”

He's been coming into this workshop at 5:45 in the morning since 1984. Forty-two years of mornings. After June, that's over.

When wind only brings noise

Most garden owners don't realize it until it's too late: almost every wind spinner on the American market today was built to end up in the trash.

The blades are stamped from thin galvanized steel that oxidizes the second the zinc coating gets scratched. The bearings are nylon bushings that swell in humidity and freeze in the first hard frost. The rotors are pressed, not balanced — which is why ninety-five percent of big-box spinners sound like a rusty gate by the second Ohio winter.

Frank saw this coming forty years ago. He'd been rebuilding jet engines at Wright-Patterson for three decades, where a single unbalanced rotor meant a pilot didn't come home. So when he started building wind spinners, he built them the only way he knew how — the way you build something when a life depends on it running right.

Forty years on jet engines: How Frank tamed “the secret of perfect running”

Frank never just built wind spinners — he engineered them like turbines. Every Flying Ace is cut from a single piece of 304 stainless steel, the same marine-grade alloy used on Navy fittings and commercial kitchens. The center hub is machined, not stamped. The blades are hand-balanced on a jig Frank built himself from a scrap APU housing in 1987.

The bearings are the part most customers never see — and the part that makes the biggest difference. Every Flying Ace rides on a sealed precision ball bearing, the same class Frank used to rebuild auxiliary power units at Wright-Patterson. No nylon. No seizing. It spins in a four-mile-per-hour breeze and stays silent in a gale.

“It's not magic,” Frank says. “It's tolerance. A spinner wobbles because somebody stamped the blade and called it done. I balance every one. Takes me six extra minutes a piece. Forty years of six extra minutes — that's why the one I built in 1986 is still running in a yard in Tipp City.”

Why Frank can no longer keep doing what he loves

“That's it now,” Frank says, letting his eyes drift across the workshop. There's no bitterness in his voice. Just the quiet of somebody who's made peace with something he didn't choose.

In February, the lot off Brandt Pike was sold to a developer from Columbus. The plan is forty-eight “luxury condominium units” with rooftop terraces. Demolition begins the first Monday of June. Frank got ninety days to clear out a workshop that's been in his family since his father's time.

And there's something else. The arthritis in Frank's hands has been closing in for three winters now. “The heavy work's still okay,” he says, flexing his right hand. “But the final balancing — the part that matters most — my hands won't hold steady anymore. Some days it's fine. Some days I can't thread a nut.”

He doesn't say it like someone complaining. He says it like someone stating a fact he's already accepted.

No chance of a new start

Frank spent months looking for new space. “There's nothing left in Dayton,” he says. “Every old workshop got turned into a brewery or a coffee shop or condos. The rents on what's left would bleed me dry inside a year. I'm seventy-two. I'm not starting over.”

And even if he could — his hands wouldn't let him build the way he used to. What's in the workshop now is the last of it. When these 87 spinners are gone, the Flying Ace is gone with them.

“I've got customers whose Flying Ace has been spinning for over 20 years”

Frank opens an old three-ring binder and slides out a handful of printed photos — some faded, some taped to index cards, most of them dated in his own handwriting on the back.

“This one went to a woman in Tipp City in '92,” he says, holding up a photo of a stainless spinner against a white picket fence. “She called me last fall. Said it's still running, never touched it. She wants to buy one for her grandson now. She's in her eighties.”

He spreads a few more across the bench. A Flying Ace over a tomato garden in Kentucky, dated 1998. One at a farmhouse outside Columbus from 2001. One in a Chicago courtyard from 2007. “Every one of these is still running. I don't service them. I don't grease them. They just keep going. That's the whole point.”

The end of an era in Dayton — and your last chance

Soon Frank will turn the key in the workshop door for the last time. He's already packed the older tools into crates for his grandson. The lathe is going to a community college in Columbus. Everything else — the jigs, the bearing stock, the balancing station he built in '87 — gets scrapped when the bulldozers arrive.

Only 87 Flying Ace spinners remain. When they ship, the listing comes down. There will not be another run.

“It's about the mechanics, not the money”

So that the last pieces find good homes, Frank has priced them at a significant clearance discount — well below what the aerospace-grade materials alone cost him to build.

“I could charge double,” he says. “Some of these would end up in a collector's basement if I did. That's not what I want. I want them spinning. In real yards. Real gardens. Places where somebody sits on a porch in July and watches one go. That's what this work was for.”

The Flying Ace Wind Spinner: The facts at a glance

• 100% Dayton precision workEvery Flying Ace is hand-built by Frank in his workshop off Brandt Pike. No factory. No subcontractors. One pair of hands, start to finish.
• Aerodynamics from a proRotor profiles designed with the same balancing principles Frank learned across 31 years rebuilding turbine engines at Wright-Patterson AFB.
• Indestructible 304 stainless steelMarine-grade. Doesn't rust. Doesn't pit. Weathers to a soft silver and stays there — through every Midwest winter.
• Sealed precision ball bearingThe same bearing class used on aircraft auxiliary power units. Spins in a four-mph breeze. Silent in a gale. No maintenance required.
• Hand-balanced rotorEvery blade balanced on a jig Frank built himself in 1987. That's six extra minutes per spinner — and the difference between a noisy spinner and a silent one.
• Built to outlive youFlying Ace spinners from 1986 are still running in American backyards today — unserviced and unbothered.
• Genuine American handcraftMade in Ohio, signed on the base, one of the last 87 before the workshop closes for good.

Where can you get the original?

The genuine Flying Ace® by Frank Delaney is available exclusively through Heritage Yard Co. — the small online shop run by Frank's granddaughter, Emma.

Emma took over the online side of things two years ago, when Frank realized he couldn't keep up with shipping, email, and the workshop at the same time. She handles the orders, the packaging, and the customer support from her apartment in Cincinnati. Frank still signs every spinner by hand before it leaves the workshop.

Risk-free trial: The 100% satisfaction guarantee

Frank and Emma are certain: you'll feel the difference in the mechanics the moment you hang it up. The way it catches a breeze at four miles per hour. The silence when it turns. The weight of 304 steel in your hand.

But if for any reason the Flying Ace isn't what you expected, Emma will take it back — no questions, no restocking fee, no runaround.

1. Order today with free USPS Ground shipping across the continental US.
2. Unbox, hang it up, and watch it turn for up to 30 full days.
3. If you're not completely satisfied, email Emma and she'll arrange a full refund — including return shipping.