Ryan Keough wrote:
Here's a silly question to kind-of side track this conversation... have any Buchon's been successfully reconfigured with a DB601 in place of the Merlin?
Yes, as Dave's confirmed, mostly by Messerschmitt's successor company. Also numerous static 'Messerschmitt 109Gs' in museums are actually Hispano Buchons with a new nose. Oddest of these is the ex-Champlin '109E' at Seattle, which is a 109E firewall forward and a Buchon (109G) firewall aft, with incorrectly cropped wingtips for any mark.
Ryan Keough wrote:
It seems to me that I heard somewhere that the airframe design was changed a bit by Hispano to accommodate the Merlin and would require a lot of aerodynamic tweaking to convert back. Any insight?
Firewall aft (with one exception) the 109G and Buchon are the same aircraft, apart from, obviously, changes in instrumentation and through firewall systems. The exception was the fin and rudder. Much has been written about the Messerschmitt's aerofoil section fin and rudder arrangement, appropriate for the DB's turn, changed for the Hispano engine setup, and making it 'wrong' for the Merlin which turns like the DB. There was a previous discussion here on WIX on this - Gary A had provided some images, this one here:
Via Second Air Force, who said: "Here is the photo that Gary sent me last summer. The cleaned-up fin on the left of the photo is from an original Bf109G. The one on the right came from an HA-1112."
From the discussion in this thread here:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=36920 which provides a good deal of useful insight to the surrounding data to Ryan's question.
The main difficulty was getting a viable DB engine, followed by the second difficulty of convincing everyone that you had an actual Messerschmitt rather than a Hispano, the latter task exercising minds that should have been used on more credible tasks. Certainly some Buchons were built up using German built fuselages - but not
all, nor
all the survivors.
Regards,
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