Warbird Information Exchange

For all of you builders/restorers/model builders and anyone else looking for an online parts drawing resource, Christmas came early!
Full sets of drawings are now available for many WWII fighters and bombers. P-51, P-47, P-38, P-40, Hellcat, Corsair, Bearcat, Duck, T-6, B-25, TBM and others-
http://www.aircorpslibrary.com/
Several Videos showing how it works here:
http://www.aircorpslibrary.com/Home/Features
A sample:
Drawing 117-65031 for the P-51

Already digging into this.... we've started a number of projects to bring Miss Mitchell to the next level of restoration. The drawings have made a huge difference.... we had them before on microfilm, but they were frankly crap. The mastered drawings in Aircorps library are actually readable.

Seriously, the best things I've seen happen from a documents standpoint for warbirds. Aircorps is giving us the capability to operate in the 21st century!

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Keep 'Em Flying

I'm aware of new software and microfilm scanners to improve readability, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know all the issues with microfilm and our work. Just by looking on their site the comparison is black and white to grayscale scans. Most microfilm equipment can produce good quality scans if the right steps are taken.



For your B-25 set, how you you describe the exposure quality of the diazo copy? Were your scans only B&W and not grayscale?

I wonder what equipment they used and where they sourced the film sets, because NASM does have polices with use of film.

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Volunteer
Yankee Air Museum

We had duplicates of duplicates and were using a microfilm reader, it was extremely washed out.

As far as the equipment, and where the film sets were sourced, I'm not sure. That would be a question for Aircorps I suppose.

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Keep 'Em Flying

From an educational standpoint, this service is one of the best things to happen to warbird operators and enthusiasts in quite some time. I'm very impressed with not only the quality of the scans, but also Aircorps' enthusiasm to expand the library on an ongoing basis. Their hard work will ensure that countless future aircraft are safely and accurately restored. Plus, as a manuals nerd, it is really fun to sift through all the drawings on their site! Great job, Aircorps. Keep it up!

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Taylor Stevenson

I have to agree with the others and also say that everything AirCorps is doing is for the benefit of keeping these great airplanes flying in the future.

The Howard Aircraft Foundation seems to be the first type club to have drawings on AirCorps and we rolled out access to our membership base today.
We are excited to have our drawings available to our members in an instantly accessible fashion – a first for us!

Looking forward to more from AirCorps!

Elliot

The digital imaging technology has developed far enough to scan the whole width of the 35mm microfilm exposure, to yield 250-300dpi images of 36 inch wide drawings. The Crowley Company is doing excellent work on developing new digital microfilm technology to create digital archrival quality data. The cost of the equipment will always be out of reach to 95% of users, but a central data library won’t be. For NASM’s microfilm collection, they should start scanning with the high-end equipment and reduce the generation loss with copying from master copies. In time, even the remastered master copies they use to create copy sets will degrade with generation loss. The warbird and historical research comminutes must move away from microfilm for most work.

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Volunteer
Yankee Air Museum

That's what Aircorps has done, is create 300 dpi images of the microfilm. In this case, they take that capability and are giving the community the opportunity to view it at an extremely low cost annually... While I'd love to see the NASM scan everything, they currently charge around $2500 for the B-25 drawings... I'd imagine there would be even more cost if time was spent to ensure the images were rendered and each image was given an appropriate part number title. I can't really speak to whether that is going on or not, but I do know that Aircorps is pushing out more and more data in this library, and it's at a cost that allows anyone, warbird operator or not, to benefit and learn.

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Keep 'Em Flying

Anyone who buys into a membership or a scanned set of drawing from Aircorp will not be disappointed. The scans are extreme high resolution and each image is several megabytes in size. I've used their P-51 & P-40 scanned rolls before at Fagen Fighters and we have the T-6 scans at Wild Warbirds. They are far better than anything else available and I highly recommend them.

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CraigQ

Aircorps employee here. The drawings library we have posted is the same one we use with our own restorations. I have the complete sets on my work computer and have been using them to do CAD models of the P-51C and P-47D-23-RA. The scan quality has been pretty high, we have had very few issues with bad or missing drawings. We usually have multiple sources for microfilm so we are getting both earlier and later rev drawings in our sets. I know that NASM is one source for several sets. There is also one of our very own WIX members who provided quite a few rolls for Corsair. I know he had other sets as well, but I don't know if he provided those for the library. Many of the P-47 rolls were from someone who is currently doing a restoration. So we generally have multiple sources for each set.

Just a heads up, many of the drawings can be over 12-15 mb's so be prepared to use some bandwidth while working on the website. We also splice a lot of the drawings together in order to understand them better. This tends to be pretty hit and miss though as we do them only for stuff we are working on in house on an as needed basis. In the future you might be able to request a drawing be stitched but that isn't set up yet.

The easiest way to find the drawings you are looking for is to use the BOM tree to find the major assembly drawing:



Then look at the assembly drawing BOM for the part number you need:



and simply use the search function to find a part number:



Alternatively, you can search for keywords in each airframe category:



If anyone is using the site and has questions, please feel free to ask and I'll try to help out in any way I can. I am actually a little bit jealous of you guys. Three years ago I would have done terrible things to have access to a site like this at such a cheap price. I wasn't working for Aircorps at the time and was doing CAD of a P-51 and paid $130 for a lower quality set of scans for P-51 from a guy in Australia, and had all kinds of trouble with that because he hadn't renamed the drawings from their roll numbers so I had to go through the spreadsheet to find where the part numbers were. Plus you could barely read them sometimes. When I went to work for Aircorps I got a copy of their set and it was just an OMG difference in quality. So you guys are in for a treat.

Do you know if the lofts and ordinates are available for the B-25 fuselage, wings, nacelles, and tails in this set? I haven't found them yet.

I am not sure, I haven't searched them out.

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Keep 'Em Flying

AirCorps Aviation is about to get a lot of business ...

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Zero Surprise!!...

I have both sets of P-51 film on DVD, Air Corps sets fills in the blanks and is very easy to search and find drawings. Many drawings not readable have been brought back to life.

What equipment are you using to scan the film?

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Volunteer
Yankee Air Museum