marine air wrote:
An argument can be made that htis is the most difficult warbird restoration..........The Northrop fleet was parked shortly after the war. They didn't build that many, and were never used by the Air National Guard, foreign air forces, or in civilian use. Can't remember ever meeting someone that flew or worked on them. Weren't all that many wrecks to recover. No one accidentally kept spare parts thinking they went to something common........ SO for now it has my vote as most difficult to rebuild.
A few comments:
1) The Black Widow WAS used as a civilian firebomber. In fact the last P-61 flying was a firebomber which crashed in 1968. A friend of mine saw this airplane fly in the 60's before it crashed. More info here:
http://www.warbirdregistry.org/p61regis ... 59300.html2) I still think a more difficult aircraft to restore was the Mosquito that Glyn Powell/Av Specs built. I don't know if you realize the complexity of that project. In order to make an airworthy Mosquito fuselage, one MUST have fuselage moulds. The last Mosquito fuselage moulds were destroyed sometime after 1950. Glyn had to "reverse engineer" the moulds from drafting data and other documentation that took many years of scouring the world just to get the precise info to build the moulds with. IIRC, Glyn started his Mossie project in the 1980's and was only able to make a Mosquito fuselage just recently, within the last 7-10 years or so. The lack of fuselage moulds is the exact reason why nobody has attempted to rebuild a Mossie since the end of W.W.II. Added to this, wood expands/contracts based on temperature/relative humidity. It is much more difficult to work with, given the tight tolerances on the Mossie, than metal.
The building of the moulds was perhaps 90% of the difficulty of that project. Once that was done, the rest was relatively easy, comparatively speaking. Now, Glyn has working moulds and is passing on his building techniques for the people behind him. Theoretically, given enough money, a Mossie production line could be built. The problem is there are only a handful of people in the world who have the desire to spend the approximately $ 6,000,000 it takes to rebuild a new Mossie.
3) My understanding is there was a considerable amount of spare parts leftover from the last owner of the last flying P-61 that crashed in 1968. All of these have been transferred/sold to MAAM for the rebuild of their Black Widow.
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Thanks for posting, Dan!
