Rocketeer wrote:
Poly(methyl methacrylate), abbreviated as PMMA - was invented by German chemists in 1928, and introduced on the civil market in 1933 under the name "Plexiglas". Rapidly being utilized by the aviation industry, hundreds of thousands of aircraft built then and within the next few years utilized the shatter-resistant, lightweight alternative to conventional soda-lime glass (which PMMA has equivalent transparency properties with).
Now for the fun part: Would anybody like to share pictures of Plexiglas canopies, turrets, blisters, etc on aircraft from the Inter-war period & WWII? Mass produced and highly unusual examples welcome!!
Don't have any plexiglass blisters or canopies to show you but do have some photos of Pyralin that was being used on the Liaison aircraft. The Pyralin was highly flexible and more resistant to cracking than the early plexiglass and was much lighter. The three piece windshields were cut from flat sheets of .050 or .060 Pyralin and attached to aluminum strips with common stove bolts or Thompson rivets. Here is a photo of pyralin after 70 years.
Also a photo of an original L-3 windshield. I kept the original frames with the pyralin fragments still attached .
The pyralin was cut with common hand shears. All of those nice smooth one piece windshields you see on a lot of L2, L-3 and L-4 restorations were not done that way during the War.
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