Warbird Information Exchange

A quick update for y'all since I was taking care of some e-mail traffic this morning anyway. Yesterday, a couple of our best volunteers showed up to help. Jim Ballard, who is one of the electricians that spent countless hours helping us on the B-29 project, came out for a few days to assist us with some of the electrical glitches that we've somehow created while doing this current project on the B-24. He always works insane hours and seems to get extraordinary amounts of work done while he's here.

Don Obreiter, who is the Squadron's Maintenance Officer, also showed up yesterday. He is likely the hardest working volunteer the Squadron has, who rarely gets any credit for it. He's been doing amazing work with some substantial paperwork issues that we had with the airplane from years ago. The work that he does gets mostly unnoticed by nearly everyone in the Squadron, but believe me, there's no way I'd be able to get my job done without him.

Not only that, but Don's also been building the bombardier's seat at his house (in Oklahoma) with the only reference being some grainy photos and some essentially useless drawings that we have on microfilm (kind of like my tailgunner's perdicament). Although we're not quite done tinkering with the seat, you can get an idea of what it's supposed to look like with these photos (sorry for the poor quality of pictures).......






Upon my normal 3 a.m. arrival this morning, I noticed that Don's truck was here. He has to get back to his house tonight and wanted to get as much work in as possible, so he simply "took a little nap" in his truck for a few hours. I have no idea how long he worked yesterday, but he's already started building the R/H waistgunner's gun mount........






I wasted a crapload of time yesterday trying to find some parts. Drove all over freakin' Odessa, TX to find some tubing (that I ended up not needing ), only to find that the only tubing at all of the steel places here are for the oil field. Frustrating.

Anyway, the small amount of work I actually did accomplish was with building the replacement fuselage skin, just forward of the tailgunner's door on the R/H side. I started with the basic layout you've seen before, along with duplicating the holes (obviously making it one piece, rather than two).......




I then cut out the window hole........




With the original set up, the window was held in with button head screws. These were interfering with my new tailgunner's doors, so I decided to dimple the new skin in order to accomodate countersunk screws. This skin is much too thin to countersink, and dimpling it also helps strengthen it (albeit minutely). The first step in this process was to get the rivet squeezer out, along with the #10 screw dimple dies........




Then, with the dies installed, I made my way over to the skin. It is crucial to check and double check that you've got the dimple dies on the correct side. I can't tell you how many times in the past that I've ruined a brand new piece of skin by putting the dimple on upside down..........




Then you just pull the rivet squeezer handles together and let the dies do the work........






And voila! You have a nicely dimpled hole that makes a countersunk screw nice and flush with the skin........








You do that a couple dozen more times, and you have a completed panel....






I'm making some doubler plates for the inside of the stringers this morning so that I can use the original size rivets and get rid of the huge ones that Consolidated stuck me with when they converted the airplane many moons ago. I hope to have the new skin shot on today.

I'll holler at y'all later,
Gary

Gary,

I've always considered myself a pretty good metal fabicator, but I can't even begin to accomplished the kind of work that you are doing and the solutions you come up with. Ol' 927 is truely a work of art.

RICK

You're a natural born comedian, Gary. Saying somebody else "always works insane hours", coming from you, that's hilarious. I'd be dead by now if I kept your schedule.

Mac

Gary, what kind of tubing were you looking for. I have a couple of sources for the non oil filed stuff in Midland and Odessa.

Thanks, but we worked our way out of the hole we dug ourselves in. Just came up with another plan and skipped that hurdle all together.

Gary

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Cheers,
Peter

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Peter, it looks like it could very well be from a B-24, but airplanes of that era often times had control wheels with a similar appearance. Difficult to say for sure.

Gary

Well, I thought I'd give y'all a quick update with a few pictures before I get out of here for the day. I managed to actually get that little fuselage skin riveted on, so now I can start fabricating the left tailgunner's door.

Jim has been doing a wonderful job of cleaning up the electrical glitches, as expected.

But the real news today is that Don Obreiter managed to get the first waist gun mounted in Ol' 927 in over 65 years! Here are a few pictures of Don working on the mount......








Here's the mount when it was installed for fitting.......




And then swung over in the stowed position.........




And then, finally, with the gun installed........








Stowed position (sort of)........




And Don making machine gun noises..........




Oh, and did I mention that I found some cool 1,000 round ammo boxes ...............






So that's it for today. Like I said, the gun installation is NOT complete, so don't kill me with the detail stuff just yet. It's just been a good source of "visual progress" for us and has been a nice morale booster.

By the way, according to Photobucket, I've now got over 1,000 photos in my B-24A file! About 98% of those have ended up on this thread. I hope you've enjoyed them as much as I have posting them for you.

Gary

Very cool Gary! Congrats!

wow this threads now hitting 184,000 after only recently hitting 100,000 must be the biggest mover on WIX ever so darn popular, guess the b24 has a bigggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg fan base

whatever gazza does next after the Mrs "X" better be interesting he got a status now as a celebrity so he gota work hard,

To quote Mark Spicolli

"Awesome, dude, Totally Awesome!"

I still can't believe how darn good she is looking Gary.

I'm getting good bumps thinking about seeing her in July at Oshkosh!

I have though many times that this would be an interesting book. You have a very easy manner of relating your stories and make the technical explanations lucid and understandable.

It would be an interesting document for the future.

I'd say the fan base is really for Uncle Gary's Warbird Storytime.

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James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

Gary, an ideal. Like in the old western days, they would place one of them Rattler's in a box with a glass front and the money would be on the table for the person who could not jerk his hand away from the glass as it stuck it. Would be a hit at the "O Club" @ Airsho You could start a large fund for both the "to be named" and the Fifi...

Me, I would just go get in the other line to place the $$ in the box...

Lynn

James, you're a genius. I can see it all now...

"Hi Kids! Uncle Gary here. Today at the craft center we'll be making precision cuts in some 2024. Can you say 'pneumatic nibbler'? I just knew you could!"

But first, it's time to feed Mosquito...OH COLONEL MOSSSSSIIIIEEEEE!!!"


Sorry lads...it's the rum talkin'

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It was a good idea, it just didn't work.