Warbird Information Exchange

1. P-51 parts (Merlin parts, gun doors, fairings, bomb shakel, etc.) in Sarasota FL junkyard (yes I bought all I could find at $2.00 a pound!
2. Merlin in High School auto shop. I lost out to inside deal on the bid!
3. 2 R-2800's in TWO seperate local barns. Now in my barn.
4. P-43 aileron trim tab in small fresh water marina.
5. Merlin in scrap pile.
6. Kamakazie part 1/2 mile from my house in chicken coop! Owner won't sell, it means too much to him!
7. Corsair in swamp.
Just to name a few.

Pirate Lex
http://www.BrewsterCorsair.com

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An ego is no match for gravity.

Dumb Question, Do you still have the SBD part?

I gotta start somewhere, and that is as good as any.

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DEEP THOUGHTS BY KIDS:
"If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until the looting started. Age 15 "


Deep Thoughts,
Jack Handy

Trawling thru a local car salvage yard here yielded a pair of RR Merlin mag's

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Those who possess real knowledge are rare.

Those who can set that knowledge into motion in the physical world are rarer still.

The few who possess real knowledge and can set it into motion of their own hands are the rarest of all.

Took scrap metal from the hangar down to a scrap yard, and saw a Heuy. It is long gone now though.

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Director

I found a bunch of parts in a yard in Pensacola, they made me step on a scale going in and most importantly, on the way out ! Those guys at the NMNA have NO sense of humor !

Those gun mounts have been gone for some time. Some went to Bill Klaers, Aero Trader and various other dealer/restorers. We only have one left that we have setup with dummy .30s for our own collection. The B-25 parts went to Scholl, we still have the Ventura mount, and one of the P-61 turret gunner seats (the other two were stolen )

One of the best finds I ever saw was a warehouse in NY that was full of NOS gunsights, Norden bombsights and turrets and gun mounts. Carl Scholl and Kermit Weeks ended up with most of it. It was simply unreal to see it.

While working for Steve Hinton I got to go hunting for parts in various places in SO CAL. We would get leads and while doing parts run and such I got a chance to drop in on various places. Farar(sp) Aerospace in Ontario had DC-3 spars up in the rafters, un-machined A-4 castings and wax mold tooling on shelves. I found a NOS Corsair MLG actuator on the shelf. Paul Grasso had a place next to Burbank Airport which his dad and uncle started. They had the original motorized stuffed horse attached to a car and used it for movies in the 30's. A camera was attached to the car, the star rode the horse and they would drive across the desert, hills or beach filming away.
They were an early developer of portable generators for movie use. After the war they bought the property from Lockheed. It had the revetment for sighting weapons. It was octagonal with 6' concrete walls with tapered to 3' at the top. Lockheed gave them money to tear it down and they used it to build a roof and hangar door on the open side. They also purchased gov surplus stuff. I got there later than it's heyday when they made a 100' fence out of wooden crates which had P-38 exhaust parts still in them. They used Lodestar wings in crates to make covers for other parts. They had B-29 and P-38 QEC's at one time. Randy Scoville told me of going there with Z and picking up the Allisons for Yippie. Paul Grasso was into racing rebuilt older racecars and had a replica Gilmore Lion roadster which he was killed in around 93.
When I found the place in the late 80's Paul told me that most things had been scrapped in the 70s but allowed me to look around with no restrictions except for the room full of Offys. I found P-38 exhaust packings made of braided stainless wire. New undrilled P-38 Flap CV joints. A couple of P-38 exhaust sections. BT-13 tailwheel struts. There was large Stromberg PR carbs in a row along the ledge of the roof about 20' off the ground. Everywhere you looked you found something. There were piles of stuff under stairs, in lockers, wooden parts boxes from Lockheed were full of parts and stacked on top of each other in various places in the building. There were also large metal boxes stacked up. You had to look and there wasn't a lot but there was quite a variety of cool items that I was able to find. Even one time Jay Leno wandered over as he had purchased a building nearby for storing his car collection. I was working on Stephen Grey's P-38 at the time and many of the things that were found were almost lifesavers at that time and really speeded up getting that thing done.
The other cool place was General Aircraft which opened in 42 and sold hardware to Lockheed through the war. When they opened the doors to there outer buildings B-17 landing gear, P-61 Landing gear (pretty much the same as B-25), just tons of warbird stuff. Floyd Wardlow worked with them to sell alot of it. There was some kind of trimotor wing in the rafters with electrical racks piled on it. When doing the P-38 the Lockheed hardware was called out as LS-xxx. There were shelves of the LS hardware. NOS P-38 bellcranks for the rudders were in a pile. They would harvest the bearings from them to resell.
It was an interesting time. Too late for the really great stuff but it was really helpful to what we were doing at the time.
I remember hearing of Z driving down the freeway in LA and seeing F-86 wings in a parking lot of a building. They were taking them out of a warehouse to scrap. I believe he bought them.
Rich

Over 25 years ago I came across a Staggerwing, Tiger Moth and a C-45 at a little grass strip. I can’t find a picture of the Tiger Moth, but you can just make out the fuel tank on the far RH side of the photo below. It looks like it’s sitting on top of the shelf, but actually the whole fuselage is behind it.




A few years later I did latch onto the C-45. It was a completely stock H model, right down to the seat cushions and had never flown as a civilian aircraft. IIRC a subsequent owner traded it for some B-25 stuff.

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Place name Paramore Surplus in Mt Pleasant, FL used to be a good place to dig for the "unusual". Once upon a time, there were prop blades, yellow-tagged cylinders, mags, and more stuffed in out-of-the-wat spots on the premesis. Last time I was there they still had some of the Viet Nam era LARC cargo vehicles behind the fence.

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Bob

i went to a small museum up in NH and there was a man there who fished out part of a rudder from either a Hellcat or Buffalo. I bet the Aircraft is still there underwater at Lake Winnapasakee. It crashed landed there in the early 40's. I was wondering though if anyone knows of if there are any japanese aircraft at Kakumabetsu in the Kirrel Islands?