Warbird Information Exchange

How feasible is it If the aircraft has corroded spars to the point that you must change both wings? I know with some piston planes you can do the whole swap, but I am wondering about Sabre or T-33 in this case...

Thanks

Anything is possible if you have cubic bucks to spend. Look at the various shops that are new constructing various WW2 aircraft. Where you run into the big problems is finding the proper material specs and then actually fabbing and jigging the parts. Some pieces are so large that there may not be any of the machinery capable of producing them still in exsistance, or it may be years before you can book time on the machines that are available. Even just building the tooling to fab some of the parts can be incredibly expensive, especially for a one-off part.

Had some friends that were in the process of making new stamping dies for Mustang gun ports. I think they had something like 1200 manhours in making the dies and never got what they would consider quality parts from the press.

Another huge problem is finding people that can do the work. Not that many guys around anymore that know how to do heavy structure work without factory tooling and jigs. You put someome that isn't skilled in that type of work and a mistake could cost you tens of thousands of dollars or more.

For data points, I would say that there are less than 25 shops in the US and under 300 people total that have the skills necessary to properly refabricate a wing for a Sabre or T-Bird

Maybe I’m reading your query wrong, but do you mean is it possible to change the wings themselves?

A T-33 has a solid spar that the fuselage sits on top of, and F-86 wings are attached to the fuselage by bolts that are nested in “tubs”.

Here are a few pictures that are on my laptop from a couple of years ago. I might be able to find some pictures of the T-33 I worked on a long time ago if you're interested.

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T-33 spar goes from tip to tip so the wing is one piece while the F-86 has removable wing panels as shown in the photos. Parts and even whole airframes are probably available enough that spar replacement is not yet worth the cost of doing it.