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There were various claims over the years that the aircraft was "being restored to airworthy condition" but this was being used to describe the workmanship and detail effort rather than the quality of the starting or finished product and its end capability.
The fuselage is a B24M former RAAF aircraft sold and scrapped in Victoria, it spend many years stored in the yard of a farmhouse covered in timber as a makeshift cover, and suffered a lot of corrosion in its belly as a consequence. It had an intact cockpit but was missing all of its turrets, including the forward turret mounting. There has been a lot of good work put into the fuselage and although I cant comment on material specs, release notes and specific areas, overall the outcome is spectacular and of a very high quality.
No short cuts have been taken, while the nose turret mounting and fairing was missing, and could have been moulded in fibre-glass to deliver a visually acceptable outcome, the entire structure has been recreated in aluminium for accuracy, after much research, trial and error.
The wing is from a B24D former USAF aircraft which force landed in PNG, the wreck had suffered grass fires but was the only source of a wing so they had to take what they could get.
The wing outer panels were cut off by disc outboard of the attach angles to allow recovery with minimum tooling/resources, with the intention of splicing them back together locally, however the group later obtained good PB4Y wing outers from the USA, these are currently fitted and they may well be airworthy capable?.
The limiting factor therefore is the burnt B24D centre-section, the attachment to the B24M fuselage highlighted the jig differences between the models and factories and there was a lot of work to mate to the two, but the major issue was grass fire damage and subsequent corrosion under the wing centre-section, and I seem to recall some doubler skins in the wheel wells being removed due to the extent of corrosion and therefore the structure would effectively need to be stripped down and re-manufactured to contemplate airworthy restoration and that has not been the case.
The project commenced with former RAAF B-24 crews wanting to create a static display, they explored acquisitions/recoveries from around the world only to uncover the only surviving RAAF B-24 fuselage sitting virtually down the road.
Colin Grey has played a major part in the driving force and wheeling and dealing to get the remaining parts and to assemble a restoration team and well resourced workshop resource to undertake the task, and while their objective was and remains a non-airworthy outcome, they are very serious about its "operational" capability and intactness.
But the outcome has been the effort of hundreds of members and volunteers over many many years of fundraising, parts sourcing, stripping, repairing, building and painting.
A friend up the road from my home is restoring the rear turret and the length he is going to make it operational and to design a mould to create new perspex is unbelievable.
He has effectively re-created the turret in 3-D CAD to determine dimensions, attach points, reinforcing ribs etc (and I mean down to specific structure not just 3 dimensional outline), built a plug for the perspex, built his own heat treating chamber for it, as well as sourcing parts from around the world to rebuild the turret itself into a operational example.
Overall an excellent project and a real demonstration of what can be done by volunteers, its a pity the remaining B-24 wrecks in PNG and elsewhere arnt being recovered for similar long term outcomes, but Australia is very lucky that this project has done so for us.
regards
Mark Pilkington
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20th Century - The Age of Manned Flight
"from Wrights to Armstrong in 66 years -WOW!"
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Sure wish there were more being worked on.
