Help with a Martin Aileron Assy Dataplate- Spartan Aircraft

[tulsaboy]

Hello folks...

Was looking for some help with the dataplate posted below:



I'm terribly interested in Spartan because of its Tulsa connection. The dataplate says, under the "Airplane-Model" heading "424003-1004" That doesn't seem to line up with any Martin product's serial number, at least as far as I can tell. Can anyone tell me what kind of aircraft this part would have been on, and which aileron assembly it went to? Would just be neat to know. If anyone has photos of similarly installed assemblies, I would be appreciative of you posting it for us to see. Thanks!

kevin

[bdk]

That's a check fixture likely used after the aileron was built to make sure all the hinge points lined up and that the aileron wasn't warped. As a check fixture it wouldn't have been on the aircraft itself.

Spartan must have built aircraft parts during the war.

Last edited by bdk on Mon Oct 13, 2008 4:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[Second Air Force]

Spartan built a number of different flight controls and sub-assemblies during the war, including flight controls for the B-24 and B-32. I don't have ready access to the info, but they may have done stuff for the B-26 plant in Omaha before they switched over to the B-29.

I've got some listings of contract numbers but it will take a while to find them.

More searching required,
Scott

[tulsaboy]

Thanks, BDK! So the check fixture itself would have been built by Spartan, owned by Martin, and used where? Spartan or Martin? I didn't know that such a fixture would have had a dataplate. I'm intrigued because this is only the second Spartan dataplate I've seen that wasn't attached to the 30 or so extant Spartan aircraft.

Spartan dataplates are kinda rare, from what I can tell.

kevin

[bdk]

If Spartan was contracted to build ailerons for Martin, Martin would have retained ownership of the tool in case they wanted to move the work to another supplier.

Martin may also have simply subcontracted the manufacture of the tooling fixture to Spartan. This would be done if Martin's tooling shop was too busy and Spartan had excess capacity.

Fixtures need dataplates to track configuration changes. If an extra rib had been added into production to address a design deficiency, for example, you would need to note that change on the data plate so that if the fixture got moved later some guy with a clip board could verify whether or not the mod had been done.

[tulsaboy]

BDK-

That makes sense. The plate has Spartan's inspector stamps on it, so Spartan did build the fixture. By that point in the war, Spartan had ceased building the NP-1 and was just building parts for other manufacturers. They built parts for P-38s, B-24s, A-26s, P-61s, B-25s and others. Would make sense that they would have built the tooling/fixtures for such parts, as they had an ample supply of labor and available factory space at Spartan.

Thanks for the education! Sounds like a neat piece.

kevin