Warbird Information Exchange

It was the Sieberman Corsair that Rielly was housing at Kissimmee...Last I checked the Collings Corsair was flying regularly.

jim

O.K. , so was the Sieberman Corsair the one that had the newly manufactured wing spar?

Kinda sorta, warbird1. The plane was eventually deemed a non-flyer and became a static display piece. The mechanic that was working for Jim Frye just after it was purchased from Silberman said it was a truly horrible piece of work. I'm still not sure if he meant in relation to "factory spec", or just generally horrible workmanship. Either way, no one elected to trust it as part of a flying aircraft, even though there are numerous would-be flyers sitting idle waiting for one.

The parts in the photo Richard posted above look like pure gold to me. I imagine there's going to be some wonderful new Corsair resto activity in the years to come.

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Rob Mears
'Surviving Corsairs' Historian
robcmears@yahoo.com
http://www.robmears.com

I guess I should chime in here as I am partly to blame for the box of spar caps. They were newly manufactured about two years ago by our shop. Don't worry, we had lots of help. The material for the outer spar caps is 2024 T3 that is 16ft in length. It took us most of a year just to find the material. It's .375 thick on the outer caps(upper and lower) and .250 (?) on the inner caps. The material had to be cut to width, machined with tapers, then formed to shape and finally profiled in width. The shape is not exactly the final shape of the spar as CV in their wisdom used clamping pressure and the bending load of the caps to close some of the gaps. They also used a lot of shims. We had enough material for seven spars when we combined our new material with what we have salvaged from other spars/wrecks. Right now we are assembling the fourth and last spar for our projects. A fifth one will be disassembled, repaired with new caps and reassembled. What's left over is available to the highest bidder I suppose.

John Lane is working on outer wing panels (several). He is a great resource but was not involved in the spar project. I'm not aware of anyone else doing this.

One last comment, I cannot conceive of a more difficult and complex design for an airplane. But, on the same token you'll never see one break.

Regards

Lynn

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Fly Safe

Thanks everyone. John Lane, I know you are a member of this forum. I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this! Any info is appreciated!

Hi Lynn.... sorry I didn't credit you guys properly with the spars... the poster on that site seemed to intimate that John Lane had done the work. I know that he replaced the spar caps on the Brian Reynolds corsair, and was assuming he'd done the same for you... so was it the other way around? Which corsairs are you working on, by the way? Also... I assume that the spar marked with F2G is from Dave Etchell's corsair... what was wrong with it? It looked really nice in the photos, although there did appear to be some gouges out near the end in one of the photos from what looks like a grinding wheel. Great to hear of the work you guys are doing!

Cheers,
Richard

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Richard Mallory Allnutt - Photography - http://www.rmallnutt.com

I'll second that!

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"They can teach MONKEYS to fly better than that"

http://www.heritageflight.org
http://www.bravo369.org

Very cool to see this working being done! It is exciting to think that we'll have several more Corsairs taking to the air in the years to come.

It also seems like a huge step toward getting spars for the other Corsairs in need.

Tim

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www.tailhookstudio.com

Mr. Hunt,

Seeing the pile of canopies and other Corsair parts reminded me. When I was a kid of about 13, my brother and I were hired for a day to unload an entire semi of Corsair parts at the Mojave airport. This would have been about 1972-73. As I recall, Mr. Guilford paid us a whopping $20 apiece, which was alot of dough at the time. There were sooo many parts that I wasn't sure it was worth it by the time we got done. Anyway, just wondered if that is the same cache of parts. My recollection was that he and another guy had split on buying all of Vought's remaining Corsair parts. Never knew what happened to those parts after the Corsair was lost. Any idea if this is the same bunch?

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Rob C

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. “

– Michael Crichton

Very,very,very impressive.Hats off to all involved.

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Hang The Expense

Hey Rob C:

None of the parts that we have came directly from Mojave. The only information I have about Corsairs and Mojave comes from the walking encyclopedia and warbird guru Wally McDonnell who at one time had a bunker with a lot of Corsair stuff in it that eventually went up to Jack Erickson for his project. Most of our current inventory has been previously owned by several others as part of a project. In fact I come to see the real picture over time and that is the parts never change, they just keep moving around from one building to another. We're actually wearing them out just moving them around. Hopefully a very few will actually make it into the air someday. On a similar note I am amazed at what we can harvest off of a corroded, buried in the dirt, chunk of scrap metal that most people would run from. Many of the parts going onto our spars came down this path.

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Fly Safe

Sounds like an eventual fly in is in order.