Steve Nelson wrote:
I've seen the P-40 up close... It's not actual weathering, as the aircraft is a purely static restoration and I don't believe it was ever flown after being restored.
SN
No, this aircraft was most-definitely never flown after being restored. In fact, I'm a little amused at another poster's comment about it being "fully restored".
A personal examination of it in 2005 revealed bits and pieces that Curtiss certainly never used in the original assembly of a P-40. Here are some comments pulled off Dan Ford's site about the same bird:
The plane is owned by Don Brooks of Brooks Aviation in Douglas, Georgia, pending formal transfer to the museum. The rebuild was done by Tom Wilson of the Hawk Factory in Griffin, Ga. Don told me that parts of two Tommis went into the final product, one from the Murmansk area and another from around Archangel. "You have to understand that the Russians went at them with pickaxes, trying to find something worth salvaging," he said. The job also involved some original castings for parts of the cowling, which work was done in collaboration with the folks who are on the Chino P-40C.
In 1999 I had a chance to inspect this plane in the company of Ben Schapiro. According to a spreadsheet provided by Don Brooks, it contains 37.7 percent original materials from the Tomahawk IIB (RAF serial AK255) that it supposedly was restored from), 22.1 percent from "the same type aircraft," 10.4 percent "remanufactured parts from the same type aircraft," and 30.3 percent newly manufactured parts. The impression we got, however, was that the plane was pretty much built from the ground up, with lots of pop rivets, plastic automobile fasteners, iron pipe (for machine guns), and newly bent sheet metal.http://www.warbirdforum.com/tommi.htm
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