Warbird Information Exchange

That meant something entirely different back then. It could have been NOS parts or it could have been well used parts. John Marlin's Mustang was put together from parts other people were throwing away and the engine was built up from primarily used parts. Nowadays the standard seems to be new build.

Hmm I wonder of the 1.1M includes the tarp....

Not disagrreing with what you said or that it's not time for another rebuild, but Mustangs-Mustangs indicates this was a data plate rebuild sometime in the 70's.[/quote]

Mike,

What Brandon said is correct. The aircraft I mentioned in my post was also "Rebuilt" in the late 70's. Keep in mind that was 30 to 40 years ago already...that's a lot of time. To add to that, a lot of the early rebuilds were not much more than aerosol overhauls and taking the best of what was available at the time to put in the project being worked on. Today actual new built parts are available and most of the time the quality of the new parts exceeds that of the NOS parts.

John

No such thing as a "data plate rebuild" in the 70's. Airframes and parts were too available and prices were too low. Plus no one was doing that, period. What they did was take a crashed or incomplete P-51 and source parts. Probably started with an airworthy fuselage, and crash damaged remains and scrounged up what they needed.

I remember seeing a fuselage that was built up into a static for a national museum merely because it had corroded longerons. At the time, nobody had ever made aftermarket longerons so the fuselage was doomed. Nowadays people replace longerons just because the old ones might go intergranular someday.