Page 5 - August2020

Don, Andy, Roger and
Jack dry fitting the
starboard panel to see
how well it fits and to
find out whether the
fuselage or the panel
have warped over time
prior to stripping it
down to its bare wood
Hey, We're Still Working! structure.

One area that necessitated another trip to Nanton was
We'll call this a special edition report.
the hinge points for the bomb bay doors (which we don't
With most everyone shut down or shut in, I wanted to use since Spartan replaced the doors with a single belly
give you a little picture of things we continue to work panel). The bolts were secured by the usual methods,
on through these difficult times. which meant hitting them with a hammer. Picking up the
tap and dies from the museum, I ran a die onto the bolts
As our province started to shutdown, I removed a
before I attempted to dismantle the assembly. The die
couple of components from the museum to work on
was run on the flat side first to get the threads clear as
in the shop back in Calgary.
close to the nut as possible. This was the only
The shop for me is the hangar I work out of for my mechanical issue in removing any of the parts from the
paying job, where we are in standby mode. panel.

The parts Colette and I have been working on are the
side panels to the fuselage that fit under the wing.

Jack and Colette in Jack’s
shop with a fuselage side
panel. The inside has at
least three layers of paint
with the outside being
covered in fabric and many
layers of aircraft dope, all
of which have to be In addition to hammering over the end of the bolts, another
removed to get down to favorite technique to secure a nut was to hammer a sharp
the bare wood structure. pointy thing into the bolt threads as pictured above. Was it

effective? Ask Davey, D. who tried to spin a nut off just such a
These panels carry everything from the control cables
bolt. The result, above.
to fluid systems, with the latter leaving us a number
of issues. Some parts had already been removed over Starting from the inside the scraping, scratching and
the past years, so we removed the remaining parts in sanding commenced for Colette and I. We spent long
order to strip, repair and restore the wood structure. hours cleaning material from nooks and crannies to
expose various levels of damage. (By the way I am here
to tell you that Alexa has a very limited selection of
music.)

This is one of the first areas I have worked on by myself
for some time so I will go into a little more detail.

The stringers and corners needed to be cleaned first as
the glue was caulked along the edges. I found that the
glue comes out like broken glass and once on the loose,

it acts like glass.
The sharp corners and small pieces cause cuts in the
wood if it gets under your tooling.