Air Britain has the location as Yarrow near Selkirk.

Alan.

Thought i throw my 2p worth in on colour…..try getting a good match on a five year old car even with the manufacturers paint.
In the case of the panel in question it will have been exposed to extremes of temparature change, airflow, uv light, oxidation, soot and oil therefore it has no chance of being an exact match to the original, factory fresh paint.
Any aircraft that has been re-sprayed or touched up in the field will have had the paint mixed by eye to a “thats close enough spec” by some Erc, who if he’s as good with colours as I am, could be totally colour dislexic.
Bloody nice panel, should be hanging on the wall with aircraft history in pride of place.
Alan.

The casualty files for both crew and their service records can be found at the link below but are not digitalised yet. A small fee is required, I think it is 28 Australian dollars.
http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/SearchScreens/BasicSearch.aspx

Insert the service numbers and you will see the files available. series A705 files are for casualty repatriation and usually have the report of the accident and inquiry papers. Series A9300 are the individuals service record.

453 Sqn Operational Records are in the link below, W.J. Harper first appears on page 5 as being on route from the UK 12/9/41. Harper arrives on page 9 on 2/10/41 and is mentioned throughout to page 28 in Feb ’42. On the next ORB from June ’42 at Drem to Jan ’46 there is no mention of him.
http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/Imagine.asp?B=1359053
http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=1359195

His combat reports for 18/5/40, 25/5/40,11/8/40,15/8/40 and 8/11/40 are available on line here for £3.50.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/details-result.asp?Edoc_Id=7738390&queryType=1&resultcount=8

Regards,
Al.

All depends on how much cash is available. If you want to focus on Aviation Archeology there are still plenty to find and visit in Scotland including an Australian who still lies in his aircraft, much to my disgust !
Then there is the Russian front with many German and Soviet undiscovered.

PM sent.

Albacore N4167 crashed at 819288 and Walrus W3023 at 818288. The location is between the summit and King Kenneth’s Cairn. We found some small parts of both aircraft back in the late 90’s after being shown by a local farmer.
The crews were LAC C.H Grubb, LAC T.D DeCuna, and LT H.M Pollock on the Albacore. Sub/Lt. D.V Lunn and LAC G.G.G Cuny were on the Walrus.
Both aircraft crashed at the same time during a night flying exercise.

Worth finding the airfield maps first and looking for any underground air raid shelters which are no longer visible especially on an airfield where large scale scrapping took place at the wars end. The reason I say this is that we dug ( with the owners permission) an air raid shelter around 1990 which had been filled with old equipment. It yeilded new Merlin exhaust stubs, used spitfire thottle assemblies and a complete Barracuda instrument panel amongst others (parts were passed to a musem). We stopped digging when we got to boxes of plasma and other medical supplies. We also recovered several wheels and tyres from a building Anson/Proctor.
American bases should be of particular interest as what they weren’t taking back to the states was destroyed and dumped. This was still the case when they pulled out of the Holy Loch in recent years. Anything that wouldn’t fit on the USS Hunley was dumped overboard, tools, cabinets, boats and spares.
The pile on the seabed was so large it had to be removed at British tax payers expense. A wartime US Navy base near me has had a lot dumped in the sea and buried on shore which I’ll ferret over once the foliage has died down.