AdlerTag
Rank 4 Registered User

Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 300
Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham Adlam
I doubt the skill to make them would be an issue considering that aircraft right up until 1939 were nearly all made of wood. The Spitfire was a very difficult aircraft to build and they managed to turn out 20K plus of those.
Although the Mossie was made of wood, it wasn’t exactly your standard wooden aircraft. There’s always the suggestion that the Mossie was made of wood and so would have been easy to build, but the truth is that it was a complex beastie that used all sorts of cutting edge moulding and bonding techniques.

I built a very high-performance airplane–a Falco F8L–of wood, and in fact I used the very same glue that was used in the Mosquito: Resorcinol. My Falco also used the same “cutting-edge moulding and bonding techniques” that were used on the Mosquito, mainly substantial scarfing of wood panels and steam bending of same.

I doubt I could have built a Spitfire in my barn in New York.

You people are hilarious. Acres of discussions about the minutae of Ju-52, Ju-52/m, Ju-52/3m, and nobody seems to have noticed that it’s not a Junkers at all. My guess is Caproni, though I’m not at all sure. But I am sure that’s not an Iron Annie cockpit roof.

Making the wild guess that if it’s from an aircraft it was somehow involved in WWII, I can at least say that it wasn’t German. The numerals aren’t in the style of the numbers that a German factory or fabricator would use.

Don’t know if there’s anything innately different about the numerals a British airframer would use, but they somehow look American to me (an American…).

Is it magnetic–i.e. ferrous–or aluminum? If the former, it would be substantially more corroded than it seems to have been, after 70 years, which would make doubtful my fanciful WWII theory.