F-4 Cockpit Restoration 2020 - Gateway Youth Aeronautical Foundation

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so what we've been doing here is we've had a an incident where when we purchased this radome it was involved in a nosegear collapse so a lot of the bands that you see in the fiberglass were actually coming apart so what we had to do is take it down to bare fiberglass and do a vacuum bag repair on it so take it down the bare fiberglass sand it all down get it nice and smooth do the repair and now we're ready to start reapplying the the fillers and so forth to get it nice and smooth again um the biggest thing is we do not want these these breaks in the fiberglass to come back so that's why we added the fiberglass that's why we went ahead and did it the right way so hopefully we'll never have to redo it again these randoms were actually constructed by a spiral wound they were put on a mold and very very thin layers they were completely wrapped in fiberglass and i'm not sure the thickness of it or how many strands there are but it's a lot but it's looking pretty good so far we'll uh we'll have some updated pictures for you guys coming up and as you can see there was oh i counted at least seven or eight layers of paint that we had to sand through give you an interesting story on how this this radome actually came about this was the actual first piece of this project that i actually owned at the time back in 2001 i owned a decorative concrete resurfacing business which is exactly what this is on the floor and we were working in a job in saint charles and a truck a scrap truck came by and i saw this radome sticking up and i'm like holy crap that's an f4e rado tracked them down i ended up buying the radome off the driver for fifty dollars so this was the very first piece that i actually owned of an f4 so this whole project how this started was um whenever i was working for the 131st fighter wing we had nine f4 feast lodges that came down to cannon range that they're going to use at canon range for a target well i talked to our wing commander and i talked to him about doing the same concept for him as a recruiting tool so we ended up we pulled a complete fuselage from cannon range brought it back up to st louis and unfortunately six months after we acquired it we were announced that we were on the bracklist so that project never went anywhere and in the course of looking for parts for that one i came across this one and i'm like well i'm going to do this myself and we'll have pictures on the the video that show the condition of what it looked like whenever i purchased it there was not a screw not a plate a panel on here i acquired every single thing through through different networks of oh i went out to tucson to a place called national aircraft we made three trips out there to acquire parts from some of the f4 fuselages that they had in their scrap pile some of the parts were actually i guess donated by the air force so one of those parts was the gun muscle so them not releasing any of the long nose phantoms the long nose is the ones with the internal cannon i was not able to find this so i knew that out at holloman air force base that they had a couple f4s that they were using as parts birds and i talked to the commander out there and he graciously donated the gun muslim to us um the aircraft was originally a german f4f um serial number on it was 72 1156 and the german number was 37-46 it was involved in a basically a catastrophic accident where the the engine caught on fire and they deemed the airplane non-repairable they sent the cockpit section out to holloman air force base for the 20th fighter squadron to use as a ground familiarization trainer for the pilots [Music] after they retired the german program they sent the cockpit section to a local scrap yard in alamogordo new mexico and that's where we purchased it from actually we purchased it from roger johnson who purchased it from the actual scrap yard and whenever i say scrap yard it was scrapped they took everything out they could possibly take off and basically it was just a carcass whenever we started so in 2003 we started a company called little pilots little pilots was a oh just a a way to get the public interested in aviation what we did was we went to several air shows we've done lots and lots of parades different public events to wear we took this out opened up the cockpits and let kids get their picture taken inside the cockpit with the hope of inspiring our youth in the aviation so after oh in 2019 we decided to go to another basically we decided a new chapter had to be formed that's when we we started the gateway youth aeronautical foundation the purpose behind gateway youth aeronautical foundation is to inspire youth in the aviation career field whether it be maintainers whether it be pilots air traffic controllers you name it we just want to get them involved in aviation some ways some shape some form so now what we're going to be able to do is take this to different stem events different events around the midwest free of charge to where we can hopefully be that inspiring entity that starts their career in aviation [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] this is kind of like dental work here [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] matt bromarkel on behalf of silver fox marketing i'd like to thank the guys over here for letting us take care of the graphics on the plane looks great come check it out let's go [Music] you

Channel: The Aero Experience

Views: 2,308

Rating: 4.8709679 out of 5

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Id: P0htgG0x5NY

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020