GEE BEE Builders - Steve Wolf / Kevin Kimball - Kermie Cam Visit Part 2

[Music] i don't want to hold you up for me no no no no no okay let's go look at some gbs come on guys oh absolutely yeah yeah and then actually the museum light is opens at 11 o'clock so [Music] so what's happening with the vega oh man it's one of those time periods where we're making making a lot of progress but it doesn't show yeah one of those deals where you're doing lots of little things and but we're doing a lot of things that are going to make life easier when we start putting the skins on we're building floorboards building the floorboard support stringers and everything make sure all that fits while it's all right fuselage right rather than sitting up inside that wooden tube and trying to fit it in there so it's just a lot of things that we're trying to plan ahead on and then we're not too far from being able to start fitting the skin i think that's really important like on my project before riveting the skin everybody kept going when you put the skins on i said i'm going to have a throttle body and i have all this stuff that i don't [Music] see i always you know said i had a kid to be able to do all that stuff but now my kid's 30 years old so i got to start thinking i got to start thinking it's getting tougher for all of us to crawl down up in those okay museum light which actually opens in 15 minutes so let's get in and out of here we're open seasonally only three days a week for four hours a day let me get some lights here really quickly so this is what we call the museum light by the way my granddaughter six-year-old loved the book oh wow the little racer oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah so uh my first uh mustang 25 years old that's pretty cool my first spitfire anyway doc yeah so we're gonna put the p47 right here uh so we've got limit so we can't put the tail on it or anything but uh so we're gonna put the dh4 back over here so here we go so i've got not only a gbz and an r2 gb but i've got both the builders here so that's pretty pretty pretty cool so anyway yeah we need to we need to get a photo of us with the yeah and you know delmar benjamin still says this is the most fun airplane he ever flew oh no way he loved i forgot to get the key to this thing but anyway the uh so what happened was you're getting a lot of fading on the fabric there going down but no big deal so what happened was you know five years ago yeah i know kevin uh you know built it up jeff eicher you know kind of uh funded the project and then i think he all took it over to sun and fun and took you know and then i said you want to put it on display and it sat here for a while and yeah we we had it in a in a hangar after we flew it we had a hangar in leesburg and then that guy we're borrowing the hangar from sold the hangar so we lost his face i called jack and i said hey you know you guys ever you know take airplanes online no we don't take uh yeah yeah yeah so he said but but which airplane that's it the z and then yeah okay yeah we can park it down there so then we we brought it down here to have a nice place for it to sit and then you acquired it from us some time afterwards yeah well it was interesting because eventually it was it's it's funny how our friends work okay so eventually i get up and i walked by for him i said i really need to have that in the collection so we cut a deal and eventually it became you know the first character in my in my book you know all of life is a school and you know his big brother over there you know gb uh jimmy ggb and uh anyway so but it was interesting because when i originally uh i flew this airplane twice okay and i remember calling you i think as it was on the video and then about that time i started doing the uh a video kia you know for a video kiosk on the deal and what happened was uh i'm looking at this bales crash i'm going that's freaking nailer on flutter i mean it was obvious to me back then they didn't know what and they talk about the fuel cap came off that's all right so so anyway so i i connected up with leon told who had done the flutter testing recommended by curtis pitts because i lost a friend from was it hard no no no no he that was that was rudder flutter but that was on a monoplane in michigan but jerry thomas uh and norm nielsen built two stevens acro basic airplanes and uh you know and i've got when you go back to look at the stabilizer look up there the blue ones hanging upside down in the ceiling norm sold the engine donated the airplane after jerry got killed and we were out there and basically uh uh i was out of town and the reports were it was out over the everglades and there was a guy out there doing some target practice because it was you know out west of the it was just swamp okay but there was a road the guy was doing some target practice had the you know earphones on blah blah blah you watched him fly for a little bit and he went back to target practicing and all of a sudden jerry apparently had gone and done a hammerhead he came down the guy heard this just like that and he looked up and it was just the airplane went straight in and there was just pieces fluttering down and i've got the aileron the aileron was ripped out of the deal and it was eighter on flutter so i said i gotta find out what happened to my friend so curtis hooked me up with leon leon normally would have charged a lot of money he came down realized what we're doing never charged me anything except his airfare down brought his equipment down and within two minutes of hooking up the things he goes like this and he goes oh you got a problem and i thought oh my god what the hell did he just do and then once i understood you know people talk about flutter and when you read in the books they think two-dimensionally you know it's got to be nose balance and the leading edge because when you bang the wing you don't want it to go down because then it's a dog chasing its tail but if it's on the leading edge and it goes bang and it goes like this it counteracts the deal so what happened was i had them flutter test the airplane and had a problem and then after i got and i'd flown this airplane and he said this airplane has a problem above 240. so when i flew it i never really went above 200 okay which was kind of about kind of what the cruise was or whatever so i flew it twice uh you know flew it uh uh at about 200 just because my gut was telling me that and then when we found out i had a problem above 240 and he told me what the fix was it's very similar to what we did on the the stevens acro type airplane we were going to have to put a weight on the hinge but the problem was if the thing the way this thing is designed it was going to have to come up through the fabric and i was like i don't want to do that if i fly the airplane i'll just keep pulling if i want to go fast i'll go fly to p-51 you know right you remember i mean uh we were down i was here when we did the flutter test curtis was here he was just a little guy i was small enough to sit in the canopy oh my god and then and then we brought the ailerons to my place i built the balance horns and you and i talked about it yeah we just can't bring ourselves to chop hole no but what happened was when i ended up with the r2 from you know del mar you know del mar i think his dream was to have somebody buy it donated to the smithsonian yeah you know and apparently that just never came to pass so he had a dilemma who can i sell this to they're going to kill themselves in it you know so i ended up with it and we came back and i think what the thought of the granville brothers was they they basically said well it's a flutter problem and so what they did i think there's a balance weight in the fuselage in the fuselage wing route yeah we built it the way they did and i didn't i never liked that 45 degree you know the push rod oh yeah for the air kind of swings and they had ford rod end bearings right like like a car rod end they didn't have we put real aircraft right right right tighten up but still if you grab this aileron go to the other side you could there's springiness between them yeah you can see that too but but that's not the problem and when i asked leon and i said hey i got this airplane blah blah blah and he said putting the weight there does nothing yeah so the bottom line is and i knew del mar flew that thing at 275 and doing loops and stuff he was lucky like leah laden schlager and jim roberts were because when my friend got killed we buzzed norm's airplane the blue one hanging up in the other hangar and then jim roberts came down who had an exact same wing as leo ladenschlager and they had the same problem and that's when we came up with the the deal there and i did an article and told everybody and so yeah inboard because it's a torque tube it can actually exacerbate the the floaters right yeah out of sync yeah delmar went through an interesting phase you know because he was a close friend and stuff i mean or you know where he just felt like i'm either gonna make it or not and stuff you know and when he did the first flight he said you know i was thinking when his tax night says i was thinking right there this is the night of the test flight he says he says you know what i was thinking right then steve i said an existence i probably won't come back from this oh my god actually and yet he went and took off but i never liked the aileron setup we did it like they did but i know he's never had where he said well you know i don't wear a parachute because you know why huh you know if something bad happens i mean what do you you know yeah this comes off and that opens yeah you said the hardest thing to get used to this airplane when you first flew it was a horizontal tail right there because you'd be flying along you start turning his head and he'd go you thought somebody was like like somebody was tucked in on him oh my god oh my god it took a while because he kept jumping like who's flying wing on me no yeah yeah yeah and then we got a little uh this is going to be in my little girl airplane this is z's girlfriend puff yeah the y model and and uh you know so that's a little puff right there right she's cute so this wasn't flagler's then this is this came out of maine johnson has the flagler one okay well there was another one that a guy up in ohio had i can't remember his name but a friend of mine used to work for him but what we're going to do is rick's already uh come up with a bump cow there was they only built two one had a bump cow one didn't and you know since it's puff it's a girl girl's got to have bumps so we're going to put some bumps on it and uh we're gonna be a little bit uh non-historic and eventually she'll have a little pink nose but it's got a little cover that that that can go in the front you know when they were racing it because they i think there was uh i think there was a gal or somebody somebody raised this at the clinging cl yeah it started king king clinton smithers seemed like that something like that and then uh i think yeah there was two or three of the ladies raised in those lower horsepower yeah yeah and even um you know i don't know mod tate if she ran it some too yeah there were several jim moss did this yeah i sat in this airplane before he test flew it closed up the canopy and stuff's like man this thing's blind yeah yeah but you know like a pits or something you want blind go fly a spear to saint louis yeah there you go oh speaking of that i see some guy just finished when he's planned on flying flying it all the way across the ocean reenacting yeah best of luck you know and i mean you know it i i see it's pretty cool but you know something lindbergh did it back in 27 or 29 or whatever was it 27 or 20 yeah 27 27 that's the thing and it's like i can see that but it's like anyway yeah the aviation enthusiast is going to go wow and the rest of the world going to give a crap you know let's look let's get to the moon first anyway so cool so all little characters in the book yeah um well super um so yeah yeah yeah let's get some pictures and uh yeah okay well here let me get let's roll the roberts out of the way yeah i just roll it over there and we'll get some pictures you know for 1500 some hours on it yeah i think so yeah i mean can you hold that yeah yeah hold on while you're taking the pictures if you can okay can you do both absolutely okay and then you know it's got good revs or whatever yeah well here i get it in the middle because you guys he's got that one i got this that's right there we go was talking about as far as how tight the canopy is oh my god yeah yeah that's why when del mar flew we just put a cat a flying cap on him with racing headed i got a big head i'd probably yeah well i tried getting in there one time with a gopro and it just it's not gonna work right it's cool though you know when you look at those guys like lee gehlbach and stuff those guys back then there were a lot of little tiny guys that's skinny and weighed 130 pounds these airplanes from that period if you look at some of the like the clipboard monocoops or any of those little airplanes and the stuff that i ike and mike and pete and all these different things they were all built for little bitty people and you know we've all just yeah overgrown over the years and we're bigger oh my god let me get you guys standing right here with both of them okay yeah there you go that's cool so so let me ask you something when uh you know what year did you actually build this one and when did it test fly well we started in 89 okay and we visited pete miller the original designer out in connecticut and he wanted to see us do it so he actually helped us the new england air museum had built one you know for stadium yeah and they had the drawings but the granville's did not want us to build a flying airplane they were afraid of that it would get iraq and that'd be it right well pete miller he said these guys are going to do it del r st will do it and so we did so we started in 89 we had it at oshkosh during their golden age air racing deal that's when i met you one but we didn't have the wing root fairing we didn't have the engine plum we were hoping to make oshkosh and just didn't oh okay then the cowling was like the paint was still wet when you put it oh yeah we put in a trailer and del mar drove with to oshkosh with a u-haul one of those little trailers that says do not exceed 45 and he went about 80 with the colleen i think we have governors at about 70 on those things well this was he was using his car and he was just one of those little trailer that just the car oh my gosh but anyway we built it and finished it up and it flew test flew in december yeah december 91 about 23rd or second just a few days before christmas and um and it's just good to see it again you know i remember seeing it outside my shop and stuff and we were like did we really do this i'll be darned so uh and and when did this thing come into fruition and about that time you know when they when these guys showed up at oshkosh before they flew it uh jeff was there and he was super inspired and so he said man we really need to do something cool so he and i started talking about maybe um taking a uh powered dga15p and trying to make it look more like an 11. you know something that maybe would be something like a harold newman flu yeah mr mulligan yeah well yeah exactly yeah and something that maybe that if we were alive then it would be a cool thing that we might have had right and then um he saw on trader plane uh a gbz project for sale in california for five grand so he went out there looked at it bought it turned out it was junk yeah and we ended up donating to that to a museum static display but that hooked us on the z yeah cool and then so we were there started working it and then when del mar was at sun and fun in 92 um first time with this went over and you know introduced me he's a little guy went introduced to myself and everything and then he went you know that was right before hurricane andrew yeah so then everything you helped del mar with a fuel leak he had a fuel tank the main fuel tank leaked uh on the way to sun and fund and so we took it out and we brought it to my shop flushed it out went to lunch while we were flushing it out then i welded it all up we pressure tested it brought it back put the airplane back together and then he was able to fly it was a vibration i think the second half of his trip to florida he was using the the small tank and had to make like a billion stops it was a bunch of short hops because oh my gosh huh so and so when did this airplane test fly uh june of 96 of 96 and when did i end up with it 98 99 yeah okay somewhere around in there interesting so delamar flew this to 2001. yeah he flew like eight years three shows flew in europe you know did i i've seen this show a couple of times it was great and i remember somebody said jimmy doola would watch him fly one time and said it just shook his head inside i don't believe it i remember when del mar came for lunch and we went to the golf course by our airport and he flew this in and he was on his way to a show and he says he come out a beautiful day and if you know how del mar talks he goes looks like a good day to do a hammerhead in the gme so we all watched him he took off he went up and he flew around for a while usually he's pretty gutsy but he flew around like 10 minutes for a while and he's thinking about it he went up perfectly vertical chugged way up there he kicked the rudder probably at about 60 and it goes like this tail slide and then it started back it up and it backed up and it slowly came back around and then he flew around for about another 10 minutes and he tried again this time he hit it a little earlier and it kind of got like this and then it slid sideways down he comes in lands and says well you're not going to see a hammerhead in the tv routine that was the end of that but he never spun it he knew better no no no no i asked him one time about about stability and things we were at oshkosh with him you know almost every year hanging out yeah and he said it's just really unstable in the vertical um it's more stable inverted because of the late reflex in the m6 but yeah he said it was really unstable in the vertical vertical he said that's why i don't really like doing looping maneuvers in the show or anything like that you said but today i'll show you he said see the g meter's all zeroed out and he said i'll show it to you when i get back and he did a cuban eight and on the verticals of the cuban eight it was it's like super divergent in pitch and i forget what the numbers were but it was like holy i don't understand why because he's pulling and it's positive i think he unloaded it just to show it to be like oh oh i see okay what's going on i don't remember him telling me about it and so then it came back and it was like oh man so he said you know that's why he just doesn't like doing anything that's vertical but nothing in the world knife edges like this and oh my god one time more areas yeah than you got on the wings it has 115 square feet of side area and 74 square feet exactly unbelievable he came between our hanger my shop hanger and the hanger across the way which is like 70 feet in there he came by knife edge probably at about 50 feet because he was about maybe the height of your hanger after the bottom of the rafters he went by and when he went by knife edge he was waving at me with both hands like this he was just on the top right he'd let go of the stick oh and he was right on the deck knife edge and he went by and he went like this with both hands and then and and he said yeah you roll it knife edge and it'll just kind of stay there you can fly it on the side so so the the the r2 was the bendix airplane the r1 was the thompson trophy pylon deal so what was different other than fuel and was there a difference in the wings the wings were the same the vertical fin was slightly more raked back like this and the cowl was tighter you know i mean it had a smaller the 1340 had more of a blunt looking nose right but airframe wise they were the same pretty much firewall back firewall back same airplane and of course we put you know the main the only mods we really did to it was you know fuel injections because i knew he'd be running upside down and when we built this airplane the intent at that point of starting this project was not to do air show aerobatic flying it was just to take it to fly in our air shows wow and just do passes but once he flew it he found how nice it rolled and the stuff it would do and you will you've seen me fly right on that first flight you know next to the a36 yeah he rolls inverted that's perfect and he did all that on the first flight and when he got back that night i said delmar i'm just curious why did you why did you fly inverted on wing and formation and all that with the airplane on the first flight he said after my takeoff i figured it was going to roll it up in a ball on lane and he said so he says i wanted to do everything with that airplane my brain had ever dreamed of in the one flight we're not getting it so so when you started working on it did you uh you know confer with stephen and anything on any of the design or thing i mean how much did you guys work the these airplanes are why we're friends it's it's funny because you know our paths were pretty close to crossing many many times um similar airplanes you know we there's times we're at the same events but never met each other so these airplanes actually brought us together so i you know then it got to where you know while he's he's in oregon i'm in florida but we spoke probably three hours a day wow for seven years and i used to come out on the airline i spent more he sees me more when i lived in oregon than now that i live in florida right we this we haven't been together for quite a while probably several years yeah but i guess i just stopped by with the sea ray one day but it's it's one of those things where yes this airplane brought us together asked them a lot of questions of what you know they they learned a lot of stuff yeah there are things that were that the grandvilles did learn and this there to put in this airplane after this one one of the things that they did is they beefed up the wing spars and so that they were unfortunately after the wing issue so what we did when i designed this wing is i put in the mods that are in this wing i put them in the spars in this way so which is plywood doublers and aluminum doublers all glued and bolted together about three feet here you know 18 inches either side so it made it a 14 g wing when you do that i'll be darn of course like this is fabric and this over here is actually plywood this is all plywood miller told them that they could leave the drag wires out but the granville brothers wanted it in there so it has quarter inch drag wires plus plus skin so and the ribs are five inches apart i mean this is only one sixteenth skin so it's not yeah these these are on five point four inch centers yeah um so a little bit further apart that gives you an idea how many ribs are in there yeah and like the bulldog i'm drawing up now the whole bulldog doing for for jim burke is four and a half inch centers there's 30 ribs in a wing that's this long in the boulder well kermit how this airplane came about also was del mar and i flew on the same aerobatic team with pits s ones called the northern knights which was the northwest deal we traveled around doing air shows and we just finished one in springfield illinois we were going back in september we ran in a big snowstorm we got weathered in rapid city south dakota and when we're in the hotel sharing a room and we got talking about different airplanes and we got talking about the gb and del mar goes if there were gb out there i'd go fly and that's how it all started and then i started thinking of being a project person that was 89. okay so i mean when i was flying the big pit sampson with the pratt and whitney so you guys started on this not long after that conversation yeah it wasn't like oh you know five years ago and and we both been you know pilots tend to have macho egos sometimes especially air show guys so it's like yeah if was a gb i'd flat two and we got talk we said well why don't we build one see how it flew that was the first thing so we started this as a 50 50 partnership but i was running a shop making my living right and my ex-wife now but my wife said said after about the first year of we worked so hard on it we weren't making any money you know and i was trying to work on a staggering rebuild project and stuff to make money and then but i wanted to work on this and finally she said she was right and delmar wanted to buy me out so i thought okay i'll sell you my half and and then i'll help you finish it up you know so that's how it and then like we've talked about it's one of those things that you know why is he you never flew it and it's one of those things that if you did ding it yeah well what do you how do you how do you fix that yeah speaking of dings it's on the other side i watched that happen and i'd say i thought we were losing the air that was the third flight and i thought for sure we were losing here darren lahr told me when i flew the z he said if you ever fly these he said don't ever get it below 100 miles an hour unless the wheels are on the ground and he left that as a reminder on the back corner right on the back you can feel it it just barely kicked the ground oh yeah yeah right there you know kermit which would spook me yeah oh it got the outer it was up so steep it out it did the pant here's what was interesting is i'm watching it land and it's a 60 foot wide 3100 foot runway at our airport with a crown for the of the rain you know when he when it ended up it he touched down he did a three-point landing and and just as it touched it just went like i mean about this quick and and luckily he had a lot of pitch time doing snap rolls and he said it felt like a snap roll up just on touchdown he said the airplane just felt like it stalled and started to go so he went he said pretty much just full left rudder forward stick and and i watched it go from here and because of the crown on the runway it looked like two feet of this wing was underground i thought they got the wing for sure because it was like here's the ground here's the wind and it but it went like this boom and he jumped it right up on the mains he just converted it he's fast right you know he's a black belt karate guy well yeah watching him do some of the stuff that he's done where he jumped up anyway fascinating oh there's the key right there i got the key the keys in it okay so that's how you get in it and uh it's got an emergency canopy but you literally get that in this oh the original didn't have that no the the idea was the door is jettisoned also and you would jettison the door and slide out i'll be darned i love the uh i love the little petals i'm sure that was not original no those are a reproduction but that's what they supposedly oh no way anyway so you can see the different things here you know give you a little bit of a view there that's about eye level cool there you go i remember i remember skinning this with a compound curve with plywood and putting a lot of water on it and stuff and then using an iron on the inside to suck and suck the moisture out and it ended up i remember you and i having conversations about the fin here the same thing with the plywood here yeah having to do this reflex and all this work in here underneath he first flew with individual exhaust stacks like the original so it ended up with black stains down here oh really but oh just he got one of those co2 checkers yeah he said ceo yeah carbon monoxide see by the time he finished his run-up to fly it he looked down and it was already black oh my god he used to white literally in there on the stringers you just wiped gray soot on your fingers and he ended up with a lot of lead he went through chelation treatment to get the lead out literally i'll be darned that's why he went with the exhaust when he came down to testify the when he came down to fly the uh the z yeah we had one of those little co checkers on the instrument panel as well and he's sitting in the airplane kind of doing before this is like hours before he flew it just kind of checking things out and so he's sitting there and he touches it on the panel these don't work they just turn black you know and that was it that was his way of saying you know there's going to be a lot of fumes anyway it's interesting that these things are brothers yeah but you know really from two different designers this is bob hall and this is pete miller um you know the chief engineers at granville was different and bob hall went on to do everything at grumman up through the oh i'll be doing f-14 so all the and bob paul was he the one did the bulldog yes yeah yeah okay so he when he left granville's after 31 partially because of the big engine argument and everything else he went out on his own and marion guggenheim funded his business of the springfield aircraft company and they built the bulldog in the cicada and then while the granvilles were doing this with pete miller as a chief designer so then he went he took the bulldog to the races in 32 came in sixth place after the r1 the three widdell williams racers the r2 and then bob hall behind them so the bulldog never really performed to the level of these air this was a lot of work i remember building this getting this so it just rolls in there yeah oh my gosh this looks like a sponson floater a tip float on a seat plane when you take it off yeah i really think it should be on a boat you know when you know this this was actually the first airplane where i saw the rods the rods go all the way through it's one it's a quarter inch 4130 rod and then it's this just it goes through all of them yeah but this is the first airplane i saw it on uh-huh but the airplane we're working on right now for kermit oh the biggest has been hinges wow so actually took that from the locking board they borrowed it you know we're being a little kid at oshkosh yeah and standing here and helping helping delmar and show open the door and show people in because it was like a crowd all the time and you open the door and they'd like the cameras to come out and take pictures do you remember del mar used to keep it over at the a uh your hangar yeah right hang on weeks ago bring it bring in the week's hanger and bring it over and and he used to bring his whole family his kids and everybody would climb and go sit up there and he'd taxi it over it looked like one of those clown cars he'd stop and get out and and kids would be getting out his wife and everybody to get out of the airplane oh my god that's really cool up there while we were building that one being at either something fun or oshkosh with del mar and he crawled up and sat on the aerobatic tank facing backwards and i was sitting in the seat and we were talking about aileron linkage and things like that but we could we were all climbed up in there having a having a meeting about the design of the airplane yeah it's uh yeah i saw a little plug in there for the for the coffee maker yeah yeah yeah all right super it was a fun project yeah we built it in two years and it had about six thousand hours yeah building it yeah we were six thousand hours over four years on the other one but we did it spare time one of the reasons on the r2 we went with an r2 instead the r1 was more famous because doolittle number 11 instead of seven was used in the bendix was that this had a 985 pratt whitney and talking to some of the pratt whitney guys had a better dependability record than the 1340 even though it's a great engine so we decided two things it would be the dependability was important because you need an engine in this to fly it right i mean because that's not much of a glider and the other is is that that it's 200 pounds lighter and we could that would lower our wing loading by quite a bit on 74 square feet of wing area 200 pounds a lot of yeah yeah so what so i understand why it's lighter because the engines wouldn't have been any different 200 yeah 200 pounds you're kidding me so the 1340 like we've got on the vega right so it's yeah it's more water pounds heavier than that 1931 32 985 and 1340 were about 200 pounds difference i had no i could go from the the 13 the 1340 like the snap cap what's going on the vegas right to a modern 1340 world war ii like a t6 yeah firewall forward because of constant speed prop it's about 350 pound penalty yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's big numbers and that's why we're going back to the correct engine on the vegas yeah because they had a 600 horsepower t6 engine on there okay yeah yeah just the same way and then when we decided which engine builder to use for this one right he used you know in samson jimmy franklin this airplane everybody was using tulsa and so i was like yeah it's a no-brainer for us yeah yeah these guys thompson did a good job on the engine he did this one but originally this would have had a 1340. it was a well it's a last engine that flew on yeah when it in the in the bales so what did it have when it won the race 985 oh i did not know that yeah of course i had a fixed pitch prop on it it was serial number two 985 and and you know something of interest you might not realize but the laird super solution flew the 985 one year it was removed and pratt whitney went back through it because the engines were on loan it went into the r2 the same engine oh my gosh and then it went on a saverski s39 or something that went to africa oh no no well yeah so like the yeah yeah the same 985 flew the left oh no way this or this airplane this airplane it went from the lair to this to the r2 to this to the air one that they went painted like a giraffe or something it went into africa that airplane came back during world war ii and sunk in the gulf of mexico out here patrolling boats so that engine is it well my airplane over there is painted in the colors of the one that went to africa correct the spirit of africa right so so the original engine that was in that powered most of these areas it all belonged to pratt whitney they didn't belong to practice they loaned the engines out and so the races ended up in the bottom of the gulf awesome that was serial number two 985 yeah and part of the reason 985 was more reliable is that the bottom end is built almost as durable as the 1340. you know it came after the 1340s so then they they still had this really robust design that they basically downsized and so the reliability it's the same engine mount pattern pattern and everything you can use the same engine mount ring and t6 and a bt-13 have the same basic ring yeah unbelievable all right well let's go let you look at the p-47 yeah okay thank you i got my one yeah yeah so we got a couple of uh gb builders inspired by the russian i-16 gb so what do you think steve oh i love this it's amazing i didn't realize they were wood i thought they were metal airplanes no no no no no no yeah it's wood all the way down all the way down to here and this basically was a uh was a wreck they pulled five wrecks up out like uh north of uh moscow or something like that and they went back and they actually went to the original polycarp factory uh a guy down in new zealand tim wallace they had all these built up at the polycarp factory wow and what year is this well this is war ii i mean yeah this was very early world war ii they flew these like i think in the spanish civil war and then eventually uh you know early on in the war they had them but uh you know obviously they weren't a match for 109s and you know what came along later so this is the one that was at the ceo yeah yeah yeah it was in the corner the people let me tell you hockey level thing isn't it yeah it is and and uh people just don't have appreciation for value because i ended up buying it for probably just a little more than half of what they were what they were selling them for you know and i'm like god guys this is i mean i'd love to fly this thing i know delmar would love to fly it too del delmar's in the first line there is the gear cable retracted oh you actually it's all manual it's all manual yeah it's all manual wow yeah and this one and then this this trailing arm just follows along and slides into place that's pretty interesting amazing so when that goes over center somewhat doesn't it because that becomes the the struct to keep it this way yeah and then the cable pulls it up that is interesting amazing and it's the same basic engine as a an2a that's right that's what we're working on and it's basically it's a it's an an2 prop which is a four bladed deal so what they do is they blanked off two of the blades okay and i don't know i i i don't know if that's an2 blades or it's a different blade for the different hub it looks fairly short yeah yeah exactly i've got two of them over there on the other side [Music] all right cool we'll let you go back and uh work on the p47 get some dimensions if i just had another 20 30 minutes or something get some details yeah absolutely and then we'll go get some lunch let me get in the office and figure out what i'm doing okay ready yeah awesome sure got some measurements got some photographs good and like you said he has every drawing that is available oh yeah through air corps but having the real feel i don't know if i can show you that picture but that's how we're painting it that's jack he's the guy that's been helping me he's still doing good and that's him leaning on the flap gives you an idea how big that airplane is so we're doing frigid with the disney dwarf flipping off the germans and the silver wings because he went through the trees and the canopy was replaced so they didn't paint that the dorsal fin you can barely see it but it's silver they put they added that later because they said it got rudder lock he says without that dorsal fin on the bubble top if you yawed over at high speed at the wrong speed the rudder would stay and he says almost nobody was strong enough with their leg to straighten the rubber back out you had to pitch the airplane up and get it slowed down and then you can get the rudder back they put that vertical fin unreal nice all right fascinating okay cool well oh you want to do that no no no i'll drive and then we'll go there anyway so that's pretty cool kermit weeks fantasy flight over and out [Music] you

Channel: Kermit Weeks Channel - Over 360 Videos to See!

Views: 53,548

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Id: Hvsvag215Dc

Length: 41min 3sec (2463 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021