REPUBLIC P-47 THUNDERBOLT - Steve Wolf / Kevin Kimball - Kermie Cam Visit Part 1

yeah i just got a call kevin kimball and steve wolf are here and uh anyway i uh i can't remember if i met steve a long time ago but kevin built the uh the gbz i've got in the collection and uh steve wolf built the r2 that delmar benjamin flew for eight years in air shows so this ought to be pretty cool i got two gb builders coming in at the same time and uh steve wanted to come down and basically look at the p47 that we just pulled out of the container he says he's building a 60 scale one so that's interesting we'll see where this goes i can't remember if i met steve or not before what's happening gang what's going on the ever present gopro steve i think i met you at oshkosh or somewhere we met at oshkosh at a couple different times [Music] come on in i did a little bit of the hammering on delmar's tv well i know that's you know i i thought basically you built the whole thing didn't you yeah yeah yeah he hammered on the wheel that's right okay good guys yeah so so steve you've been here before yeah okay how long ago oh man we first moved here so it would have been in 2009 or 10. so okay so five years before we closed yeah so we were kind of morphing and you probably watched some of my videos and stuff and see where where we're trying to head which is trying to transcend the airplane deal and uh anyway so you know we did we did events for a while and uh you know in the end i just i had to draw a line in the sand and say look you know i can't try and morph because everybody's going to think i'm the same thing so when i come back i'm going to be totally different so so you've been through all the immersion environments and all that stuff so i understand you came here to look at a p-47 that you dug out of a container yeah yeah yeah and i think my uh some of my uh some of my followers on youtube don't appreciate my humor i said yeah i forgot i had this right yeah anyway whatever yes sir come on let's go check that out first then we'll go check out the you know jb's i forget what day of the week it is most of the time tell me man if i did if i didn't have a name tag on my uh thing i wouldn't know who the hell i was but i do remember all my airplanes right so like right now everything's just basically crammed in here we do have the little museum light over there which is where the jeebies are so we'll go over and see those after we look at the jug but uh so this is just basically cramming everything in and well you know kermit i'm a i'm a project person yeah and i'm retired from flight and i ran in aerobatic schools and taught aerobatics at leesburg for many years no i didn't know that yeah we stayed real busy like three hours a day or so you know doing checkouts and stuff but anyway i met a guy 94 year old back back when he was 94 he's 100 today oh my god he's doing well i mean doing really good still lives at home drive jack hallett who flew p-38s and p-47s in world war ii and we've become best of friends and when coveted broke out it looked like we're kind of locked down can't do anything and i didn't have a project i went i called jack one day and i said hey jack i said why don't we you need to live to be 102 or three and he goes why and he was 99 then and i said because i want to recreate frigid that's what he named the people and i said he goes what i said yeah i'm going to build a scaled-down version but i want to i want to make it very accurate put your paint job that you had all these and stuff it's a d model one of the few that were still olive draft i looked up it was built in july 24th 1944 was given to the 8th air force and then it went to the ninth which he was oh and good for you and it also has a disney dwarf on the cowl yeah i'll be darned and so what uh what what are you gonna power it with well i built my little biplane with the burner radial the nine cylinder 9s burner and i've been having good luck with it you know 100 hours on it now and so i'm trying to hit like 1300 empty weight or less so it works well but i want it to be very very accurate scale wise so when people look at it shape-wise yeah but i've you know i've been using are you going to shrink your head when you fly it no you don't want it but it's beautiful you probably see it is it's 30 inches wide in the canopy you know really and i'm 20. i built i built a scale canopy for it and it worked out oh my god well come on well let's go check it out and paul can uh i think he's down there working on it where uh he can give you a little bit of history this one came out of venezuela okay and uh you know it's uh it's a freaking awesome project some of the p-47s the guys have built recently are like oh my god if they saw this they do backflip so there's a couple of there's at least one corroded spar cap that's got to replace but we'll drill all the skins off at some point and you know do all that here you're building one up well we're not working on it now right now all we're doing is god the reason we we pulled them out of the containers is because some of them were starting to have some leaks and uh what we ended up doing was containers yeah they were and we had some of them so what we did they were all stacked on top of each other so what we did is we basically pulled them all down now we can get them out some of the floors were having some issues and so uh that's kind of where we're headed so recently you had issues with pallets over in the warehouses oh yeah yeah paul spent six months with termites over there kermit i'm building it sixty percent which at sixty it's scale with the engine because you just it's a big airplane it is big oh my god it's big thing is the burner does not have a scavenge pump so the oil tank has to be mounted lower than the lowest cylinder which is perfect with the cows there's no scavenger well this works beautiful because i i can you know i don't need this air i don't have the turbocharger yeah right right so this allows this area to to you know to put the oil tank back down there and and oil coolers and stuff back in these things and you know awesome i built stuff very scale when i yeah good for you that's freaking awesome well steve this is paul here paul steve wolf built the r2 the gb r2 so i got two gv builders here and he's building a 60 p47 so you can you know i got thinking about that i thought man there's such a project and stuff you know and uh yeah send me i know i got one picture but send me some more pictures too yeah include them in the video originally this thing showed up the venezuelans had painted over all this and uh but fortunately uh paul discovered they painted over it with lacquer over enamel so he just basically wiped it off with some lacquer center watch it clean it up see that i just finished up the canopy on it awesome and built the skirt and everything is all metal and stuff and then it's anyway so it really looks like a it does jeff at airplane plastics did a beautiful job on the bubble for me i even got the antenna that goes up and and that stuff but i have to keep it light so it's built a lot like an rv six or four right structurally and i got the spars being built but anyway and then of course there's that head-on view looks really really close you know and i had to build of course every bulkhead and everything make forms for it unbelievable well yeah help yourself uh the size of this thing oh my god i know yeah here's the gun sight see jack had he said he had this the small gun site not the the big one like i've got the i've got the the these installed i mean i've got it opened a little to show like yeah this has got the turbo in yeah and i've i built this and i've got the deflector shield going here that's all up in there and everything and john starr who's one of the best painters in aircraft and he does airbrush stuff we're going to paint it like a 50 or 100 hour measure with all the and then clear coated in somewhat of a satin not lost yeah world war ii oh yeah that's awesome oh i appreciate this yeah yeah yeah well the the wings are still in the container you know paul can show you those but basically uh i mean look at this stand they built it's got there had to be a step to get in the size like i mean i couldn't remember that they could actually pick it up with uh you know with a crane um it's got a roll around stand it came with a little tow bar that bolts onto the front so we we can't tell it across the grass but we can tow it down the road over and paul's just basically getting ready to put it over in the little museum light on display that's great and you know this is monocoque from here back and then the engine mount and everything so basically my firewall sitting here i've got a tubular structure because i have a single row radial it sits out right so i don't need this much depth in here but see these are all zoost on from here forward so i'm getting ready it's nice that i get here today because i'm getting ready to build all of this stuff including the cowl and the cowl flaps and so this i really appreciate it well help yourself or something it's a strong airplane you know the wing weighs 1800 pounds really in the in the assembly deal for the military they get 50 guys can put a wing on in the field 50 guys around these guys lifting 36 and then the guys pound in those tapered or uh all the wing pins are hollow with a tapered bolt through the middle so when you torque it spreads it out and stuff but yeah this is this is really a treat to get to see it up close and here was the interesting thing i've got my seam i'm not building in two halves but this is where i ran my seam so it looks right right one sheet all the way over down to here because this this is a top and bottom you can take the top off it's literally folded together you know that paul was explaining i didn't know that you know the whole they built the top half they built the bottom half and loaded everything come together put them together it was kind of like a mosquito but i think the mosquito went you know sideways like that yeah so let's take a picture or two oh yeah yeah everything that's kind of what we got so far but it's a great project like i said some of the things that guys have been rebuilding are you know yeah really really sad a lot of corrosion the uh a lot of the anchor nuts got messed up so paul's drilling all those out to put the canopy help yourself okay he's gonna put the seat in the canopy on that we're gonna roll it over another thing that got me entered when i got the i have the drawings to the i'm starting on the tail now yeah my spars are almost done but the leading edge radius is just a three-eighths look how sharp oh yeah yeah and the dorsal fins the same thing it's just a sharp edge is it uh i mean not looking at it because they got some offset for torque as i understand it no it looks straight on i think it's straight on and the antenna sits a few inches off to the right there's probably a socket for it yeah yeah there is it's sitting right up there you're uh you're the expert at this point i've been studying a lot you know yeah they're very helpful and here's what's interesting is the elevator hinge line and the rudder line up with each other so you know so i had to build a split push rod that splits and comes back and and runs the two elevators and then here's the rudder setup and this really helps me to see it in person since i'm starting on the help myself the uh the uh yeah they had the of course the normally the front spar sits there so they had to build these brackets because we're not going to put the tail on uh we've got just a kind of a narrow spot there we can put it over at the museum [Music] what do you think mr steve it's big it's big isn't it you can see why i can go 60 percent still fit in there because you see guys flying this their whole shoulders are up you know kermit you talk about the canopy my bubble that bubble canopy that i did it it ends up the same as this s1 s bubble about the size i'll be doing 20 inches instead of this is 30 between the rails fuselage is 52 and some inches wide on this yeah there is a second floor there's a basement yeah yeah women's lingerie and naked in jamaica rum is at the end of world war ii the p-47 was the fastest single-engine fighter with 479 miles an hour at 30 000 feet faster than a mustang yeah mustang 434 an interesting thing i is i don't know if you know go john shackleford but he has a sea fury with a 3350 right on it and he was recently in a warburg flybys down in texas and he said with a c fury with a 3350 says i could catch the p-47 only in the climb on downwind we were pretty even but as soon as we started diving in these are known it just left him yeah and he said that's because they weigh so much he said we were turning in what two thousand horsepower driven 14 or seven tons of airplane yeah oh my god he said two of the flyby said the p-40 i was indicating 485 miles an hour and the p-47 just left me and he said he must have been going at least 500. so he said i'd catch him in the climb and he said the third pass i cut on the inside of him got ahead of him a little and they were coming in for the flyby and he went chugging by me unbelievable going over 600 miles an hour yeah yeah and dives yeah jack said when he was flying combat you never worried about the structural or angle on the airplane or red line yeah and they go water injection and he said it would push you up you go 450 indicated coming in strafing he said if you went water injection full throttle gave you the other four or 500 horsepower and stuff he said he would uh he says he saw you know like 5 30 540 a couple of times on the air oh my gosh so so it must so the tail must come off back here and then it splits right so i went ahead and split you're right this tail cones build a separate section right in the top and bottom all this paul was just showing us how this splits right here and it's bolted in here yeah it's bolted together oh i'll be darned freaking 3 16 bulls of course there's a lot of hold up yeah so anyway i mean this thing is like a freaking primo this thing's a time capsule yeah this thing is freaking awesome anyway so uh when did you get this [Music] yeah um it's a d so it's got the bubble top you know low back and right back to the uh but it truly is just like a time capsule you look in there and it's just untouched and it hasn't been i do have that butchered or messed with or anything which is really out there i've got them slightly open yeah the uh i don't i think other than just you know taking everything out of the inside i mean obviously we split it um but then you can get in there and clean everything but there's really nothing other than maybe rolling out a few dents or something like that here and there like i said the skins are going to have to come off the wings and at least one spar cap is going to have to be replaced but what a great great project oh and you know you know jack flew the first one that flew his frigid his first mission he went through trees and literally tore up the heel ended with a he called it a log but it was actually a part of a branch went between the cylinders and it tore the cowl up he came out he thought he was dead he was buzzing the officer quarters it was just he said they we had 80 pilots they brought three p-47s for us when they took the p-38s away and the 367th got p-47s so they they he had his 50-minute check out and the next flight was a combat flight but when he first flew frigid what he named it he took off and he saw two guys walking across the bridge between the river and the runway so he says i'm going to put those guys in the river so he came back around with the p-47 and he dove down on him and he said he said they just dropped they didn't he's i was watching them and they just dropped they didn't jump on the water yeah they dropped down on their bellies i came across there looked up and there's just row of trees and he actually has pictures he actually has a picture of it going into the trees and and when afterwards it was a cutout and he came out he thought he was dead he said i came out the other side he said the p-38 would have went over the trees the wing loading he said the p-47 all it did was change the angle of attack and he said the altitude didn't change you know so he plowed through the trees he came out the other side he said the whole front shaking he looks out the leading edges are beat up flat the gun barrels are all bent and it kept flying i'll be darn our tax dollars at work yeah yeah and it's in the and i've read it doesn't name jack hallett but it says while a pilot was buzzing the officer quarters struck trees and had to have the wings replaced and they put those wings so when you see this airplane the way we're doing it's olive drab fuselage but it'll have silver wings because the wings were changed out i had to get a new cowl oh my god so you got a story behind it so i actually yeah he's still alive i mean i just was talking to him last night he's helping me work on it almost all the holes [Music] but he just had back surgery but he's doing good yeah at some point and you know how you know what he you know what he did to screw his but he's a hundred and half hundred and a half you know how he damaged his back three weeks ago he was out doing snap rolls and a stearman oh my god and he hadn't flown a stairman since training in world war it's been 79 years since he flew a stearman but he was up yarding the thing around and then they found it his legs started hurting a few days later he goes to the hospital and he's got a ruptured disc oh my god he looks good he's a little guy but you look at him you know he's not 100 years old there's no way yeah so forgive me for asking and i'm having his obscene visuals but how did he come up with the name frigid boy you know he's made me swear to secrecy [Laughter] but okay the camera's got to go off now but it has something to do i think with a song that has those words in it and stuff that sounds like an easy excuse an easy yeah yeah he said he says i wish i would have never told you guys that because and here he is this is like three weeks ago i was out flying my sea ray pulled up alongside and there's jack a hundred years old flying backseat did the flight took off fluid good was that doing aerobatics awesome and he's the happiest at the hospital they said you're the best patient the guy you they've met him he's just always in a good mood and uh you know they're there he is standing with the steerman but he's 100 years old look at that face he looks awesome yeah and he did 104 missions wow he was over normandy on d-day on his 11th mission in a p-38 and then he went through the battle of bulge in the 38 and then in early 45 they ended up with the frigid or the p-47 which came from the eighth air force and until he hit the trees and stuff and he went through trees with another p-47 too but he got shot down from ground fire he did a lot of mostly fighter bomber this is really the picture i want to show you because this was taken a couple months ago when he's a hundred there's jack but there's jack leaning on the flap oh that's two seven there's frigid and if you see what the dwarf is doing yeah yeah yeah one of the swelling dwarfs yeah so that was there's jack 76 years ago and there he is isn't it yeah of course he's a small guy [Music] he went make sure we get the scene in there we'll find a way to get them up and cause by then it'll be over at the museum oh that'd be great yeah you know he we put him in the stearman with a bows and we got a boson chair and you just hook it up use the engine picker and just stuck him right in the steering and you know oh my god i had a guy here one time that actually was a mechanic on the original candy clipper duck on uh luzon or what what was the island where they had the the tan death mark but dan oh yeah hello yeah the bataan death march he came down here he was in a wheelchair and we i got a forklift put him on a pallet we picked him up on the wheelchair got him in the duck and i took him for a flight oh my god what a great story oh man i got to get i got to get phil to get that out because that was an awesome deal and i also got a chance to fly a guy who actually did i think like four out of the five candy clipper flights they were flying over the japanese fleet to luzon to get stuff and what happened was they would bring supplies back medicine they had uh you know some uh uh extra space on top and they had nurses there that were working you know on on the uh the medical aspect and so they throw a bunch of candy on top you know just to throw it on there that's a guy named candy clipper wow and it was all at night too all at night yeah because the japanese fleet was out in the you would really enjoy meeting him because he is a not only a nice guy even humble but his knowledge on stuff we sat him in the p-38 when they had it over a new smyrna and that's his favorite airplane he loved the p-38 but he sat in the p-38 and jack literally closed his eyes and he goes here's where the turbocharger this and that he reached and he touched everything in there with his eyes closed he hadn't been in one since world war ii and the guy says you think you could fly it he says pull the chalks you know he was ready he was currently up until the last the last couple years he's been flying an l-39 front seat doing the whole flight take off landing aerobatics and everything so we just he's like an incentive guy you know he's definitely a carrot out front you know just to try to keep up with it good well help yourself taking a bunch of pictures or something then we'll go over and check out the jeebies look at the wings yeah let's go let's go look at those really quick yeah i'm getting ready to do this i'm starting on the vertical fin and the tail [Music] a couple of tempest a two and a five wow yeah it does actually knight was telling me last night that the they had one version of a p-47 that republic built before right at the end of the war and it was super light it took a lot of stuff out of it but they hadn't had the turbo charge but at 10 000 part of the information you see where the lacquer is over the enamel but this is uh i think the spark happens spar caps gone i don't know if was it it was laying on that probably on the ground no no no no the airplane the airplane was probably on display at some point oh my god yeah some moisture just you know yeah but anyway you know if we have to replace both of them or whatever we'll just pull everything coming off yeah that's just oh yeah it's got yeah they had compressibility problems on p47s and the later ones when it got to the 30 block they put dive recovery flaps on it huh yeah like p38 yeah oh that helped me hit some of these things i got into the dive then got what i couldn't i think you got to build all this good stuff yeah yeah anytime you need to come down you want to fly down just you know make it easy just pop it okay yeah i've got several airplanes that get in here we thought about it today but the way the weather is you know yeah we'd get stuck here or something so not today to get stuff changed oh man that's a big drop right there yeah i think we continue the wings out we're going to take the forklift and pull this up and shore it up yeah because problem we have we pulled the fuselage out they wanted to slide to the side oh yeah we don't want that it's an electrical wing but it's an even taper but the rear spider which is right about in this area where is it about but they they put so much wash out that when you look across the top it's almost flat okay i've got good drawings on all of that you know just the feeling of being around it you know if you look inside airplane 47 people don't realize that the gear is so big and long that when it retracts it shortens yeah it goes into the way it has that rod here not quite as complex as the bearcat double knuckle thing no and it's amazing that whole section of the top of the wing just opens yeah when we get the wings out too you want to look at both sides we can pop those panels you know if you want i'd like to come down sometime too and when i can bring jack yeah when it's all out and sure yeah really right now i'm starting on the tail so oh we got all the tail feathers over here i appreciate this more than you know yeah no no no yeah i got to fly a spitfire over in england and that was that was really nice oh cool uh a single seat or a dual two-seater oh yeah was it uh i had the low canopy it was graces yeah yeah yeah yeah and you know how i got to do it is i met him and he goes i met him at a pub and during the big hill air show we fell you know we were talking and i said so what do you fly and he said i fly a spitfire and i go god that's such a beautiful airplane he says what would you like to fly because he when he found out i was steve wolf he said you the steve wolf built the jb and i said yeah he says i got a poster that airplane and with your signature and then but he'd had a few pints you know and he says well you want to fly you're kidding and then i was flying collins b17 for a little bit there before they crashed it you know oh my god it's really sad oh there's there's aileron yeah yeah uh flaps oh where the stabilizer is oh that's what the canopy yeah the front they've got armor plate yeah canopy well i got that pretty damn close hey paul where's the stabilizer oh yeah okay man that is a big wide canopy there's that there's how they did it from the outside right now i'm just moving mine but see it's like 30 inches across between the rails paul was telling me originally it was electric it is electric yeah they got a toggle switch unbelievable that's perfect i hope they have an emergency release i thought my batteries did i'm i'm not getting out of this thing yeah though stabilizers the flaps are the ailerons the airfoil is it's almost it's it's a unique thing because the spars are fairly straight you look across the wing but yet it's an elliptical wing it's almost like they just took the curve and extend you know they built it like this and down and put to me that fat airfoil airfoil you use just doesn't look like it should be as fast as the airplane is yeah what's that thing empty i mean a real big one a real one it was around 12. yeah i think it's like 11 9 or something oh my god the mustangs like seven and a half thousand pounds when i wasn't flying and watched the 247s take off and he said it never looked like they were going to get off the ground you know they just staggering out off the end well you know somebody once said because the republic was noted for making like really heavy evidence they said build a runway that went around the world and republic will build an airplane but let's use all of it i just wanted to show you dave let's go show the tail feather because he's uh about to build one oh yeah the horizontal yeah it's one piece really one piece that yeah it's one piece it's not too yeah i can't believe i started pick up that armor plate you could that's safe i told jack up to get it in the airplane you know since he never flew the airplane over 8000 feet because he was doing all low-level bomb supporting the troops he uh you know i said man they could have taken all that turbocharger all that system and build a lightweight version as a fighter bomber because it was really designed to go at high altitude but once the mustang came along they quit using the p-47s as much at high altitude but it was a better fighter bomber yeah says we wanted to get a p-51 and he he flew p-39 p40 p-38 p-47 flew everything out fighter's army air corps had except a p-51 we got him in the collins one two years ago and he was 98 when he landed i said he said jack what do you think of the p-51 and he goes he says too damn heavy on ailerons he said it took both hands to roll it he said the p-47 i could roll that with one hand and he said there was no problem and i said could you get in and out of the p-47 back then during the war without help they said of course i could hop right in and hop out i said took two guys to get you now the mustang i said you don't think you lost some strength but you know he said well maybe i did so then eric white that was flying to b24 eric comes to me later and says you know that friend of yours jack you know what he said we tried getting him out of the mustang we were trying to undo the belts he is the two seat two loose nuts one and he says he says for god's sake get me out of here i'm a mustang pilot now he says i might get lucky and get laid [Laughter] tonight this is currently our little [Music] welding shop dave [Music] does it look like it's in pretty decent shape it's got yeah you have to take it all apart you know it's got light corrosion all through it you know they didn't priming was kind of just like a somewhat afterthought right some light primer inside a lot of this all the skins were bare it wasn't meant to be here you know they didn't play they didn't build it for two years yeah and it's sharp isn't it it says on the dr i thought it was an eighth inch radius but it says i looked at it again it's a 3 8 diameter so 3 16 radians yeah 3 16 radius this is my next project too so it's pretty fit i got pictures of those did i send you the nose rib one it's just the drawings i got all the drawings well you know steve i'm saying if you wanted to borrow it and drill it apart you know to get some dimensions to bring it back all restored you know i think we could we could i think i could trust in building uh building it up [Music] they did a really nice job taking it apart i've been texting nate young and i told him i said whoever you had taken apart did a really nice job he says yeah they were really careful when they took it apart oh good for them they didn't use the sawzall yeah there's no butcher work at all yeah you see some surface corrosion right here right how the hell paul pointed out there's no there's no blind rivets in this thing no how did they do this close this thing out and there i don't i didn't understand because there's no strip there there there i think they i think they shot this as a sub assembly they went in and they shot all this and they came back here with this video right in here and then they kind of brew this far out and then they reached in and bucked it all over and the thing that gets me is you can see how they flush yeah this and on the elevator look they did they joggled they had those reinforcements yeah yeah leading edges and then it's all jogged in and stuff yeah that's great you know i've got it i want to finish this in my lifetime so i've got to be careful as a single builder to try to get it done in the next few years but i tell you when you see it it's gonna it's gonna look pretty good i think as far as authentic not most of the scaled-down ones they got the mustangs that canopy's too big and yeah they get out like the titan and everything's out of all portions and stuff and i'm trying to keep everything you need all this with the rear spar out yeah finish it yeah well you know look at my plan and use a tungsten bucking bar that makes it oh yeah those things are great they are well you know what you need to do though is down there where the turbo charger would normally be you need to put in like a giant uh like a mega speaker so it sounds like a p47 when it goes live well i figure if the burner doesn't fly i'll put a 540 like home in it about 300 horsepower that will get in the air and like you said have a have a good sound system you know holes in your spark plug yeah they reach in like a stabilizer so you can actually reach as much [Music] these factories while they were shooting all this i mean they must have had a room with just hundreds of people shooting rivers just constantly when you think of b24 has over a million rivets or a b17 and they're building one every 55 minutes or something like you said the racket in there when i look at the whole production during world war ii it's too overwhelming it's it's like how could they how did i read a deal in aircraft production that there was a point where north americans could build 50 t-60s a day i mean that's it's just a really cool one plug-in grumman hellcat production and there's a grumman film color okay 40 minutes on the design and the production of the airplane it's fascinating absolutely fascinating well this isn't going to be too bad i can english wheel that out and roll the edge over and weld the leading edge seam there and then and then everything else can be done i don't know about doing this that'd be a lot extra work that's a separate piece right there yeah right there we've got um we've got to roll dies yeah i do too i could do it this way you're gonna have to do it because now because we talked about it now yeah oh god i know this is yeah he works good i mean he he runs with his very he he comes and works and we feed him breakfast or lunch the only thing is is when he became went from deburring to dimpling the skins he wanted a raise so i said okay you get two cookies for dessert instead of one you know then i made him go back and do something he said i'll check with the union i don't know if they're gonna let me do this now i've got a different he's funnier than for a while i'll be darling well you know i'm down sometime yeah yeah yeah yeah you'd like everybody likes me they said he's the best patient he's in waterman hospital right now doing rehab from his back surgery but he said it doesn't hurt well i'm thinking if he's five six that might be sixty percent of like a normal p-47 department i sit in it it's so it's like sitting in a the bubble feels like you're like sitting in a gbz yeah that's pretty tight that's pretty tight i can't even get a gopro on in there this actually has pretty good room it's surprising in there it was such a big airplane i gotta go i left my stuff uh i wanted to get some measurements if possible yeah yeah and i wanted to look in the fuselage yeah yeah yeah even though i got the fuselage all finished riveted come over here real quick i just want to show you something pretty cool i don't think kevin's even seen this now that's a spinner that's off the tempest two but that's not what we're coming to see that was rebuilt by uh richard grace over there yeah richard grace is the guy to probably take cover yeah he just did this he just did this he's doing the tempest too and he's been over uh once or twice and he came over to get some uh measurements and so so we sent a couple of parts over there super nice for him oh yeah yeah yeah i knew his dad knew his mother knows his mother those are the canopies check this out wow big wow yeah big wow that was wow it was it was over kind of where the other shop a few years ago oh see you have seen that we got some lights coming up try it on it is an amazing piece yeah as soon as i've got the finances this one's going on a front burner with a lot of people just been focused on trying to get fantasy a flight going and you know all this crazy stuff that's going on right now but this thing and it's a long bizarre story but howard helped me get the airplane i swear well literally literally i saw this airplane in 1984 uh when her i think was 84 when we had the sunderland we just brought the sunderland over 93 but anyway one of the two years i had it at oshkosh this airplane showed up and basically i uh you know i made a mental note you know i they looked at the sunderland i think at some point i they showed me through this i made a melon man one day i'd love to end up with this there's only three of these in the world this is the only civilian one the other two are jrs's and this is the only one leave it the howard that's flush riveted okay and he and he bought it to basically set around the world record that he ultimately did in the lockheed 14. so this originally just all had fuel tanks in and stuff but basically i saw this thing completely forgot about it 12 years later i'm at the monroe institute doing exploration of consciousness and all this stuff never done any drugs in my life i had the most amazing experiences i've got a 1500 page book of my travels and other realities and where i was taking what i was showing blah blah anyway in my third program one of the exercises we were supposed to do we've been brief was to go meet deceased people well the first guy freaking pops up is walt disney okay so i talked with walt for a while thank him for giving me an industry to stand on his shoulders and then he leaves you know and i'm like who that's cool who's next freaking howard walks up i had not thought about this airplane in 12 freaking years and right when we was leaving he taps him on the shoulder he says kermit i know you're interested in my sikorskis 43 i'm going to help you get it four years later it was mine yeah wow so that's how he helped you yeah oh my god my world is off the chart bizarre and uh anyway but that's a little glitch yeah yeah brand new set of wings that's the vertical fin back there no those are b17 all this is all b17 stuff okay yeah 826b he had the wings under under construction and no no no yeah well what happened was well the the the the crash in lake mead the u.s army air corps actually owned the airplane because they were taking all the airplanes for the war yeah and then he was doing the the spruce goose testing and he wanted to do some testing and unbeknownst to him the government had taken all this radio weight out of the back end well he takes off out of vegas everything's fine blah blah blah goes to land it all of a sudden it goes down there it's freaking nose heavy as crap it water loops the wing goes down like what happens in a pvy killed two people right away howard wasn't gonna make it and the one guy that was still reasonably coherent got howard out of the hatch up in the front and so the air force the army air corps didn't want it so they he got the bill of sale back and basically started rebuilding the airplane and uh he ordered a brand new wing but the war effort kept going and going and going and finally said screw it so they rebuilt the wing and then eventually they delivered the wing so i got a brand new wing wow a spare wing for it too so but it's it's a anyway nice but anyways and when did it last a month i remember when you guys went out yeah howard was the last guy to fly it and put it in the water probably in 1952 is what my understanding is anyway all sorts of cool stuff wow now that is a spinner yeah oh man i didn't get to see this yet jack said yeah oh what see what no no i was gonna think where's your little russian guy oh the the polly polly's over i think it's in the next hangar scale of this yeah steve walsh steve wolf hey i've always wanted to meet you how are you well nice to meet you too eric yeah yeah the kim eric ken does a lot of the early stuff we're rebuilding the waldo pepper j-1 back there there's a lot of fabric woodwork and stuff so they only built i think two with the radials the all the other ones had inline engines yeah yeah so uh you know this airplane has uh like did some kind of a record flight yeah it did across the mediterranean or something i don't know what it did but it was it had been stored in a castle forever and all of a sudden uh i got a call from my friend over in england that had done a bunch of work on some of my brit airplanes and said hey this thing's for sale blah blah blah and it basically showed me some pictures i bought at sight unseen and the first time i ever saw the airplane was when it showed up at a container and because we were kind of out of space everywhere is the reason why we you know had a lot of the containers out there and it was just time to kind of get them out and you know we've been airing them out and and things like that but you know this is a wood airplane but this thing this was one of the high ones and there's nothing uh absolutely didn't get any problems no two pieces no no no this is a center section this is wood okay this is actually metal but it has a wood covering over it looks like it but it's just a it's just a cover and it basically i think i don't know if it's part of the fuselage or it bolts to the the frame okay interesting canopy shape yeah but i mean just i mean oh my god what a classic period type deal and you know and people have pointed out there's not a lot of original vintage uh you know italian airplanes flying so pretty cool one day fantasy flight's all about potential there's potential right there pretty cool [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 [Music] you

Channel: Kermit Weeks

Views: 77,653

Rating: 4.9459667 out of 5

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Id: HdUJ5wmDifs

Length: 47min 44sec (2864 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021