Crazy Eight

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning

Today was a beautiful sunny and warm day here in rainy Portland, so I continued to clean the Mexican hull. Lots and lots of sand, cigarette wrappers, bottle caps, rocks, found a bullet hole hummm. The corrosion doesn't look too bad, we'll see what it looks like after the skin comes off. I think the most daunting problem is removing all the rusted fasteners, I've tried using Kroil and it doesn't seem to cut. Also, it seems like all the hydraulic cylinders are still inside so that will save money.

I put in a picture showing someone signed the airplane in Mexico in '84, number 954.

Checking out the project

My family stopped in to look at the project, they are very encouraging, and mom likes her airplane!

Turkey time

I found a copy of the T28A manual, 550 pages, many revisions, but I got through most of it in a few days. I was reading at every spare moment, in between getting ready for Thanksgiving. I could tell mom was getting tired of me walking around the kitchen with the giant blue book. It was great to finally understand how all the pieces work together on something I have admired for 40 years! I now know how to get the canopy frames off and the propeller, I really want to get a fuselage in the garage before the snow comes and I want to get the engine in somewhere warm and dry.

I also brought in the wet boxes of spare parts, they were a little stinky but the parts were getting wet and I didn't want them to corrode, it was nice to see all the parts individually bagged and tagged with a part number and name. I will follow that method, putting the parts bags in boxes, each box labeled per page of the parts list manual. Some of the boxes are full of parts that look like junk, you can see little nuts and bolts that were custom, hand made at the North American factory. I will remove the good pieces and recycle the rest.

Alex and John testing out the seats!

Alex and John testing out the seat for the first time. Sitting in an early A model T-28, 1949?  it has the high canopy and looks lighter than the other fuselage, lots of good parts though being stored on the desert, including an entire "firewall foreward" engine.

The next pictures, we are deciding which fuselage to restore and which one to use for parts.   The one we are looking at is a later A model T-28,  1953?   You can see the left front wing mount was ripped out when the fuselage was pulled from the wing, probably in a scrap yard in Mexico.  That wing mount was on an important extrusion that runs the long length of the fuselage, called a longeron, lots of work.  You can see the faded triangle of the Mexican Air Force.

We have decided to restore the later A, using parts from the early fuselage, I think the owner will be happy with our decision.

They're here!

The two fuselage pieces arrived on Monday, all the way from Death Valley.