Here we are, you have found us on the internets! This is the story of this wing you are standing in front of:
SAFETY FIRST, please do not get under the wing, you can peer under and touch it, but please mind your common sense and don't go under.
This is a Navy North American T-28B Model wing Center Section, its made of a right and left of different years, the one on the right is newer than the left one. They are both NEW and were made in Columbus, Ohio around 1952. I bought them at an estate in Sacramento, CA, the woman's husband wanted to start a business of restoring T-28's and as we can guess, they are not the best businesses. The T-28 has never enjoyed the valuations of the true Warbirds, such as the Wildcat or P-51, it keeps up with the T-6, all of them take the same amount of work, I wish I had started with a Wildcat, this is much less costly to get started in. On this wing, if you look at the center area where it joins, we had to fabricate and source almost all the parts, it seems when these airplanes were surplus'd, the Navy was the last customer in 1984, when the wings were separated, all the hardware was tossed. New parts and pieces are easy to find, but the "piles" are drying up. The landing gears were both as is from the Navy rebuilding Depot from around 1978. On the leading edges you will see two patches from shipping damage, forklift forks went through. The left side has stringer patches inside made from P-51 stringer. I will install the wheels and brakes and store it in a hanger and bring the fuselage down from my garage in Portland to finish over the winter.
This is the Fuselage, it started it's life out as a later 51- A model(no roll bar, low canopy) in the USAF, went to surplus in Arizona, the French government bought it in 1960, it went to todays Airbus factory SUD in southern France and was modified to use surplus engines from the B-17 R1820 at 1200hp. It was called the Fennec and was part of the first COIN or counter insurgent effort in Algeria. After that failed it was sold with what was what was left of them to Argentina where it served until 1984. It was imported back into the US. When I bought the fuselage, it had been mostly restored, I am returning it back to the A model it was with the original smaller engine, the 800hp R1300.
This is our best of three engines, found at the Connecticut Aviation Museum in Hartford, it was surplused and we were lucky enough to get it. We found that it was NEW. This variant was the R1300-4A a designation for the Navy Blimps used for coastal NORAD in the 1950's. It's at Anderson Aeromotive in Grangeville, Idaho where I am able to tear it down, inspect and replace pieces, all the aluminum pistons were corroded as were the cylinder liners, many of the parts for this engine are still easily found new. I am enjoying rebuilding it part time, many thanks goes out to Ray and his crew for allowing me to work there.
I expect to have it all together by September next year, more than likely it will be September of 2020. Thanks for reading, enjoy the show!
John
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