If there is already a thread about this, forgive me. I searched, but didn’t see one.
Over the past 2 months, I’ve been privileged to do some volunteer work on “Liberty Belle.” She spent some time at Double Eagle II airport, in Albuquerque, NM. Mostly, I just did grunt work, and was glad to be part of the project. She has a newly-rebuilt #2 engine, and now sports 2 Wrights and 2 Studebakers. The coolest thing I did was to pull the navigator’s and radio operator’s desks out and refinish them. I stripped off what was left of the old varnish, steamed out what dings and dents I could, filled some of the deeper gouges and cracks, sanded 'em off good, and varnished them with plain, old, oil-based spar varnish. They came out looking pretty good. I also did some restoration on the little gooseneck lamp on the navigator’s desk. If you have a chance to see the Belle this season, be sure to check on my work!
Next year, I’m hoping to be able to refinish the bombardier’s deck, which is pretty weathered, being up there under the sun so much. Don’t know if it will ever happen, but it would be cool! It was incredible to get to know things about a Fort you can only learn by busting knuckles, and I’m here to tell you, the Belle has enough of my DNA to convict me of being a B-17 geek!
In the process, I took about 200 digital pictures of the “walk-around”, pointless, anal-retentive, detail kind of stuff like structural details, rivet patterns, wheel well details, and even a few of the inside of the wing, taken from an access panel near #2. The pictures are 8MP, so emailing them is out of the question, but I’d be willing to make them available if y’all think there’d be any value to it. Is there a site or organization that would be interested in having these pictures?
Does anyone make decals for currently-flying aircraft? I’d sure like to build a model of “my” Fort, but would feel real bad about having cruddy-looking nose art.
