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- #141
dirkpitt289
Master Sergeant
Well the time has come to blow the dust off of Old 999. I started with filling and sanding the seams.
After multiple sessions of filling, sanding and repeat (about a weeks worth) I feel I'm ready to move forward.
Thanks for looking
If you've been following the history along with the build you may recall the part of the story concerning George Kendrick. George was the ships only waist gunner. He had replaced the original single side mounted 30. cals with twin 50. cals in each window. He also had spare machine guns mounded to the fuselage and along the catwalks just in case any of them jammed. If a gun would jam he would toss it over board and replace it with one of the spares he brought along. According to Jay Zeamer George was the screwball of the crew. He even had a machine gun mounted behind the ball turret through the floor of the aircraft which brings me to the next part of the build.
To the best of my knowledge no photos exist of Old 666 so the only thing I have to go by in the way things were setup are the eyewitness accounts of the crew. Now except for the passage I posted back in posted earlier from jay Zeamer I can only speculate how George set this gun through the floor. That along with some creative embellishments on my part will all I have to go by. So here we go. In order to have a gun usable through the floor one has to speculate he had also had some kind of window to see through.
Here I marked the area out using a spare waist gunners window. I thought about using a bubble window like on the top of the nose of the F model but decided not to.
Here is the window in place.I drilled and dry fitted the machine gun barrel but won't mount it till sometime after the beast has been painted
Next I moved onto the wings. I have a lot of seem work to do in this area. I also need to remove the carburetor intakes
After multiple sessions of filling, sanding and repeat (about a weeks worth) I feel I'm ready to move forward.
Thanks for looking
If you've been following the history along with the build you may recall the part of the story concerning George Kendrick. George was the ships only waist gunner. He had replaced the original single side mounted 30. cals with twin 50. cals in each window. He also had spare machine guns mounded to the fuselage and along the catwalks just in case any of them jammed. If a gun would jam he would toss it over board and replace it with one of the spares he brought along. According to Jay Zeamer George was the screwball of the crew. He even had a machine gun mounted behind the ball turret through the floor of the aircraft which brings me to the next part of the build.
To the best of my knowledge no photos exist of Old 666 so the only thing I have to go by in the way things were setup are the eyewitness accounts of the crew. Now except for the passage I posted back in posted earlier from jay Zeamer I can only speculate how George set this gun through the floor. That along with some creative embellishments on my part will all I have to go by. So here we go. In order to have a gun usable through the floor one has to speculate he had also had some kind of window to see through.
Here I marked the area out using a spare waist gunners window. I thought about using a bubble window like on the top of the nose of the F model but decided not to.
Here is the window in place.I drilled and dry fitted the machine gun barrel but won't mount it till sometime after the beast has been painted
Next I moved onto the wings. I have a lot of seem work to do in this area. I also need to remove the carburetor intakes