Calgary's Hurricane on the Move

Sweet stuff Andy!

Good stuff Andy!

Crimea_River said:

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Nicely packed. Great job so far

Thanks. Planning a trip to the shop in June and will hopefully be able to post plenty of update pics. The engine, above, hasn't been worked on since we moved it to the shop in Nanton. The volunteers are too busy keeping the 4 Merlins on the Lanc primed for the upcoming exhibition season.

I need to volunteer with my local aeronautical museum I think

Hell yeah. If you have one nearby, go for it. Many members here are not in a position to do so but would love to do it if they could.

My nearest one have a vampire rotting away outside. They struggle a lot with donations. I was thinking about getting the hurricane finished and then leaving it there as an exhibit to draw people in.

Watch this spot. Heading up to the restoration shop on Saturday to see how the Hurricane is coming along and hope to get some good pics of the progress. Since rolling the engine into the shop, we haven't touched it as the Nanton gang have been busy getting the Lanc tuned up for the summer runs.

As stated above, I visited the restoration facility for our Hurricane and came away with a bunch of pics that I'll share with you here. Not sure I'll get them all into one post but let's see.

The Hurricane is being restored in a plain Quonset hut just to the north of the Reynolds-Alberta Museum in Wetaskiwin, just south of Edmonton, Alberta. The museum is a treasure in itself and worthy of a separate thread which I may start someday.



Inside the hut is a well-equipped workshop to service aircraft restoration activities. Not only is our Hurricane in there, but there's also a Stearman crop duster undergoing a restoration, as well as a P-39 Airacobra. The latter is a long term project and is not really being worked on at the moment.



On entering the facility, the partly disassembled landing gear can be seen on a table. The diagnosis is good in that the oleos are in good shape.



The sheet metal bits from the original aircraft that can be seen on the table are pieces that had to be replaced as there had been some apparent attempts at repairing these before in a manner that was not quite up to snuff. On one piece (below), the team had to reassemble the original part in the correct geometry to use as a template for cutting a new section:



The replacement section of skin can be seen here attached to the port wing and being readied for riveting:



Further inboard on the port wing, we can see that there has been a lot of work done on the main gun bay as well, with the lower skin replaced and the interior ribbing cleaned and painted with aluminum dope.



Moving around to the main attachment points, you can see some nice restoration work done here as well. One of the attachment lugs had been previously bent and, being high tensile strength aluminum, it took some doing for the team to straighten it out. They were successful however and re-heat treated the lug once it was back to the correct shape.



I'll take a short break now and post some more pics later.

Excellent to see the progress on this one. Thank you sir.

Jeff

You're welcome Jeff. Here's some more:

The MkXII's that equipped 133 and 135 RCAF squadrons on Canada's west coast actually sported 12 .303 machine guns. The two extra guns per wing were paired and mounted at a distance outboard of the usual 4. In first photo of the underside of the port wing above, you can see the spent cartridge chutes of the two outer guns. Below is the upper surface of the same wing showing the open access panels for the guns and ammunition feeds.



This table displays the main gun access panels for the port wing and other various bits.



Taking a closer look, there are pieces here that are original parts but whose brothers in the starboard wing have gone AWOL. The panels at the top are the two for accessing the outer ammunition feed boxes described above. The unit below that is the aileron actuator which would be difficult to replicate. It's possible that the missing pieces are mixed in with some of our Mosquito stuff and we'll need to keep an eye out for them. If we don't find them, they'll either have to be fabricated or traded from an organization that has them.



Here's the starboard wing that has had its work mostly completed.



Next we have the two ailerons which have been cleaned up and now need to get their fabric added.



EDIT: oops, hit submit post too soon. Will continue in a few minutes.....

Thanks for the updates Andy.

Geo

Awesome!

More bits and pieces. The green finished parts are the leading edge fairings that from the machine gun openings, 6 openings total. Also visible are the flaps that attach to the outer wings (there are also separate flaps on the inner wing section nearer the fuselage). The tubular units are the gun mounts and you can see the knurled adjustment screws for boresighting.



One thing I learned was that the port navigation light lens on the Hurricane was actually blue, not green. Apparently this was true for a number of British types before the switch was made to green. The lens is being fabricated by heat forming the material over a wooden die.



Finally, some miscellaneous parts that still await work starting with the canopy frame:



Radiator:



Miscellaneous parts rack



Oxygen tank and others, possibly air tanks:



Fuel tanks, fairings, and the radiator shroud.



I did not take any picture of the fuselage nor the inner wing section as there really has been no work done on these.

In answer to Terry's question from earlier, I did confirm that the aircraft will be restored back to its original markings as sported by 133 Squadron RCAF. The upper surfaces will be the typical dark green and ocean grey and the single letter 'M' will be painted behind the fuselage roundel, the squadron codes not having been carried. The undersides, I would have thought, would have been medium sea grey. However, there is a fully restored Hurricane MkXII in the Reynolds museum that depicts an aircraft from 135 Squadron, the sister squadron of the one we are representing. I post pics of this aircraft below and it shows what appears to be azure blue on the undersides. My first though on seeing this display was that the colours are wrong but then I must admit that I know very little about these two squadrons and the colours they carried in this relatively unknown theatre (see the excellent Vintage Wings of Canada link in Geo's post above for an interesting series of photos of 135 Squadron during its service).

Another feature of many Canadian-built Hurricanes was their use of a large Hamilton Standard prop whose hub did not fit inside the standard Hurricane spinner. Consequently, the spinner was left off these aircraft with no apparent adverse effect on their flying charateristics.



Well that's it for my update guys and I hope that you find these pics to be interesting. BTW, an appeal has gone out for anyone who happens to have a .303 machine gun or two who'd be willing to give it up for installation into this aircraft. If you have one and don't want it, drop it in the mail to me would you?

Excellent shots Andy! Thanks for the update.

Agree with Hugh...thanks Andy.

Mention was made in another thread about the Merlin 29 that was fitted in this Hurricane. I volunteered to get my hands dirty and help dismantle and rebuild this engine. When I joined the team doing this, the engine had already been partly taken apart, with the cylinder banks, heads, and carburetor removed. First, a clarification: it turns out that the engine shown in post #19 was not the right engine so we had to take it back to Calgary and swap it out for the one that actually came with our aircraft. Probably a good thing because the actual one had apparently not been run very long. OK, here are some pics of the dismantling process.

This is the engine mounted on the stand with both banks taken off. you can see that the long studs are still in. If you look at the one to the extreme left with the adjustable wrench on it, you might notice that it's been snapped off during attempts to remove the assemblies.



Here's the reason it snapped - plenty of corrosion. The threaded part that's intact was embedded in the engine block and we spent a solid 5 hours setting up a drill press and pulling it out with an extractor. Fortunately it came out without damage to the block.



The carburetor:



A view through the cylinder bores into the crank case. Note how clean the connecting rods are, evidence of the low hours on this engine. The guys who rebuilt the Lanc engines were amazed and said that the ones that came out of the Lanc were discoloured as though someone took a blow torch to them.



Pictures of the cylinder heads and cylinders before sending out to the hot tank for chemical cleaning. Note the coolant deposits in the nearest duct in the first picture.



The same parts upon return from the hot tank:



Cleaning of the rocker assembly in the varsol tank:



Here's one of the pistons in the midst of cleaning it last night. I should have taken a "before" picture!



More to come when something interesting happens.

good stuff Andy

Very cool Andy