Ahem, yes, well, on with the show.
This week I made it down to Nanton twice. Our restoration team is currently busy with building mock-ups of the main bulkheads and interiors so that the actual parts can be mounted temporarily and to therefore have the electrics and pneumatics recreated on sub assemblies. My assignment now is to recreate a full scale mockup of the cockpit floor and partial walls from Bulkhead No2 (just behind the pilot seat, to the nose) so that we can mount the instrument panel, control yoke, and pedals.
These first few pics are taken looking back from bulkhead 4 (the back of the bomb bay) to the rear of the aircraft. The area in the foreground on this particular aircraft actually was a cramped crew compartment for a mapping camera operator. The poor devil had only one small porthole window and only intercom communication with the pilot.
Below are pictures of the cockpit floor area that I'll need to replicate. My measurement sketch and tape measure rest in the clutter.
In the center of this pic can be seen the box that mounted the rudder pedals which hung form the top of the box. The mount on the wall at top left is for the magnetic compass.
This is the view from the nose. Bulkhead 2 is the half wall in the background and the rudder pedal box is to the right. You can see that I spotted the centerline on a length of masking tape in order to take grid measurements of the floor to duplicate it.
The frame in the first pic below was under the pilot seat. To the right can be seen the elevator trim wheel and the floor has a mess of control cables still in place.
I spent 4 hours Tuesday night creating just 2 templates to get the wall curvature at the grid lines I measured. The angled box was used to kee the template square and perpendicular as I scribed and adjusted the cut line.
I'll post some pics of the mockup when I get going on that. In the meantime, there are many more measurements that I need to get.
By the way Chris, I now have a scanned copy of the complete parts manual for an FBVI so the search may begin for your parts. However, if these are engine-related, then I'll not likely be able to identify them.