If you’ve been by the Greenwood Military Aviation Museum’s air park lately, and if you have an eagle’s eye for details, you may have noticed the museum’s Avro Lancaster is sporting a new, convertible look for winter.
In the never-ending quest to counter Mother Nature’s harmful weathering effects, volunteers Robert Mullan and Dave Saulnier have been beavering away to restore the aircraft cockpit’s yellowed and crazed Plexiglas greenhouse. They worked through the summer and fall months measuring, cutting and forming new glass for much of the forward-half of the canopy and, while the work isn’t complete, the difference in the clarity of the old versus new panes is striking.
Deteriorating weather conditions forced them to consider working on the aft section of the canopy in the warmth and shelter of the GMAM workshop, so off it came during the final weeks of October. The new “convertible look” meant a plywood bulkhead had to be fabricated to seal the aircraft off from the elements, and about 100 rivet holes in the fuselage skin needed to be plugged with latex sealant.
The framework for the rear half of the canopy had been originally made of laminated spruce bows during the war, likely due to the scarcity of aluminum and the abundance of skilled carpenters at the time. It had long ago rotted away and been replaced by a make-shift steel frame, thought to have been reconstructed in the 1970’s. Unfortunately, it didn’t appear to have been made using authentic drawings, so the canopy frame, along with all of the fitted Plexiglas panes, were misshapen.
Mullan and Saulnier plan to fabricate an all-new aft canopy throughout the winter months. They’ve begun by locating technical drawings and fabricating a mock-up of a short section of the upper fuselage, onto which they will form new aluminum canopy bows. The bows will be fitted with formed Plexiglas panels, and the entire structure will be installed onto the aircraft in the spring.
If you’d like to see this type of work firsthand, feel free to contact the museum’s front desk for a tour of the workshop this winter. The restoration shop is open 9 a.m. to noon every Wednesday and Thursday morning.
