PB-2A progress to date. How I got to this point.
1. I met
Walter Musciano at the logger at the
Kalamazoo Air Zoo in September 2006. He offered to provide, to the best of his ability, plans to whatever he designed, and that’s a lot.
2. I won the
March 1952 Air Trails magazine as a door prize at a
Cloudbusters Meeting. It included a construction article on the
Consolidated PB-2A by
Walter Musciano.
3. I asked
Walt for plans to this plane and a few others, and he delivered, as promised.
4. I found from the history and markings that this plane had been based at
Selfridge Army Air Field, where I worked as a volunteer in the museum, and the late, great
Ed Stoll was librarian of the achives.
Ed helped me find some unique one-of-a-kind photos.
5. I read the decal making article by
Richard Oliver in
Control line World. Thus far, I’ve had a 3 of 5 success rate with decal making, 60% to the good.
6. I read an air brushing series by
Al Rabe on
Stuka Stunt and decided I couldn’t get where I needed to be with MonoKote and acid brushes. So I pulled the trigger on a spray system and got instant gratification.
7. I read a really great series of postings on
AMA District VII’s web forum.
http://forum.amadistrictvii.org/ . The series was a well-documented step-by-step on vacuum forming by
Grumman-cats.
8.
Dan Olah of the
Cloudbusters loaned me his vacuum forming system and I was able to make a borderline acceptable canopy with my first and only piece of plastic.
9.
Steve Kanyusik, a WWII Navy photographer heard me talking about the
PB-2A at
The Beef and produced two unpublished photos of the subject, taken in 1937. Photos are in short supply because the airplane first flew in 1935 and was out of service in 1938. In those days, air progress was fast and cameras weren’t cheap.
10. Last open item: I’ve been digging around like a hungry rat, but I can’t find
a set of 3-view drawings. Does anybody have a likely source? In addition to the PB-2A, this aircraft has also been called the P-30.
I have to reluctantly lose two weeks of production to attend 10th Mountain Division arctic warfare training at their classified base. While the objective of the training is Nordic and Alpine skiing, I will as always keep my spy camera ready for any aircraft documentation that comes my way. Maybe somebody will need
Corsair II 71 years from now.