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#1
14-03-09, 00:37
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Work is progressing on the Weasel and John is on to rebuilding the sponsons. There are a dozen different sizes and types of hat channel section in a Weasel, and to speed things up for the June Swim-In we had a number of those folded up along with the sponson panels at a metal shop in Toowoomba.
The sponsons are being built as complete assemblies before being added to the hull. He's recovered some of the original seatbelt fittings (the Weasel had seatbelts fitted as standard) and seat-back catches from an old piece of hull. A small die was made to press new hold-down brackets. An original seat back (in arctic white) is in place to test alignment of the slots that were milled through the channels. Steve. 
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#3
15-04-09, 01:08
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Recent progress on the rebuild of ARN 139999, the only surviving WWII Australian Army Weasel.
John has sliced the top and back of the dead M29C hull off. This piece contains the centre bulkhead and the cockpit coaming edge which is rolled (wired) and not trivial to reproduce in the short time we have left before the Bundy Swim-In in June. He has finished scratchbulding the new sponsons and has started grafting them to the upper hull piece. I was wrong when I mentioned there are a dozen types of hat channel - there are at last count fourteen styles. We had new reproduction fuel tanks made by a master fuel tank builder in Adelaide who normally does WWII jeep tanks. We imported the remains of a very rusted Weasel tank from the USA as a pattern for him to use. These repro tanks are absolutely perfect and a credit to the builder. A bloke in Sweden supplied us with some NOS Weasel fuel level senders to top it off. John has been doing all the major hull rebuild work so I've been helping out with getting a repro exhaust pipe made up, and I also rebuilt the steering lever assembly. I managed to get a complete unit out of the remains of three very cactus ones. Here are some pics. For more see http://202.63.50.228/gallery2/main.p...g2_itemId=3168
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#6
15-04-09, 02:54
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Oops almost forgot. There is a photo on the AWM photo collections database of ARN 139999 and its sibling (seen front-on in one of the photos earlier on this thread) while they were at Bandiana. The AWM timeframe caption is incorrect, this was in 1945. Go to the AWM website and search for 'Weasel' and it'll come up. It is photo P05457.009 hope they don't mind me showing it here but it's all for a good cause. People rebuild Spitfires from the dataplate up and call them restored, this Weasel will be about 50% original with as much as we can sensibly use. It will be painted in its original factory-painted alpine camouflage pattern when it's finished, just as shown here.
Here it is, enlarged and sharpened a little bit:
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