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Originally Posted by scimjim
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Very nice work and lovely detailing. I guess the Liberator seat came out of a field in Norfolk
Viriginia rather than my neck of the woods.
Funnily enough, my other hobby is metal detecting and I have permission to search the site of a WWII airfield within walking distance of my house.
What I'm actually looking for are Viking, Saxon and Norman coins and relics, which the site is littered with (here's the result of eight hours detecting in November) -
- but there's an awful lot of debris from the base too. They operated Stirlings, Lancasters and Mosquitos between 1942 and 1946, losing 170 aircraft on combat and training missions, at least one of which crashed into a church nearby, so there's always the chance that I could unearth some long lost bomber seats. I doubt they'd be in as good condition as the one in the hot rod thread though.
Interesting debate about the use of solid vs pop rivets. In WWII everything would've been made as cheaply and quickly as possible so pop rivets would've been a godsend.
Post war, however, and quality of engineering became paramount again. I was taught reaction bar riveting in week one of 'hacking and bashing' (basic engineering) at RAF Halton, No1 School of Technical Training, in the seventies and the Martin Baker ejection seats I worked on were 90% solid riveted together with pop rivets only used on blind or unstressed panels.
I had intended to make my own seats btw, but the time element eventually killed that idea as I wanted to finish the car this century.
Good luck finding/making some suitable seats.