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Thread: Building spruce biplanes in 1918

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    Default Building spruce biplanes in 1918

    A very interesting film...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVG0-sbx3wA

    Appears to be a U.S. film from about 1918/1919 and shows the process from logging to flight. Several interesting aircraft types.

    Barry

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    I did not realise that so many different types of foreign aircraft were made in the U.S.A. in 1918.

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    Some may be repairs or just taken apart to study foreign construction technique. That was quite common.
    I will swear that I saw a SPAD parked and partly disassembled in that film!

    B


    Quote Originally Posted by Naharaht View Post
    I did not realise that so many different types of foreign aircraft were made in the U.S.A. in 1918.

  4. #4

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    Holy carp! The work involved is amazing. How many (thousands?) man-hours went into building a WWI plane? I'll cry much more now when one goes down on a first card Boom!

    Thanks for that Barry.

  5. #5

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    Quote Originally Posted by Teaticket View Post
    Holy carp! ....
    Fish with a halo Pete ?!

    "He is wise who watches"

  6. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by flash View Post
    Fish with a halo Pete ?!
    Feces with a halo.

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    With a Henry Ford type production line the amount of man hours (and woman hours) per plane can be greatly reduced.
    One of the criticisms of Anthony Fokker was that he always skimped on production and never had a proper factory, it was more a jumped up workshop.
    Reading about Fokker it appears the Germans had already complained about quality control but when he won the big contract for the Fokker DVII it was on condition that he did not produce the aircraft. He had no quantity production line. As a result all aircraft were built by sub-contractors. So he went back to building the EV/DVIII and look what happened the that! The wings fell off due to poor workmanship.

    While Fokker claims that he returned to his native Holland for sound economic reasons he was also on the wrong end of manslaughter or wrongful death charges following the DVIII crashes; he was also still being pursued for mega money over the Schneider interrupter gear patents which he had infringed with the E-series monoplanes and had already lost court cases over. He never paid out on the Schneider case and, as far as I can tell, he never returned to Germany.


    Quote Originally Posted by Teaticket View Post
    Holy carp! The work involved is amazing. How many (thousands?) man-hours went into building a WWI plane? I'll cry much more now when one goes down on a first card Boom!

    Thanks for that Barry.

  8. #8

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    Interesting video - would be better with period music and longer time to read the occasional information screens (most of the comments below the video complain about those annoyances) but one definitely must tip the hat to the amount of work that went into producing those iconic aircraft.

  9. #9

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    Yeah, who picked the music for this? I was not expecting any music but what was there was a strange choice. A small inconvenience to pause to read the few captions shown, but as said, a great video showing what it took to make an airplane.



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