YES , you can Google it, I believe its the De Havilland Aircraft Heritage museum at Junction 22 on the M25, its been classed as the best kept secret in Hertfordshire!!!!
YES , you can Google it, I believe its the De Havilland Aircraft Heritage museum at Junction 22 on the M25, its been classed as the best kept secret in Hertfordshire!!!!
Years back in the late 70s early 80s i worked at a timber yard here in Warrington called R A Naylor, one day i was asked to clear the attic space above one of the timber mills, there were 100s of large plywood wing ribs of various sizes up there which i was told to throw in a skip. An old guy who had worked there since the late 1930s told me the ribs were for Mosquitos and Naylors were contracted to make the ribs, I don't know how true it is bit the ribs were for a wooden aircraft.
Cool, interesting, you never know. Long way to ship them down to Hatfield however
Gunny,
The ribs were most likely solid wood, balsa, maybe other wood in the uk, and the wing skins would have been plywood. See this interesting video in Australia
Mosquito Manufacturing-1944 - YouTube
I worked with Airbus wings years ago, times have changed !!!
Broughton Factory mate, just outside Chester, where I live now. Was British Aerospace when I worked there, was made redundant in 1993, thats how I got into the silly game i am doing now !!!
Hawarden Airport - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
You know what Gunny!!! I was always told that there were some Mosquito's built at Broughton after the war, and the fuselages were stored in some bomb proof hangers that are still there to this day! ( During the war, they used to store the Wellington and later on Lancaster fuselages in bomb proof hangers and also on local farm land around the factory in case the place was bombed ) Just Google'd Broughton Factory and it says the same !!! Warrington is not that far away to be making wooden ribs to send over to Chester!!! haha
If you look closely at the picture below, you can see the aircraft scattered about over the farmland
Well Warrington to Broughton aint very far at all, i didn't realise they'd built any there though. What are you doing now mate?.
Gunny,
I did hear stories while I worked there that they did build some Mossies’ after the war when the Factory was first taken over by DH but I can’t confirm that, was nearly 20 years ago when I first worked there, I was not really that interested in the history of it in those days, I do have a book at home about the factory, I will have a look when I get home the weekend.
Your story about the wooden ribs in Warrington would make sense then, its only 25 miles away!
I worked back at the Broughton Factory about 5 years ago now for a couple of years in a different capacity, I was more interested then, used to walk around soaking up the history, I most likely worked on the same spot years ago where the current BBMF Lancaster was built, a lot of the buildings are the original 1939 ones and still have remnants of the camo paint that they painted the factory with in 1939. While installing some computer cabling, a colleague and I found an old Air Raid Warning Siren tucked away in one of the buildings, I was going to try asking to remove it but I moved on before I could get around to it.
I retrained in 1993 in Electronics/Avionics but it didn’t work out so retrained again in Computer Networking, been doing this shit ever since!! Install and maintain computer data networks and hardware. Currently up in Barrow in Furness working at BAE Systems Submarines doing a small project for a few months, but may end up being here all year !! Can’t grumble, its work, and I am self-employed and it’s been up and down a little past couple of years.
Was walking around the ship yard before Christmas and we stumbled across an old Air Raid Shelter, the entrance still had the old painted entrance sign, still there after all these years, un-touched, was going to take a picture of it but for obvious reasons we can’t really go around taking pictures here ! Haha
How are things with you??
Oh lucky you stuck up in Barrow and possibly there for a year, i heard of less harsh things being sentenced to criminals , on the plus side you're only minutes away from the lake district.
I just got in touch with a guy who used to work with me at Naylors and he remembers the wing ribs, he too says he was told they were for mosquitoes, but he remembers somebody else saying they were for transport gliders so the mystery deepens.
How am i? Still looking for a job mate, i've got an interview with my "personal adviser" at the job centre tomorrow, Oh joy!...
You may well be correct in your assumption regarding the wing ribs Gunny. Much work on the Mosquito was sub contracted out to timber yards etc. and especially furniture makers like Waring & Gillow and Ercol to name but two. It was a useful way of speeding up production and also disseminating it in the event of the main factories being bombed out, destroying all the stock and tools etc. As you say, they could well have been ribs for Horsas or Hamilcars, these were produced using the same methods of putting work out to subbies.
Regards, Ned.
'I do not think we can hope for any better thing now.
We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker of course, and the end cannot be far.
It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. SCOTT.
Last Entry - For God's sake look after our people.'
In memory of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Lawrence Oates and Edgar Evans. South Pole Expedition, 30th March 1912.
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