The Little World

Now that the contract for refurbishing aircraft has been let out to Ess bend Aviation in Alberta, Stein’s Air World can concentrate upon preparing museum displays rather than spreading an aircraft over an entire shop for years. This is what happens when in-house restoration is undertaken.

Here are a couple of pictures of the work done at Point Cook – the RAAF base near Melbourne – to fill out their service museum. Of course they have the best access to original material and information that other private museums cannot obtain, but the fact remains that you can only put so many people on at any one time and they can only do so much with limited supplies. It’s not like a major aircraft factory in wartime.

Now the Ess Bend has just started up again – they were big in the days of bush pilots around Lake Athabasca and oil exploration, but have tapered off in the past decade. The new contract was got at a lower price than many big workshops would have demanded, so a lot of the odd aircraft for the Air World will be passing through their main shop.

The heading image shows some of the new planes that have been sold from the Air World and will be sent off to Schmatterim Air Force Base in Israel for display. At least I think they’ll be for display – they might actually use them on someone…

Anyway, here is the Hawker Sea Hawk in the process of restoration for the museum. They bought one of the old Indian navy planes from the 1960’s and have repainted it in period colours.

It’s still not on the landing gear as they are trying to free up the struts – these have seized up from 30 years of no oil. If they can’t actually get them working they’ll just weld on some fixed angle iron legs and wheels and tow it down to Wet Dog behind a tractor. It’s light enough – there was no engine in it when it arrived…

They’ve also dug enough of the old 60 pound rockets out of the dud pile at Cold Lake to give it a full complement under the wings.Research shows them in various colours but the two-part green and khaki seems to have been standard.

It should look quite nice when they get it finished.