Through flying, I met another great friend, Danny. He also bought a vintage fabric airplane which needed a restoration. Below picture of the plane before he started, being towed home to begin the project.
He stripped off the fabric and disassembled everything. He sandblasted tubing, did weld repairs to the metal framework, and epoxy coated the whole thing before putting a new fabric skin on it. Here's a shot of the project when it was at my garage in Bristol. Doesn't look like much of a flying machine at this stage. You can see it was a thorough restoration, and not just a cover up.
The metalized wings were removed and restored to the original fabric condition. Here one of the wings in the paint booth after it was re-fabriced.
A couple of years, and many, many hours of labor later, here she is ready to fly at Meriden Markham Airport.
