This is a story of a Restoration

I restored this boat from April 2006 to October 2008. You will need to go to the very bottom, October 2008, to find the biginning. See blog archive on the right side.















Friday, September 3, 2010

McMinnville, Oregon...Spruce Goose

Here are some pictures of Howard Hughes' wooden troop carrying flying boat that he built from 1944 to 1947. This plane flew just 8 months after my boat was delivered to my home town. For more, GOOGLE Spruce Goose. It could carry 750 fully equipped troops.












These last two are models of the construction out of birch plywood. The skin is about an eighth of an inch thick, made of 9 plies of very thin birch layers. The wing span is 20 feet longer than a football field. It is made of 95% wood. A man can walk upright in the wings, and thus service the engines while the plane was flying.

4 comments:

The Crash Test Dummy said...

Way cool!

Funny Farmer said...

I've heard of the Spruce Goose... but I don't think I knew that it actually flew. Now I'm about to ask a dumb question: Were all planes made of wood at this point? For some reason I thought by then everything was made of aluminum.

OldBoatGuy said...

Thanks, Crash.

You're right, Lisa. That and titanium and other metals. When he proposed building this huge transport in 1942, the government told him he couldn't have any metal because of the war effort. So he stubbornly went ahead and built it out of wood, mostly birch, some spruce and other light strong woods. The reason the G wouldn't go along with his plan is because they said he couldn't build a plane that large.

zanykitchencook said...

We went there. They have a plane that crossed the English Channel (where I'm from) - did it again recently