Bob & Ron's vintage Link Trainer (aka Blue Box) restoration adventures
We had help installing the wings from Rick’s grandsons, Ian and Tanner. It was hard to find the original location of the aileron hinge screw holes since they were buried under the new fabric. Diligent pork-stick probing did the job. Next time we’ll mark the holes when installing fabric. Both wings on; one aileron moves.
We finally finished doping our C-3 trainer. Wings and control surfaces are ready for the fuselage.
Leroy got out his old drafting tools to place the star perfectly parallel to the fuselage.
As you probably know, many of the Link Trainers had flag stripes on the rudder. Here is a trainer restored by Ed Link’s folks; Ed donated trainer No. 85 built in 1941 to Melbourne, Florida’s Airport Museum.
After two coats of sealer, a coat of UV protection, and two coats of butyrate white dope, we are finally ready to put the finish color on our C-3 trainer.
We thought picking red would be easy, but there are lots of reds. I asked Rick, which one looked most like American Flag red. Rick is a researcher – he dived in and got this great answer.
In RGB color space, American flag red is hex #b22234; it is composed of 69.8% red, 13.3% green and 20.4% blue. In CMYK color space, it is 0% cyan, 80.9% magenta, 70l/*% yellow and 30.2% black. It has a hue angle of 352.5 degrees, a saturation of 67.9% and a lightness of 41.6%.
We went with Tennessee Red.
This looks like a circus, but is just the cheapest Amazon spray paint booth over top our C-3 blue box. We only punched one hole in the tent and perhaps shortened a couple poles setting it up, but it seems to work just fine. Got a spray coat of sealer on today, and a coat of UV protector – that’s the shiny grey stuff. Next week we apply a couple coats of white butyrate dope.
We are getting ready to recover our C-3 hood. It had been repainted green and is now cracking badly. As we prepared to remove the old cloth, we turned it over to discover a couple unique features. Two brackets support a shortened clipboard with the last pilot’s faded notes. Also, a convenient “NO SMOKING” under the hood sign.
