This is flexible wood, but it needed help bending around the complex curves of the airplane body, so the skin was made up of hundreds of individual pieces of ply fitted together with 15-to-1 scarf joints. The first layer of “skin,” or the inner wall of the fuselage, was made from 1/16-inch birch plywood. These two crucial pieces began with Glyn’s half-cigar-shaped molds, each with seven slots cut into them to fit the plane’s laminated spruce interior bulkheads. Glyn and his crew started with the fuselage, the most intricate part of the build, consisting of two vertical body halves made up of three layers of wood. The only safe way to rebuild a Mosquito that could dependably return to the skies was to embark on a huge wood-working project. Every inch of the airframe needed to be fully reconstituted using the vintage methods and materials. About 40 percent of this plane, by weight, was deteriorating wood and brittle glue. Our job as aircraft restorers is to start with as much as we can and replace as little as possible, but the Mosquito was a special case. The fuselage was too weak to support itself, so we divided the carcass into separate chunks and shipped it home to New Zealand in three shipping containers. The engine installations and landing gear were missing, and the wing was rotten and beaten up. It had been outside for maybe 40 years, so the fuselage woodwork was extremely dilapidated. We began looking for an original aircraft to serve as the foundation of our Mosquito build, and we soon located a mangled and rotten airframe that had been all but lost to the elements in Canada. What followed was a three-way partnership to accomplish something that had never before been attempted. When an American client took delivery of an aircraft that AvSpecs had just completed, I suggested to him that, with Glyn’s help, a Mosquito project might actually be within reach. The most vexing part of the project was now well in hand, and a Mosquito revival had never been closer. Each 37-foot piece, affixed to a long workbench, looked like half of a giant cedar cigar, scarred with slots to accommodate the airplane’s interior bracing. When I first saw Glyn’s hand-made fuselage molds, I was amazed by his tenaciousness and workmanship. Undeterred, Glyn resorted to reverse-engineering the molds from the factory’s fuselage drawings, calculating their exact shape by lofting a detailed pattern between hundreds of known points on the plans. The large and costly molds were the key to the process, and even after years of searching, Glyn couldn’t find the critical plans. A majority of the aircraft could be knocked together in a furniture shop-everyone from piano makers to cabinet builders put the planes together for the war effort-but creating the Mossie’s smooth triple-layered wood fuselage was a complex endeavor involving thousands of parts. Glyn devoted all of his time-seven days a week for maybe 10 years-to scouring the world for the drawings he needed to build the mold.Ī wartime advantage of Mosquito construction was that it could happen almost anywhere. Almost all of the cumbersome and heavy molds disappeared or were destroyed after World War II. His main challenge was tracking down the Mossie’s unique laminated-plywood, tapered cigar-shaped fuselage molds. He spent years gathering Mosquito fragments, manuals, parts, and plans from all over the globe in hopes to one day resurrect his own. My friend, Glyn Powell, brought the original Mossie restoration project to life almost single-handedly. Instead of the standard rivet and sheet metal processes common in aircraft resurrection, the Mossie required thousands of hours of working with screws, glue, and a lumberyard’s worth of timber. It was an intimidating plane while it was active, and it was an intimidating restoration. With those double V-12s screaming, practically nothing could catch a Mosquito going flat-out. Mossies were fast a pair of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines drove twelve-and-a-half-foot propellers that could pull its airframe through the sky at more than 400 miles per hour.
When a mission required speed and precision, the RAF called on Mosquitos. In February 1944, a squadron of 18 Mosquitos conducted a low-altitude bombing of the Amiens prison in German-occupied France, freeing dozens of prisoners and French Resistance fighters. It was a versatile twin-engine workhorse used as a fighter, bomber, reconnaissance plane, trainer, attack aircraft, ship hunter, and radar-equipped night fighter. The Mosquito was a unique piece of the United Kingdom’s wartime history.
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