Here is the April 06 report on the rebuild of BL628 the Spitfire V. We have received all of the components from Australia now and have them stored in the container and have begun work on the aircraft.

We have removed the damaged head from the engine and boxed it up for shipment back to the US for repair or replacement. There is no sign of internal corrosion in either the bores of the bank we have removed or inside the engine itself, which is good news.

We have mounted the forward dish cowl dishpan to the engine to assist us with mounting the coolant expansion tank onto its mounts. The tank that is with the project requires complete rebuild and new mount brackets fitted to the bottom sides. We have fully dismantled the tank and acid cleaned all of the components. We have fabricated new attachment bracket hardware and will be able to re-assemble the tank shortly.

We have begun the repair/rebuild of the main engine mount frame. The parts available are a mixture of original tubes and web good only as patterns and most of the raw material stock. We have dismantled the web assembly and have fabricated two of the new plates and will be building the other two this month. The lower tube support fittings are badly corroded and we will be machining two new items for those before we can assemble the web back together.

We have begun the process of stripping out the main fuselage of all its components in readiness for removing the paint from the outside and within the cockpit.

We have begun the repair to the left aileron and have fabricated new skins for the bottom surface so far.

We have assembled shelving in the storage container and spent some time sorting all of the components into various sections and adding the parts removed from the fuselage to the parts shipped separately.

We have the Soda Stripping people coming this week to remove the paint from the fuselage and then we can look at prepping this for the new interior paint.