How long does the average warbird rebuilding take? Obviously it varies a lot with the complexity of the airplane, the completeness of the project to start and the amount of manpower, and money one spends on it. At one end is something like the CAF B-29 and D0C that were over a decade or recreating the two recent DH Mosquitos that are now flying. In other cases you might have an L bird that needs an annual and maybe a recover and can be done in months. Usually any substantial rebuild is going to over a couple of years.

So a recent article in the magazine of North American Trainer Association caught my skeptical eye. It has a good point about a knowledgeable person doing a pre buy inspection before a purchase agreement is made, ie knowing what you've got before you pay for it. I think a good way is to buy at the upper end of the condition range, and be willing to pay a fair price, and there are pitfalls if you are bargain hunting and accepting much less quality. It's by Jamie Trudeau, who I don't know but he is a T-28 expert and the footnote says he has decades of experience restoring and refinishing all types of aircraft having restored and refinished "over 800 of them." Now maybe that is true as blue, but I am skeptical, I'd be surprised to see anyone build 800 model airplanes in that time. I've only had two flights in T-28s and no maintenance on them, but to me it is a large and fairly complex airplane and not one you could quickly restore. If one assumes he began full time warbird work at 21 and retired at 66,then its 45 working years. To do 800 planes in 45 years is 18 per year or an average of one every three weeks ! That's a lot of Red Bull consumed or maybe they have a huge crew working on them? Has any one ever taken a plane in for rebuilding and been told to pick it up in 3 weeks? Maybe there really is a twilight zone down there in the Bermuda Triangle where time stands still?