If I lived in your area I'd volunteer to help with inventory management. All your spare parts, sorted, tested with test docs, wrapped in corrosion barrier bags, boxed, labelled, ready for inventory!

@TenDegrees

5 ай бұрын

Same… heck, I’d come help even if just to sweep the floor!! I lived just north of Houston for 16 years and only found this channel/bird/project after moving back home to NC. Darn! Been to WoH air show a few times so I’m pretty sure I may have seen one of the Collings Foundation birds on static display and just did t know it at the time!

How fun to be able to crawl all over an F-4!😊

Great progress, looking good. It's nice to have a clean and neat hanger, quita a bit of a mess under the F-100. The test bench is coming in handy. Keeping my fingers crossed replacing the relay in the bay will be straight forward. Good job.

Glad that it worked out! I wonder if that high coil resistance reading was just an indication of the corrosion on the surface of the terminals? It seemed fine with the ring terminals fastened onto the posts. Also.. nice to see the TA-4, even if briefly. 🙂 I used to work on A-4Ms and TA-4s in the Corps.

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

I bet it was a little bit of surface oxidation on those screws. Ohm's Law calculation shows that the coil has 1,050 Ohms of resistance (120.4 Volts and 0.114 amps of current) and a total power draw of just under 14 Watts. Measuring DC resistance on an inductor is always tricky though, and as nice as my Fluke meter is, it cannot measure inductance. The TA-4 is pretty neat and I imagine we'll work on that one after we get the Phantom finished. Pretty cool that you got to work on them!

Congrats on finding the spare relay! The new lens certainly seemed to help with the closeup views of the schematics. Nice job!

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

Thanks! Feel pretty lucky that we had one. I'm liking the new lens also!

I see it’s all AOK with a continuity test. What about a load test? But because it has continuity doesn’t mean the terminals can carry a load. Being these units are so old I question if the epoxy/resin has maybe broke down and has an issue when it gets warm from a load. That would partially explain the unusual values across the coil terminals.

great vid.

That's wonderful. I'm glad you finally got Charlie involved, he's been working the electric on that jet for close to 20 years. Question, When is "crewchief" Al going to put the strut back together? It's only been sitting for close to three months and nothing has been done. You said you want to run the jet. That's the only thin left keeping you from doing it.

Good morning everyone!

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

Good morning!

Well that was a very anticlimactic end to "Oooh I wonder what kind of spare parts we're gonna see and hear about on this scavenger hunt". Would've taken me months to find it in my storage even if it had a neon sign pointing at it. Now to look forward to the pain and suffering of replacing the old one and testing the new one next week

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

Yeah, I certainly was not expecting to find that either! Replacing it will be phun for sure.

Yay for spares! Are you going to tag and keep the old one or does it get tossed? As always, thanks for sharing.

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

We'll tag it so it won't get reused. We may try to open it and see what went wrong inside it.

@fsj197811

5 ай бұрын

@@DieselThunderAviation Oh! Oh! I wanna see!!!

Does the part get tested against the manufacturers maintenance manual, contact resistance, pull in voltage etc, then issued a Form 1 certificate or FAA equivalent before you can fit?

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

Something worth looking into, though likely is not required since this isn't a certificated aircraft. It's rare that ex-military aircraft have a type certificate. Only examples I can quickly think of would be the C-47 and C-130, since they were sold on the civil market as the DC-3 and L-100 respectively.

Is the old relay XB3, or can it be rebuilr? Also, how do you get spares parts, especially for the F-4 and the other vintage jets?

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

Very likely the broken relay is done. I doubt that it is repairable. We may try to open it and see what went wrong inside it. For parts it depends. We have some stock of parts the military got rid of as they retired the aircraft, other are salvaged from other airplanes. Some parts can be made like sheet metal panels, hoses, and lines. Some can still be purchased, so it really depends on what we need.

Curiosity question. I’ve only been following these videos for a short period of time so excuse me if this has been answered already. It appears that there’s a lot of work being done on the Phantom for an airworthy jet, somewhat comparable to a deep maintenance phase check. Did the Phantom sit for a long period of time or has she suffered a major electrical fault given the efforts on the ground power system? Any background knowledge would be appreciated.

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

Good question! She's airworthy (always has been), but not currently flightworthy. Every year she has to have an annual inspection performed in order to fly. Her last flight was in 2019 so she was laid up for a while due to COVID and the Nine-O-Nine (B-17) crash in 2019. For the most part the inspection went fine until the electrical system started giving us trouble and the right main strut started leaking. Alongside that we are sourcing new pyros for the ejection seats. Since we are a small team, things are taking longer than it would if we were full time maintainers on the jet.

@Zone5Aviation

5 ай бұрын

@@DieselThunderAviation Appreciate the response, figured COVID and the B-17 had a part to play. Man you guys are spread pretty thin between the F-4, TA-4 and the F-100, and a B-17 in the mix before 2019. Does Collings Foundation put keen volunteers through tech school or you source former or current USAF techs only?

Any f4 patches? For sale?

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

We had some for sale at the airshow. We aren't set up for doing any sort of web store or anything (something I'm working on), so currently we only sell stuff at the locally.

Where are you guys hangered at?

@DieselThunderAviation

5 ай бұрын

Ellington Field (KEFD), it's south of Houston.

@fullsac

5 ай бұрын

@@DieselThunderAviation Wish I was closer. Would love to volunteer for you guys!