Tuesday Club does all kinds of things!

Sunnuntai 28.4.2019 - Member of Tuesday Club

Suomeksi

The Tuesday Club has an important role in the activities of the Finnish Aviation Museum and the Aviation Museum Society. These blogs usually describe the restoration and repair of museum airplanes, but the Tuesday Club does all kinds of other things as well.

In the past months the Tuesday Club has been working to improve the Hawk Experience Center and there have also been different activities for the Päijänne-Tavastia Aviation Museum and for the Finnish Aviation Museum.

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The Aviation Museum Society’s Hawk Experience Center gained great success last year and now it is being prepared for its 2019 summer tour in different events. The service facilities of the Experience Center have been improved during the winter.

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The Tuesday Club team has assembled and modified six new metal cabinets for the Hawk Experience Center. The cabinets are on wheels and easy to move around and transport. The wheels could not be directly installed on the standard tube legs of the metal cabinets. Therefore, the cabinets were fastened by their legs on a sturdy plywood board and the wheels turning 360 degrees were fastened under the four corners of the plywood board. Two of the four wheels on each cabinet have brakes. The new cabinets can be easily moved around in the Experience Center.

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Old and rejected airplane cabin service and sales trolleys were donated to the Aviation Museum Society several years ago. The trolleys have been in the storage, waiting for a new life. Now the morning of their new life is here: the Tuesday Club team did a proper maintenance on the trolleys, painted them blue and added Aviation Museum Society logo stickers on the sides. Now the trolleys are as good as new and will be used in the Hawk Experience Center.

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When the Hawk Experience Center is transported to the various events, the items inside it must be properly secured with cargo straps. More fastening points were needed for the cargo straps and the Tuesday Club team added four new hooking loops on the walls the Experience Center.

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The Päijänne-Tavastia Aviation Museum has three large sea containers next to the museum hall at the Vesivehmaa airfield. The containers are used for storing museum items which are not on display. The museum staff wanted to improve the functionality and storage efficiency of the containers by adding shelves for the airplane equipment which have been stored on pallets. The Tuesday Club team assembled six new metal shelves for the sea containers at Vesivehmaa.

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The Aviation Museum Society is arranging a three-year fund-raising campaign for the Aviation Museum’s “New Aviation Museum”-project. Several money collection boxes are needed for the aviation museums and aviation events so that as many visitors as possible can participate and donate in the fund-raising campaign. The Tuesday Club team has built six money collection boxes during the past months. The boxes are partly transparent, each box has two plexi glass walls. The first four boxes are ready to be used for collecting donations from the visitors. Similar money collection boxes were made by the Tuesday Club for the VL Myrsky II (MY-14) restoration project.

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There is a staircase from the Hall II of the Finnish Aviation Museum into the restoration space of the museum. The restoration space is not open to the public and there has been a rope across the top of the stairs to indicate that the stairs are closed. The museum decided to replace the rope with a proper gate. The Tuesday Club team built a sturdy gate from 45x95mm planed battens and painted it blue. The gate was attached to the stairway railing post with hinges and a spring was added to pull the gate closed.

Photos: Lassi Karivalo

Translated from Finnish to English by Erja Reinikainen.

Avainsanat: aviation history, restoring, old aircraft, Hawk Experience Center, Päijänne-Tavastia Aviation Museum, Finnish Aviation Museum

Hawk model to Hawk Experience Center

Keskiviikko 21.3.2018 - Member of Tuesday Club

Suomeksi

A wooden model of BAE Systems Hawk Mk 51 jet trainer was found in the storage room of the Finnish Aviation Museum. The partly damaged model is approximately 50 cm long and it represents HW-310 which was in use in the Finnish Air Force. HW-310 belongs to the series of Hawks which were assembled by the Valmet Aviation Industries between 1980 and 1985. The real HW-310 has been withdrawn from use and stored. The State of Finland will donate it to an aviation museum in Switzwerland (Clin d'Ailes - Musée de l'aviation militaire de Payerne) and where it will probably be transported already this spring.

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The museum has no information about the builder of the HW-310 model. Originally the model has been attached by its landing gear on a white plywood board which has been hanging on the wall. So the model has been a wall decoration.

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The model is very well made and its proportions match the original aircraft. The cockpit has seats and its main equipment – also made of wood. The instruments on the panel have been painted, decals haven’t been used. The model has been painted according to the old camouflage scheme (black/green/grey) used in the 1980s, which suggests that the model was probably made about twenty years ago. Today the planes are painted all grey with small national insignia.

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Photo: Jorma Laakso.

When the Hawk model was found, the idea of bringing it on display in the Hawk Experience Center of the Aviation Museum Society was brought up. The center has on display the cockpit section of HW-314, which belonged to the same Hawk production series as the real HW-310. The model of HW-310 could be used to illustrate what a whole Hawk looks like. There is an existing showcase where the HW-310 could be on display. An additional advantage is that the HW-310 has a similar black/green/grey camouflage scheme as the HW-314 in the Experience Center.

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The Finnish Aviation Museum decided to donate the HW-310 model to the Hawk Experience Center and the Tuesday Club set out to work. The model was moved from the storage to the club workshop. The model had some damages: the nose landing gear was broken, one of the horizontal elevators was loose, the seam of the vertical elevator and the fuselage was broken and the cockpit canopy was loose and slightly broken.

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Fortunately the damage wasn’t serious and repairing wasn’t difficult. The right side horizontal elevator was glued into place, the seam between the vertical stabilizer and fuselage was re-glued and painted. The split wheel on the nose landing gear was repaired. The canopy of the cockpit didn’t quite settle in its place and some modifications were needed on the canopy and the rear seat in order to have the canopy in the correct position.

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As the model had originally been hanging on the wall, it hadn’t been balanced to be standing on its landing gear. When placed on a horizontal surface the rear-weighted plane’s tail is pointed downward. Therefore an additional support has to be added under the rear fuselage when the model is in its showcase.

The Tuesday Club team discussed whether the HW-310 identification marking should be changed to match the identification of HW-314 in the Experience Center. The decision was negative. It would have been difficult to modify the last number of the identification marking from a four to a zero so that the change couldn’t be noticed on the original paint. So the original appearance of the model was respected and no changes were made.

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The HW-310 model is made of solid wood and is very robust but it still needs a good storage and transportation box. A new box was made from plywood and wooden battens. The box has a hinged lid and it was painted with clear varnish. The box and the lid have supporting pads which were cut to measure and support the weight of the model during storage and transport.

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The Hawk model and its box are ready. The model was placed in the existing showcase to see how it fits there. And it looks great!

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Fine, isn't it?

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Now HW-310 is waiting for the summer exhibition round of the Hawk Experience Center to begin. The first event is already in the horizon: The “Military Aviation as a Profession” –event will be arranged by Satakunta Air Command in Pirkkala, Tampere on May 15th.

Photos (unless otherwise individually mentioned): Lassi Karivalo.

Avainsanat: BAe Hawk, model, Hawk Experience Center, restoration, Tuesday Club