Anson Project

March 1, 2026
OK, have bean REALLY delinquent in posting! Again. Not that we haven’t been busy, it’s just that most of the work has been cleaning, repair, paint prep etc. that doesn’t have very visible results. We are working on getting parts ready to put in the cockpit – instrument panel, engine controls pedestal, control columns, rudder pedals, …
We also started reconditioning the auxiliary bits on the most complete of our Cheetah engines – fuel pumps, magnetos, etc.
One task we did accomplish was sourcing the wood to fabricate the wing spars. Like most Ansons sold as scrap after the war, ours had the wing cut off and will need new wing constructed from scratch (well, actually from the blueprints). The Anson wing has two box beam spars (front and rear), each with a top and bottom fl**ge made up of between eight to thirteen laminations of 7/16 inch spruce, so a 56 foot span wing requires a fair bit of lumber. A local sawmill (about 200 kilometers away) agreed to custom cut the wood we needed. Now it just needs to dry in the hanger for a few months. In the meantime we will experiment with bending some test pieces to the required dihedral angles, glue tests, etc.
Oh, and we got a new stable mate in the restoration hanger, a Canadian built 1946 J3 Cub that will be restored to flying condition. The airframe and engine need very little work, the main task will be replacing all the aging fabric.

August 2025
Work is progressing on restoring bits and pieces for installation in the cockpit; not a lot of visible results but very necessary work. This will likely be our main focus over the fall and winter.
We did temporarily attach the nose to the airframe and put the engines in their approximate position for the museum's annual "Aviation Days" show.
We took a couple of weeks break to continue the ongoing job of repainting the museum's DC-3 - blue stripes this time. Nose and tail next year.
And a couple of us made a pilgrimage down to the Moose Jaw Western Development Museum to get some photo documentation inside and out of their Mk I Anson. Their aircraft was brought back to life several decades ago by their Vintage Aircraft Restoration Team, which included a number of retired service personnel from the Moose Jaw RCAF base. They were also kind enough to donate several boxes of leftover parts - a complete set of control cables, magneto wiring, ignition looms, innumerable brackets and fastenters, ...

2025 June & July
Things have been a bit scrambly the past couple of months (my excuse for the delay in posting) – the Tiger Moth had to come into the restoration hanger for some engine work so the Anson airframe needed to be shuffled up tight beside the Norseman, which put a temporary hold on installing the fuselage formers.
But this seemed to provide an opportune time to set up our paint tent (see photo) and get the numerous pieces that people have been prepping the previous months. First (and largest) was the nose: 1–first coat primer inside and out, 2 – fix a few defects then second coat primer, 3 – mask and paint lower exterior Trainer Yellow, 4 – mask and paint upper exterior Dark Earth, 5 – mask and paint interior RAF Cockpit Gray-green. For those concerned about originality, the Dark Green camouflage pattern will go on after the entire aircraft is covered. Looks pretty good (more photos). Additional parts get done over the next couple of weeks – cockpit cowl, inner cockpit shroud, windscreen frame, seats, miscellaneous small parts.
Callen continues his Sisyphean task of hand painting the innumerable formers.
Nathan makes a breakthrough with the Cheetah engine and manages to free and remove the broken pushrod bracket on number 1 cylinder.
The cockpit floor get installed (after a few adjustments – blueprints don’t always exactly match the actual airframe ). Now that we have something to attach the bits to I guess we better get busy cleaning and refurbishing all those pieces in that were put in storage so they can be re-installed.
One of the missing parts from our Anson is the bombsight leveling bracket, a device that the bombsight attaches to used for leveling it in flight. Turns out after contacting several other museums that we aren’t the only ones without the bracket, they are rare as hen’s teeth. So despite the fact that it likely won’t be needed for several years I decide to draft up a 3D replica using a drawing from the bombsight manual and the few photos that comtacts have provided. A nice exercise in drafting (something I haven’t done in about 5 decades) and 3D printing – the parts turned out not bad, now for clean up and assembly.

May 3, 2025
More progress.
Floors for the gunner's compartment and the wireless operator's station were painted and installed in the airframe.
Started drilling the innumerable holes to mount bits to the cockpit floor.
All the seats have been cleaned up and repaired and are ready for paint; still need to find someone who likes doing upholstery work to make cushions for all of them.
The bottom formers were cut; this completes all the formers behind the turret and should keep us busy for the next several months installing them.
We even made a start at delving into the depths of Armstrong Siddeley Cheetah engine mechanicals - didn't get too far but we have manuals and the internet so there's hope.

April 2025
Steady progress on a number of fronts.
All the floors have been built. next step is paint and then installation.
The nose bulkhead repair is complete.
Repair of the various crew seats (pilot, second pilot, navigator and radio operator) is going well. We are fortunate to have multiples of all the seats so what's missing on one is often available from another.

March 9, 2025
Lots getting done in the past month:
• Nose repair nearing completion. It, along with a growing number of parts await painting come spring.
• The collection of broken former brackets has been repaired and replacements fabricated for those that were missing.
• A complete set of side and top formers has been cut on the CNC router and is now being test fit using the aforementioned brackets. When we are satisfied everything goes together as it should, all the pieces will be removed, painted and put back together.
• A bit more fettling required on the radio operator’s floor to get it in place. According to the blueprints it should fit but in reality there are some bumps and fl**ges on the frame that get in the way – strongly suspect that the original assemblers also had to do a bit of trimming to get the floor in.
• Fabrication of the cockpit floor is underway. Lots of internal blocking required for all the pieces that will attach to this section of the floor.
• Canopy framework disassembly and cleaning is complete and Bruce has started making patterns for the many pieces of Perspex that will go in the windows.
• Started restoration work on the pilot, second pilot, navigator, and radio operator seats. The original pilot’s seat is in pretty rough shape so we will graft the recoverable parts on to a better donor seat that we have to make a seat as close to the original as possible. The other seats are in reasonably good shape and just need a clean up, paint and re-upholstery.
• A trip out to Red Deer Alberta yielded some parts we were missing, plus a fabric covering course for the distant future when our aircraft gets to that stage.

Jan 30, 2025
Start of another year, lots going on. Progress on many fronts:
• Gunner and Navigator compartment floors have been fabricated). Next step painting and installation.
• Canopy disassembly has been completed (another complex job involving the careful removal of hundreds of tiny, corroded nuts and bolts. Next step cleanup of the frames and fabrication of new windows.
• Brackets for fastening formers to the frame have undergone rust removal thanks to Brian’s magic rust removal process (OK magic YouTube video process but still...). Unfortunately this revealed a large number of broken and missing brackets so there will be some fabrication work required (no surprise).
• Side and top formers for the rear section of the fuselage have been cut and test fit. Next step installation (see bracket fabrication comment above).
• The bottom bulkhead has been clecoed in place in the nose section ready for rivets.
• Prep for paint moving ahead on several fronts: instrument panel, cockpit interior panel and cockpit cowling are pretty much ready for paint come spring.

Wow, long time no posts, apologies to all. It's not that we haven't been busy, far from it; it's just that most of the activity hasn't resulted in much visible progress on the Anson. But that's about to change!
So what have we been doing? Well a big chunk of time went into work on the museum's DC-3. As it still has the original paint from when it went out of service several decades ago and has spent the entire time out in the elements, the exterior was looking rather, um... weathered. So we erected some scaffolding and spent a great deal of elbow grease hand sanding the entire upper surface of the fuselage. Do you have any idea how many thousands of rivets there are on a DC-3??! Once the roughest patches (i.e. all of it) had been smoothed off several coats of white were applied (thank you Endura Aviation), followed by a new set of decals. Looks MUCH better.
Next summer we will redo the blue.
A large chunk of time also went into cleaning and re-arranging the restoration hanger. The backdrop mural from the previous JDO Project was carefully removed and put into temporary storage. A LOT of new shelving was added. The outside storage area was cleaned and re-arranged (the Anson engines now have a roof over their heads instead of just tarps - yea). And a lot of time was spent going over blueprints and salvaged wood pieces to plan out what and how we would tackle restoring the wooden bits.
Which brings us to today. The first sheet of plywood went into the CNC router to cut a set of floor panels for the Gunner's compartment and the top formers between the gun turret and tail.
After the usual trials sorting out the idiosyncrasies of various pieces of 3D software: SUCCESS! This was mainly a test cut but went prettywell, some valuable lessons were learned and we are ready to move ahead. Let the woodwork begin.