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All right, it's Ray from ProShaper Workshop in Charlton, Massachusetts
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And what you're looking at is an automated machine gun. This is the latter part of World War II on a B-29 bomber
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This had Pacific theater use. And right here we've got a little hole from FLAC, and we've got a bullet hole over here
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And Van from Questmasters.us, he has a museum of World War II artifacts, and he brought this up
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And this machine gun turret looked like it was squashed by a bulldozer
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He spent three days at the class. Now he took it all apart
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He had to take all the rivets out. There was hundreds of rivets all along the bottom
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and these reinforcing pieces where these rivets were. And after he got all the rivets out, we were able to repair the ring
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There's a ring underneath there, and we'll show some pictures of that too. We took a whole bunch of pictures of the progress So Van was able to take it all apart by taking all the rivets beat it out on the floor with a blanket and then was able to put it in my big English wheel
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got all the area value back in the arrangement where it's supposed to be. Okay, so here's Van
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This is actually a General Electric automated turret used on the B-29 Superfortress during
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World War II. The aircraft had four of these turrets, two underside and two on the top side
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The top side had four A&M2 50 caliber machine guns and the two bottom ones had two, as you can see
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the holes right here, two A&M2 50 caliber machine guns. The hole in the center was actually for a
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gun camera and the gunner remotely operated the turret so that when it actually started firing
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the camera located in the turret would train and record the target that was being fired on
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What was unique about the B-29 Superfortress was that any gunner in the aircraft could control all four turrets
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Meaning, if somebody was wounded or someone was incapacitated, the automated gun sight, which was remotely fired
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was so advanced for the time period introduced in 1943, the gunner could control all four turrets at the same time based on the trajectory of the aircraft approaching the B And so the reason this was so important to restore and Grail put the photos up of how bad it was
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is that this stuff is just getting so rare that the originals are so needed to be preserved. I
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mean this was just smushed and if it wasn't for ProShape or being able to allow me to come up here
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take the class the 40-hour class and bring it back to this state still needs a lot of more
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additional work, but this turret right here is going to go on the big-time operator, which was
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a B-29 in my personal collection. Had 42 missions in the Pacific, shot down two Japanese aircraft
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and as you can see, the 40-hour class brought it back to life. And this was the first time you used
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an English wheel, too. Absolutely. I will give a shout out to your YouTube videos. I initially used
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I wanted to beat out the centerpiece that held the .50 caliber machine guns
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It got me so far. And then I said, you know what? I sent you an email
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I said, Ray, let's do the class because I need just that extra bump to get what wasn't included in the videos
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Yeah. And you did a magnificent job on this van. I'm really, really proud of the results
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I think the people that see it at the museum are going to be wowed by it
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And a piece of history has been preserved. And that what Van all about is really into keeping everything as authentic as possible We had to weld a few little spots because it was cracked badly It still needs a few spots welded
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And like he said, he has a lot of work yet to put this inside bracketry in
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and that's going to be time consuming. He'll probably spend another week getting this thing
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the way he wants it. So I really want to thank you for taking my class
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Van. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me come up here for
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questmasters museum you can follow questmasters on uh on facebook and uh the again the website is
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questmasters.us so you can see the rest of the aircraft the rest of the artifacts in the
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collection yeah and so look forward to doing more work with you awesome and i would just like to add
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that you're a very good presenter of the material and i've been talking to you for four days and i'm
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really impressed with your knowledge and i really think if you don't have a youtube channel you
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should get a YouTube channel. Hopefully, maybe in the future you'll see Van in a lot of YouTube stuff
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because World War II stuff is popular and Van has encyclopedic knowledge of all
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this stuff. It's just incredible. Thanks for watching. It's Ray from ProShaper Workshop in Charlton
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Massachusetts. Thanks for watching
