Richard T Eger
05-30-2002, 11:32 AM
From within a thread on 12 O'Clock High!:
Artie Bob
Late war Bf109s
Sat Apr 27 14:42:13 2002
63.190.236.170
1. Fit and Finish-I have seen Allied evaluations of late war production German aircraft quality and IIRC, the general consensus was while there was a lower standard of finish, in general this was not to a degree that appreciably degraded performance.
2.My personal opinion is that G-14s were built essentially from metal cutting as G-14s, G-10s were built (not rebuilt)from components already in the pipeline as G-6s and upgraded before completion to G-10s. Remember G-6, G-10, G-14, G-14 A/S and K-4 were at one point all coming of the lines at the same time. The RLM W.Nr. quandry IMHO, comes from how these numbers were assigned, which was at the time of main fuselage fabrication, not at final assembly. These two tasks were often done at at different locations and the fuselage subassemblies might then be temporarily stored at intermediate dispersal locations and brought to final assembly locations as engines became available. Thus the sequence of individual W.Nrs. comming off final assembly and acceptance might get pretty jumbled, although in groups that had been assigned by the RLM to that final assembly point. The documentation for all this is pretty scattered, I think the keys may well be found in the minutes of the Jagerstab meetings, which I went through about 35 years ago and my memory is now a little hazy. The minutes, translated into english, possibly also Russian, were part of the war crimes tribunal documents and facsimile copies, possibly also the originals should reside whereever the records are now archived. In any case, the english version was fairly widely distributed and certainly should be found in any USA University library that pretends to have even the most rudimentary documentation of WWII.
Artie Bob
Late war Bf109s
Sat Apr 27 14:42:13 2002
63.190.236.170
1. Fit and Finish-I have seen Allied evaluations of late war production German aircraft quality and IIRC, the general consensus was while there was a lower standard of finish, in general this was not to a degree that appreciably degraded performance.
2.My personal opinion is that G-14s were built essentially from metal cutting as G-14s, G-10s were built (not rebuilt)from components already in the pipeline as G-6s and upgraded before completion to G-10s. Remember G-6, G-10, G-14, G-14 A/S and K-4 were at one point all coming of the lines at the same time. The RLM W.Nr. quandry IMHO, comes from how these numbers were assigned, which was at the time of main fuselage fabrication, not at final assembly. These two tasks were often done at at different locations and the fuselage subassemblies might then be temporarily stored at intermediate dispersal locations and brought to final assembly locations as engines became available. Thus the sequence of individual W.Nrs. comming off final assembly and acceptance might get pretty jumbled, although in groups that had been assigned by the RLM to that final assembly point. The documentation for all this is pretty scattered, I think the keys may well be found in the minutes of the Jagerstab meetings, which I went through about 35 years ago and my memory is now a little hazy. The minutes, translated into english, possibly also Russian, were part of the war crimes tribunal documents and facsimile copies, possibly also the originals should reside whereever the records are now archived. In any case, the english version was fairly widely distributed and certainly should be found in any USA University library that pretends to have even the most rudimentary documentation of WWII.