Originally Posted by
Islandlad
What is the going rate for a P51D or a P40 in barn condition?
This looks like a well known collection waiting to come up for sale.
Only one of the P-40's has been sold, or acquired by a couple of guys in NZ. The Smith family while not being aviation knowledgable, are aware of the legacy that John Smith has left, and they want to retain quite a bit of it in the family and keep as much of it all as is possible in NZ. At the moment, the Mosquito, P-51 and one of the P-40's and John's Tiger Moth are being retained by the Smith family in ownership albeit to be displayed and looked after by the
Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre. All the Harvard projects and parts have been acquired by the New Zealand Warbirds Association which hopes to get at least one composite aircraft airworthy from all the various bits and part projects....and the huge quantity of Harvard spares will keep their current airworthy fleet in the air for some time to come.
It needs to be remembered that the Mosquito, both P-40's and the P-51 were all cut to transport them to the shed where they've been (the Mosquito fuselage as well as the wings were cut off and re-spliced) and the P-51 wings were saw cut outboard of the u/c.
John Smith collected a HUGE amount of parts for various aircraft types over the years, some 20+ containers of stuff, which is all being collated at the moment, among them large quantities of Vampire parts, Seahawk, Walrus, P-51, Hudson, Mosquito, Harvard, Airspeed Oxford and P-40 bits.
All the Mosquito parts and spares are going to Avspecs, which is great news of course. The interesting thing I have found out is that in the Smith collection was two complete Bristol Hercules engines and other Hercules parts, which have gone to the Bristol engine Society at Omaka. So is that the source of the news that TFC have finally found a source of engines last year for their Beau project...?? Seems to much of a coincidence as the news as quoted was they were from NZ.