Help ID this vintage bird please

It appears to be an upgraded twin Beech 18 with a tricycle landing gear and modified wing tips. One of my upgraded SWAG's

 

A Beech H-18, I believe.

 

Yes, Super 18, later model. The square wing tips came about in the E model in 1954. The tricycle gear was a retrofit by Volpar and they converted a good number before the factory offered the Volpar kit in the H model in 1962. I recall reading Flying as a kid and seeing ads for the Volpar conversion at the time.

Considering that the twin Beech was first produced in 1937 and the last one was built in 1969, it had a long and productive life. They built over 9,000 of them, but because they were pretty much flown until they died, there aren't as many left as you would think.

 

Yes... great, long lived plane.

It's longevity was exceeded by Beech's own Bonanza... which, I think, has the all-time record for length of production.

 

That sound like a fairly radical modification, taildragger to tricycle gear.
Seems they'd not only have to put in a whole new nose but also move the mains back.
Were the ground handling characteristics especially poor?

I know the first ME262s were tail draggers, then all further ones were trikes.

 

The gear structure on the Twin Beech was, as with most aircraft from the late 30's welded tube structure. Here is a link to a shot of the gear well of an original tailwheel version (about half way down the page).

Beech 18 differences and modifications

They moved the main gear location 48 inches aft and yes there was a new nose to house the nose gear since the original nose would have been too short for that. Depending on how and if there were existing bulkheads in the nose or if the entire bulkhead was replaced with the new one that supported the nose gear determined how hard the conversion was. Since most of the main gear was on welded tube structure that could be unbolted and replaced with the new gear setup. I'm sure there was a lot of work with new gear doors, and modification to the forward cowl area to accommodate the wheels that were swinging forward now but it obviously wasn't horrible. The sold over 400 kits to convert to tri gear, so it was actually pretty popular.

Remember too that in those days A&P mechanics were a lot of WWII veterans and weren't just "remove and replace" technicians. There was a pretty large group of guys that were trained and did a lot more than just plug and play kinds of repairs that are more common today. I don't mean to suggest that today's technicians aren't well trained, and there are still good ones out there, but back in the mid 60's there were a lot more of them around and local shops were willing to do more extensive modifications on STC's than they some are willing to do today.

 

The tail dragger configuration was ordered by Hitler because the tricycle configuration, to him, was too American. Ground handling, clearance, and take off problems eventually led to a nose dragger config. From looking at the wing structure it appears that originally it had no sweepback.

 

The entire wing was supposed to be straight, but weight-&-balance problems forced Messerschmitt to sweep back the outer wings. The center section was still straight, but the leading edge was later swept to match the outer wing. The aerodynamic advantage of sweeping the wings, in the case of the Me 262, was an accident!

 

I didn't get that deep into it, Jim. If one looks at the structural centerlines, the layout between the nacelles and the fuselage is a straight wing structure and the wing outboard of the engines is still straight wing layout but all of it rotated back by the sweepback. I think that it had to be done when they switched to a tricycle gear configuration because the main gear had to be moved aft. Just thinking and I try to do that once in a while.

 

When I was at Hondo in '44 we had hundreds of those airplanes there flying day and night. I remember losing two days and nights of sleep when a retraction chain broke on two airplanes in one day. Immediately EVERY AIRPLANE ON THE BASE had to go through an inspection of the retraction chains. That meant running the airplanes through PLM (Production Line Maintenance) nose to tail, jacking them up and and removing the chains for inspection. We found quite a few cracked links and to make things better for us, there was a raging storm going on for the entire time. The "Bug Smasher" is a great little airplane.