January/February 2022 51GETTY IMAGES (TOP); COURTESY WARREN DENHOLM (RIGHT)
from piano makers to cabinet build-
ers put the planes together for the war
effort—but creating the Mossie’s smooth
triple-layered wood fuselage was a com-
plex endeavor involving thousands of
parts. The large and costly molds were the key to the pro-
cess, and even after years of searching, Glyn couldn’t find
the critical plans.
Undeterred, Glyn resorted to reverse-engineering the
molds from the factor y’s fuselage drawings, calculating their
exact shape by lofting a detailed pattern between hundreds
of known points on the plans. When I first saw Glyn’s hand-
made fuselage molds, I was amazed by his tenaciousness and
workmanship. Each 37-foot cedar piece, affixed to a long
workbench, looked like half of a giant cigar, scarred with
slots to accommodate the airplane’s interior bracing. The
most vexing part of the project was now well in hand, and▲ Mosquito
assembly, 1943.
▶ The build’s
original airframe
endured 40 years
of decay.