Initial Recovery
This is the right side of the airframe. As you can see there are a number of poorly applied patches. These will have to be carefully removed and replaced with better sized panels that are installed with flush rivets.
At the nose you can see the right hand avionics bay hatch and the holes in THAT that need to be repaired. The spaces running along the lower edge of the images are the avionics bays that held the black boxes that ran the various systems in the F-15. The primary oxygen bottle was also installed in this side of the aircraft. I hope to locate a bottle that will fit in the existing mount. From this image you'll notice the tooth shaped strip of metal that runs along the top of the avionics bays. This was the upper half of the hinge for the doors that covered these bays. If I can't locate replacements, I'll have to fabricate them myself and THAT dear reader, will be a chromed pain in the butt. :)
The left side. I got lucky and the ejection seat rails are still in place. Since obtaining an ACES II seat [or an Escapac II for that matter] will be VERY expensive, I'm going to build a 1:1 scale replica that will drop right in.
You can see at the right edge of the image the worst damage that's been done to the airframe. Everything else has been carefully drilled out and removed or cut. Whoever set this thing up took a great deal of care in not destroying anything un-necessarily. My only complaint about this side involves those two rusty patches. What ever possessed them to install a patch made of a ferrous metal? It obviously began to rust the first chance it got. Those areas will have to be carefully cleaned up since the Aircraft Stripper solution won't take the rust off, and using a sandblaster is a Bad Thing(tm).
That dim outline you see just to the left of the black strip is a pop out handle that is used to enter the aircraft. You push on the little square and the handle pops out.
Here's a rather poor shot of the rear cockpit bay. The shadow is mine.
This is the cockpit bay right behind the ejection seat. These racks held the TEWS gear that was used in the F-15. Something tells me that the crushed Diet Coke can was not part of the standard equipment. :)