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Article
by: Kelli G. Frye
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
October 1992 |
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Long Beach, California - Tom Green is no expert chef, but
somehow he was able to teach eight men how to
shrink-wrap a 3000,000-pound goose.
The Evergreen Air Venture Museum of Oregon asked
Poly-Corr Industries of Chino to help seal
protective plastic over the enormous Spruce Goose
for journey by barge earlier this month from Long
Beach Harbor to it's new home in Oregon. |
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"None of us knew what we were getting
ourselves into, because nothing this big has ever
been shrink-wrapped," said Tom Green,
Vice-President of Poly-Corr.
Howard Hughes' flying boat is more than 218 feet
long and stands nearly 181 feet high. The hull is
25 feet wide. The wings span 320 feet and are more
than 11 feet thick. The fuselage is 181 feet long
by 25 feet wide. |
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It took 12 workers two days to drape a white sheet
of plastic 64 feet wide and 200 feet long over the
fuselage. "The wrapping weighed 600
pounds", Green said.
Since the largest roll of plastic available
measures 32 feet by 200 feet, the workers had to
melt two rolls together to create a sheet big
enough to cover the fuselage, Green said. |
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In all, it took 30 days to dismantle and wrap the
entire plane in heavy white plastic. Workers
melted the plastic sheeting with heat guns to form
a watertight shrink-wrap skin that protected the
wooden plane from the elements on the journey up
the Pacific Coast.
Green and three of the Chino company's technical
workers trained and assisted an eight-man crew for
two days. Voluntarily, however, the company
continued extensive telephone contact with the
work crew until the whole plane was successfully
cocooned, Green said.
Poly-Corr Industries is a distributor for
Gloucester Engineering Co., Inc. of Massachusetts,
which donated the heat guns used to shrink the
plastic. "We've been a distributor of their
product for 15 years", Green said. |
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