A while back, the San Diego Air & Space Museum completed the construction of a 1932 Boeing P-26 “Peashooter” fighter plane. Built exactly to Boeing plans, it is authentic in every respect. This interesting airplane is unique in that it was the first all metal military airplane, the first monoplane (single wing) fighter, the last to have fixed gear (non-retractable), and the last to have an open cockpit.It truly was the design bridge between old and new.

The question curious visitors often ask with regard to Museum reproductions is, “Where do you find all the old parts necessary to build such a thing?” Generally, our response is that the talented volunteers in our amply equipped machine shop take a drawing, or sometimes just a photograph, and work their magic. A few days of cutting, bending, grinding, or shaping, turns out exactly what is needed in virtually all cases.

Occasionally, however, some antique parts cannot be recreated by the mechanical geniuses in the machine shop. For example, the P-26 was originally equipped with what were known at the time as “Streamlined Tires.” They were developed by the Firestone Rubber Company exclusively for use on the P-26. The forward profile of the tire looked very much like a letter “V”, with the bottom rounded slightly to create a tire with far less wind resistance than would be found with a tire similar to what you might find on a motorcycle, for example.

As the aircraft neared completion, the task of somehow finding serviceable “Streamlined Tires” began to haunt our restoration volunteers. If there were any of them still in existence, where would we find them, what would they cost, and would they still be viable nearly 80 years after they were produced? In what could only be considered a serendipitous moment, Jerry Orr, the lead guy on the “Peashooter” project, happened to be scouring old aircraft parts in a yard near Los Angeles when he turned over a stack of tattered cardboard boxes, only to discover a “Streamlined Tire” under the heap. Dried up, cracked, and dilapidated beyond use, he brought it back to the shop, uncertain at the time just how it might ultimately be used.

As the crew pondered just how this beaten old piece of rubber could somehow be reproduced, another volunteer mentioned he had a friend who made plaster molds for casting various and sundry objects. Could we get him to build molds for the tire? A slightly strange application of the art perhaps, but the concept panned out and the tired old princess of our admiration would live again in the form of cast polyurethane reproductions. Meticulously done, the molds were so accurate that the tire size, serial numbers, and of course, the word ‘Firestone’ were clearly visible on the new castings.Our problem was solved.

Ultimately, we cast four tires and it gave us great pride, of course, to have the only “Streamlined Tires” in existence. To the best of our knowledge, the only other “Peashooter” in the country was hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. and we knew for a fact it did not have the proper tires in place. It gave us more than an ounce of pride to offer a set of the almost real thing to that prestigious institution. They immediately accepted our offer.