Historiker

Coming up soon is Camp Mabry’s Muster Day Event on April 18th & 19th. I’ll be there with Gerda the R-71 and the rest of Fallschirmjager Regiment 2. Looks to be lots of fun.

Here’s the PDF information file.

Brent Mullins, in Bryan-College Station Texas was a lot of fun. We arrived early on Saturday morning, unloaded the R-71 and cruised up to the gate. Though there was a small snag. The key for the R-71 was in Austin! It only took a few minutes for me to McGiver a quick fix.

Here we are parked in the display area and hanging out with some other fallschirmjager.

…and on the way to the battle, riding in style…

Oh and why this is a great pastime… the opportunity to teach a little history… outside the classroom and away from the dull teachers that made me memorize dates because they couldn’t think of any other way to teach!

Just the opportunity to talk after the show to people who are genuinely interested in learning makes it all worth while!

Well time to take the R-71 to the very first event. Brent Mullins is an annual event held in Byran-College Station Texas on March 21. There are a lot of vehicles at this event so a great place to debut.

The public battle is at 2PM and I’m looking forward to it… time to burn up a lot of blank 9mm ammo with the MP-40!

By the way photos are up for the Van-Gilbert Farm Tactical event from last weekend…

The BMW is quite happy in it’s new home… she’s also got a name… Gerda. Anyway Gerda came to me in pretty good shape, but there were some things that needed attention. So the past several days have involved some minor surgery.

First her knee pads were mounted too far down on the tank. My friend Bill M. offered to do the welding to relocate them in the correct position. He did this over a weekend and delivered me back the tank sandblasted and ready to repaint. I replaced the leaky fuel petcock with a new one and new fuel lines to the carbs too.

One thing that puzzled me was that the generator lamp stayed lit all the time; that is after I had replaced the bad bulb with a good one… Diving under the sidecar while tracing out the wiring I found that the voltage regulator, rectifier and starter relay were attached to the bottom of the sidecar. Exposed to any water that I ran through and ready to be knocked off by any stump I passed over! In addition they wires were all spliced up using those crappy ‘butt’ connectors and the generator output wire was dangling free… no wonder it wouldn’t charge!

While looking in the headlamp shell I didn’t like the rats nest of wires, and the main fuse was bypassed with the hot lead wired straight into the ignition switch… no short protection at all. Something else that needed fixing, now!

In addition I’m adding turn signals so I can be a little more road safe. I know they are not original but this is 2009 not 1940 and traffic density is a bit different. Besides in those days you didn’t have buffoons driving while reading the paper and chatting on their cell phones…

I decided to move the regulator board and the battery into a protected area. The trunk of the sidecar was a natural location. But the leads had to be extended to do that. First I had to restore the regulator board…

So a lot of unwrapping of electrical leads, rewiring and refurbishing with soldered connectors later I had everything back together and neatly packed into the trunk…

Now to mount the new saddlebag can…

I decided to up the ante in the field so to speak… I’ve started to add some firepower to my impression. I just got a MG-42 parts kit. Now I have to decide if I want to make it static; a dummy non-operational replica, or a gas gun (propane firing) or have it made into a semi-automatic and blank adapted gun… decisions, decisions…

All of the options have their pros and cons. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes…

My parts kit…

One consideration is storage and security for the gun at reenactments… I found a really great place that makes a good looking transit chest replica. The workmanship looks really good… the only flaw I see so far is the irritating music on the web site… makes it really hard to view the site while at work!

Web site owners take note! It’s kind of hard to explain German martial music on a conference call or in a cube farm!

Transit chests…

Oh and a little motivational music…

Well our first movie weekend went well… not without many hitches; but this is the first time we attempt to make a real feature movie about fallschirmjagers. We didn’t shoot nearly as many scenes as we wanted to. I think we were a little optimistic about how smoothly it would go.

Our hardworking director…

But the key thing was we had a huge amount of fun, worked out butts off filming, posing and setting up various sets. My house was full of people, uniforms, helmets, various gear and guns. During scene changes all actor/reenactors throwing field uniforms off and dress uniforms on… one person remarked that “there was a lot of cross dressing going on”.

Packed living room/barracks…

We had three vehicles on hand too. A kubelwagen and two BMW R-71’s. We did a lot of road scenes escorting the General to the base… he and his driver ate a lot of dust following the R-71 escorts on the dirt roads while filming.

Der Kubelwagen…

Bill’s and my R-71’s…

We even had a member of the Luftwaffe general staff at the house to supervise the filming…

The best parts of the day were after the hard work sitting back to watch outtakes and eat hamburgers and drink beer while falling out laughing at ourselves and our wooden acting!

And now a little teaser for the production…