Dragon’s Breath

Dragon’s Breath

 

The Martin T-4 being scratch built in wood by Joe Weathers (which was featured in an earlier post) is nearing completion. The fuselage is painted and the custom made decal is in place. And here’s the tale of how it was done.

 

 

The decal of the dragon holding the lightning bolt in its talon was used in 1929.

To create the decal, Joe took the image off his cell phone.

“I had an image of the real nose art on my cell phone,“ according to Joe. “I scanned the image from my phone, resized it to scale, and then put it on frisket paper.”

 

 

 

Later iterations of the nose art had the dragon riding a bomb.

 

 

 

Also noticeable are two eyelets located at the center of gravity. These were there  so the plane could be hoisted by the ship’s cranes.