Visited the Pima Air and Space Museum last month and spent 2 hours staring at the same B-17 panel

Ivan Bell · 2026-09-23T05:25:04.444504+00:00

I went down to Tucson last month and finally walked through the Pima Air and Space Museum. What got me was a B-17 waist gunner position that still had the original wiring runs, all laced with waxed cord and tied off every few inches. Our new birds use zip ties and cannon plugs and it gets the job done, but seeing how clean those old harnesses were laid out hit me different. I stood there way too long just looking at how they routed things around the ammo chute. Does anyone here still lace wire the old way on restorations, or is that a lost art at this point?

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Visited the Pima Air and Space Museum last month and spent 2 hours staring at the same B-17 panel | Aircraft Mechanics - Free To Speak