Don't let bodhi's insulting tyrade spin things for you folks. When you dig something up out of the earth and it's a flat piece of metal, almost none of it is used. What they do is rip it apart, flatten it out, and use any piece as a template to make new parts. It's worse when the plane has been burried. I never said you couldn't get historic info from it, so ignore that secondary spin Bodhi puts on it as well. Some very few rare parts that don't get mangled (smaller parts, mostly, maybe throttle units and super-dense stuff like main wing spars or guns made from steel) get re-used IF they're not rusted, but 99% of warbirds "restored" from dug-up wrecks are simply new materials built off of the old pattern.
WMaker, while you might say that's reasonably intact for a wreck's engine, it still is somewhat mangled, and you would have to spend serious amounts of time rebuilding it. If there's a small compression, twist, distortion on part of the engine case, it's useless. Also the impact of crashing could have caused any number of micro fractures or cracks to the block. Any number of parts of the crankshaft and other moving parts could be destroyed and irreplacable. Although, I do admit engines would be far better to dig up 60 years after-the-fact than entire airframes would be. The denser material holds up better, that is for sure. I don't think crash engines are very useful, outside of being a piece that "survived" the crash while mostly retaining a recognizable shape.
