Diary
All Pictures © Bluebird Project
All text by Bill Smith (unless otherwise stated)
Visit Our Sponsors Page and Visit our news story page
See the Diary Archive older entries
Newest entries are at the top.
For Diary of lift see Diary Archive.
June 2010
Whatever has happened to our milk?
Remember when you were a kid and the milkman left bottles on the doorstep and on cold mornings you could pop off the foil lid and the cream was so thick it wouldn’t pour?
And that was only on days when the blue tits hadn’t pecked through and nicked the lot. There was something endearing about small, blue and yellow birds getting up before you and stealing your breakfast – at least I thought so – and in the days when we recycled properly the empty bottles were then rinsed then refilled with fresh cow-juice squeezed straight from Ermintrude’s tits then given no more than a quick heating up according to a process laid down by M. Louis Pasteur to make sure there wasn’t too much listeria in the world.
I was sent to the little village store the other night for milk, something I never buy, only to discover that the do-gooders have assumed control of our moo-sauce too. Like light bulbs it seems you can now only get washed-out, fake milk. They call the blue-topped stuff whole milk but it bloody isn’t because someone has thieved the cream before the birds could even get a sniff and it only gets worse as the product they still call milk gets progressively more watery until you’d be forgiven for thinking they’d harvested quite the wrong bodily fluid. So-called, ‘whole milk’ is only missing its cream – though they charge you the whole price – but they do likewise for green-topped, semi-stolen milk that’s had the cream plus most of the rest of the good stuff taken out until you reach the red-topped slop that you could keep a goldfish in without too much trouble. Don’t forget, though, that they then sell you back what they’ve removed in your best interests in a hundred other dairy products then tell you not to eat it because it’s bad for you.
What’s actually bad for you is sitting about taking no exercise but try getting out on your bike for half an hour and the health and safety maniacs will have you dressed like a Christmas tree in fluorescent green with twinkling lights. The ethos these days seems to be that we need an environment, whether at home or in the workplace, where clumsy morons can hurl themselves at danger and bounce off unscathed protected by their gloves, glasses, boots and shortly, probably, full-cotton-wool-jackets…
The maniacs call me all the time in my office to ask who looks after health and safety within my organisation to which I reply, “We do.”
Then they rub their hands with glee and knowingly inform us that what we really need is a boy, straight out of school, having swallowed the latest manual on how fools can avoid injury while diving headlong into a combine harvester, to come and show us how it’s done.
“We use a somewhat outmoded though highly effective model,” I explain. “It’s called… (and I drag this part out for best effect) ‘common sense’. Ever heard of it?”
They tend not to like that very much.
I mean, divers don’t strap on their diving knife so they can charge blindly amongst old fishing nets, do they. It’s a get out of jail card if all your experience, planning and precautions don’t quite keep you out of bother (and for flicking your underwear over the side once safely back on the dive boat). So is it really safer to erect a million-foot-high scaffold with crash-mats and sky-hooks to change a lightbulb when your subject isn’t proficient in balancing safely on a rickety chair in the first place?
Angle grinders are my favourite. The maniacs tell us we should wear eye protection at all times yet not one of them can demonstrate how to use one safely without eye protection. Work amongst a group of blokes with grinders and it’s not their eyes you’ll get into bother over. You’ll only sprinkle their mug of tea with iron filings once before you learn to combine safe grinding practice with neighbourly consideration at which point your eye glasses become a secondary layer of protection instead of treating the symptoms of unsafe working practices. I invariably invite the H&S busybodies to come and run a training course in working off a ladder, balancing on chairs and angle-grinding without wrecking your mate’s cuppa and then show us how gloves, glasses and boots can contribute that little bit extra. It beats them every time.
And here’s another thing… they can never tell you what type of grinder ejects what type of projectile while working any given material and which are the bad ones so here’s a health and safety lesson born of long (and often painful) experience.
Bits of hot, abrasive grinding disc are quite nasty because they hit your cornea with a lot of residual heat and stick but they’re quite smooth and don’t scratch too badly whilst being easily removed with a cotton bud. Shards of stainless steel stick too and they’re anything but smooth so your eye protests angrily within seconds but they too can be quickly swept away with a cotton bud so long as you’re careful to lift them away as you go to avoid any scratching. For real anguish what works best is a high-velocity shaving of cast iron. They’re usually needle-sharp and red hot so they stick into your eyeball and weld themselves there with the heat. The trick with splinters in the eye is to shift them immediately. You can trail to A&E where you’ll be seen after all the overdosed druggies have been mollycoddled back into society but by then it’s too late. Once your eyeball gets angry all you’re going to get, apart from agony, is anaesthetic so you leave the hospital looking like a pirate, orange dye that makes the world look like it’s lit with sodium vapour lamps and a total stranger jabbing at the offending piece of shrapnel with a cotton bud just as you could’ve done yourself two hours earlier. One of those cast iron spikes can even mean scraping your eye with the blade of your Swiss Army Knife… that takes a little more resolve, but with a bright light, a mirror and a steady hand it works every time. Aluminium splinters are totally harmless, by the way, because they cool quickly in flight, have little mass and therefore little energy and never stick so they can be quickly blinked out.
There now – you’d not get that lesson from the H&S lot any more than they’d admit how painful a ball of molten welding spatter trapped in your steel-capped boot can be or how fragments can ricochet off the frame of your safety spec’s and hit you squarely in the eyeball anyway.
One thing though. Always wear your glasses when drilling hard stuff. Exploding drill bits are bloody dangerous!
Our health and safety prospects will improve soon, however, now that the daylight thieves have moved the clocks again. Just as we entered the bleakest winter since 1978 the fools wound our timepieces the wrong way to extinguish all hope of seeing our way home in the snow but now that spring is here they’ve given us our hour back when, let’s be honest, we don’t really need it. And – there’s now talk of us moving the clocks in the obvious direction next year and adopting double summertime by 2012. This could signify a loose particle of common sense that’s fetched up in the right place, or it could as easily be that they don’t want their Olympic running and jumping, spear-throwing contest going short of daylight…
Soon the sunlit evenings will be long and the grass will grow like the weed it is whereupon the footballists will hang up their boots and millions of kilowatts will be saved across the nation as cricketists don long pants and jumpers to leg it hither and thither in the blazing, summer sunshine. It’s in the sensibly warm summertime that the serious business of Formula One swings into action again.
Now there’s a proper sport, one which evolves year on year, where sponsors’ millions serve to move mankind forwards and feed the developing technologies of everything from crash survivability to fuel economy back to the populace. A sport where someone is actually in charge to enforce rules, punish those who transgress and ban refuelling making the first race of the year into a sad procession of overweight petrol tankers. It was dreadful but at least Rob finally had a chance to get even for all our digs at his chosen sport…
*
For almost five years now I have been teased in the workshop on a Saturday afternoon as I switch on my ball chasing wireless to warm up the valves to listen to my beloved team get beat once again. Apparently I should be into F1 for real excitement.
So it came to pass that sipping my tea one Sunday morning and channel hopping I happened upon this fascinating sport.
First few laps I thought were quite exciting but then the race ended. Or so I thought
..But no they had been racing to see who had the fastest car so he could start first in the real race? Surely it would be fairer for the guy with the slowest car to go first or even have a head start. Never mind, off they go again to the delicate screeches of Merriment Walker
And Stirling Sienna is in the lead with a thousand laps to go.
900 laps to go and Sienna still leads.
At this stage I went to 112 to catch the end of Bewitched. (I have always had a thing about Elizabeth Montgomery)
Turns out I missed the most exciting bit which has unfortunately been removed from the sport.
THE PITSTOP???????
And Sienna pulls in for fuel, Excitement mounts as we watch to make sure he uses the diesel pump and not unleaded. Cost him £340.00 to drain the tank last time and almost certainly cost him the race. He is eyeing up the mars bars on the rack and oh no he has gone for the snickers. Must be the Geordie pump attendant cos when Sienna asked for some air he was given another 10 litres of fuel. Ready to go but there seems to be a problem. He’s refusing to leave the pits. Only been given single greenshield stamps, needs triple for a bottle of fizzy stuff to squirt at the end.
And he is eventually off to join the rest of the little cars for the boring bit.
Now you might think that that would be enough excitement for one day, and I wouldn’t blame you in the least, anyone would.
But no siree, Bob. These pit stops are a double edged sword.
While Stirling was in getting his fuel and a Ginsters pasty for the journey, my little mate from earlier with the crappy slow car. Who had to start last???? has caught up and seems for some reason to be ok for fuel and sucky sweets so doesn’t need to stop. Probably knows its only £1.14 a litre further down and he can use his premier card. And so we return to the commentary with Merriment Walker.
And Sienna is edging forward trying to rejoin the flow of traffic as Robs little mate in the crappy, little slow car who had to start last? tootles toward him. Will he flash him out? NO he has tootled straight past with a two fingered salute
Stirling is furious as he eventually gets out he knows that all of the overtaking lanes have cones on them so no one can overtake anyone any more. But wait Rob’s little mate in the crappy, little slow car who had to start last? has pulled into a lay-by and has disappeared behind the hedge Stirling flies past him and over the line. Another fine victory for the man with the fastest car who started first.
So, to recap. We have a sport where the handicap system puts the slowest bloke at the back. The only way to overtake is if someone needs a pit stop and the powers that be take out the pit stops. What chance does my little mate have against Stirling who is starting first not stopping and no one can get past?
If I have missed something, lads, please explain before 3pm Saturday when I will be warming me valves up for a proper sport.
*
…no, Rob you haven’t missed anything, on that occasion at least, but the second race in Australia was an absolute cracker with lots of overtaking, pits tops and not a ball in sight.
In the meantime we’ve been working hard on our own brand of motorsport.
One of the reasons we’re rebuilding an old Orpheus is that it’s all too easy to simply accept that this is what was spannered into the hole in 66 and not think any further. We had such a tussle with the museologists and lottery fools about how to handle history but at the time it never occurred to anyone that this legacy engine is, in its own way, another piece of our past that was slowly slipping into obscurity. As it happens the Bristol Orpheus is another mini-masterpiece of British engineering. It’s a small, compact turbojet from a time when turbojets were still something of a novelty and it boasted a number of innovative design features and an excellent power to weight ratio for its day. The turbine bearing, for example, uses a total-loss lubrication system whereby an air bleed from the 5th stage compressor combines with a metered oil supply to blow an oil mist onto the centre of the bearing from where it’s centrifuged into the jetpipe and simply burned off.
Bristol Siddeley sold it a little better than this when describing it as a ‘non-scavenged’ lube system that reduces the amount of plumbing and obviates the need for an oil cooler.
So long as your oil duration exceeds your fuel duration, it’s a neat way of lubing the back bearing and the little Orph’ was full of clever tricks like this so we thought rather than just spooning a nice clean one into K7 and happily showing off our new engine it would be more appropriate to rebuild an old one and teach you all a bit about how it works. (And ourselves too)
Our decision has inspired a fascinating journey all the way to the early fifties and back again and given us the pleasure of meeting some fascinating people.
I recently met with some of the engineers from the company that’s overhauling K7’s engine-driven fuel pump where we examined a set of springs from behind the pump pistons. Basically the Orph’ has seven combustion cans and the pump has seven small pistons to shove fuel their way with a spring behind each one. As may be imagined these springs do a lot of work and due to the pump design should one break the bits drop between the spinning pump rotor and a machined port-opening that immediately slices and dices the broken spring into thousands of tiny pieces then pumps them right through the engine. We don’t want that to happen.
For this reason the springs are a critical item and are usually replaced at overhaul but because K7’s pump dates back to 1959 it wasn’t certain that replacement springs were available. I couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about because they certainly didn’t look like much, just springs really. Having speculated inwardly I then gave voice to my thoughts. It wasn’t a clever thing to do.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, do you…” said one of the engineers with a twinkle in his eye.
All I could do was grin and agree.
I soon found out that before the springs are ever made into springs the raw wire has residual stresses set up in it by shot peening (the firing of tiny balls at the surface to cover it in a tensioned skin of microscopic dents) before being springified… That way the material can be stressed beyond what it’s theoretically capable of doing and become a very clever spring indeed. I moved on swiftly.
On another occasion we were discussing the elastomers in the fuel control system – rubber impregnated cloth diaphragms, mostly, that control servo-pistons and assorted rocker arms – and how they would definitely need replacing. Brand new and packaged they have only a relatively short shelf-life. Even properly inhibited inside a complete pump they don’t last more than a few years so a set of 1959 examples definitely wasn’t languishing in the stores and even if it was we’d not dare use it so we (or rather our sponsors) were faced with re-manufacturing the parts to a specification that hadn’t seen the light of day in half a century.
With ever an eye for K7’s originality, not to mention the scale of the favour I was about to ask, I suggested we re-use the originals because they looked and felt good as new and there’d be no real harm done if our engine ground to a halt halfway down the course.
I got that, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’ look again and they were right again. The problem here would not be the engine simply giving up and spooling down – what would happen is that should the pressure used to govern fuel flow start weeping through a pinprick in a diaphragm the engine wouldn’t stop at all, it would run away with itself, pouring ever greater quantities of kerosene into the fire until it howled itself to destruction in an explosion of hot shrapnel. We didn’t fancy that either.
There’s no denying that these pumps are robust little things and even in the broken spring scenario I was told the machine would ‘keep on trucking’ – for a while anyway. The modern version with carbon slippers on the piston ends and a host of incorporated cutting-edge materials can do an astonishing 22,000 hours on the wing between overhauls but having been warned of the dangers it would be grossly irresponsible to plough on regardless without thoroughly addressing all the safety issues. The elastomers are being re-manufactured…
We’re extremely fortunate with the engine controls but not so with the start system, which is both completely bespoke and was manufactured by Lucas Rotax, a company that’s long gone. There’s no spares or engineering support so we’re completely on our own in understanding and rebuilding all the twiddly bits that make it work but at least the start bottles are straightforward.
)
They’re spherical pressure vessels; one fitted either side of the inlet trunk on a steel frame. We always had high hopes of resurrecting them because the system remained pressurized during the boat’s long sojourn on the lakebed and when compressed air started hissing out after we’d cracked a fitting we all ran like hell. The reality seems to be a little different in that the right-hand bottle stayed dry because the main air valve and pressure regulating valve remained firmly shut providing a double barrier to water ingress but the other had a much simpler arrangement at its neck and ended up partially flooded.
)
Following much deliberation we decided to tackle the easy one and soon had it cleaned so we could inspect it inside and out. The dilemma we faced was that in order to get it through a hydrostatic test we’d have to shot-blast it losing in the process all the original paint and inspection stickers. If there was no chance of it surviving the test we’d have been better conserving it as a museum piece and finding another way to start the engine.
First we had the colour properly matched and a tin of paint mixed then all the stickers were meticulously measured, photographed and their position on the bottle recorded before the bottle went to the blasting dept…
)
Looks like the surface of some distant planet, doesn’t it… The blasting was intended to reveal any surface pitting. This doesn’t occur on the inside because it was dry but out here it swilled about in an electrolyte amongst a cocktail of other metals and suffered its share of dissimilar metal woes. Having consulted with several experts we were signed off to dress these pits with a die-grinder then build up the wall of the bottle by welding with the appropriate filler rods. It worked like a dream.
)
Next, give the repairs a good polish…
)
The neck had pitted too so that was carefully rebuilt and the wire-locking holes re-drilled.
)
Perfection… but would it take a test? Detailed boroscopic examination of the interior showed it to be in excellent condition but the proof would be in pumping it full of water. That’s how it’s done… were the bottle to fail when full of compressed air it would be like a bomb going off so the bottle is pumped up with high-pressure water instead, which is incompressible so far as the scope of the test is concerned, so if the bottle failed we’d get soaked and disappointed but no more.
)
The bottle was plumbed into the test rig and calm as could be the man opened the valve and a small Haskell pump relentlessly bumped up the pressure until it was stopped at 3200psi.
Each bottle holds approximately 17 litres of air at 220 Bar or 1052 cubic inches at 3200psi. The start system uses a pound of air a second and the start sequence takes six seconds so the pair of them together were good for twelve starts but to achieve a working pressure of 3200psi we’d have needed to test the bottle to 4600psi (that’s the test pressure stated on the label though these days the test pressure would be nearer 4800psi).
What we decided to do was test to the last working pressure – that which Donald used in 66/67 – then impose a new max working pressure of 2000psi. Assuming we can achieve similar performance with the other bottle we’ll have a much lower stressed setup that’s still good for at least a half dozen healthy starts. Let’s see what happens with the other bottle, eh – not to mention all the valves and twiddly bits we’re rebuilding to go with it.
Speaking of rebuilding – we’ve been getting all adventurous with the cockpit opening again. The past few years have been a huge learning curve with us first wondering who we might get along to make the complex shapes needed to rebuild the pointy end of our boat and then, on discovering that not many people actually know how to do this and even fewer on a volunteer basis, we chose to have a go ourselves and built this.
)
It wasn’t actually too difficult to fabricate from new, 1.5mm sheet alloy and it looked great but a certain piece dragged from the lakebed wouldn’t lie down and die quietly. It just looked too good to ignore.
)
That blue bit popped off and sank in the crash in remarkable condition and we often wondered whether it might graft back in as an original piece of outer bodywork.
Sure enough…
)
It worked a treat and we were all smugly pleased with the result but that’s where the matter rested because shortly afterwards we tore the boat down again to have the frame painted and the cockpit opening went into storage.
Fast forward a couple of years and the time came to have another look. But by now we’d got better at our night and weekend tin-bashery and thought another piece or two might save.
Like this, for example.
)
OK – so it was a little ‘crumply-dumply’ as my four-year-old would say but we’re not scared of things like that any more and a few strategic whacks with a hammer had it looking marginally better.
)
Now it only takes a small amount of imagination to see the curved cockpit opening at the bottom. One of our sponsors came to visit last week and having looked about awhile said, “Who could ever have imagined that all that scrap you pulled out of the lake could be turned into this?”
What could I say?
Some more tin-bashing and we had another piece ready to be grafted back in.
)
What we did in this case was to pin original over new then slowly cut away the new material and shape in the edges for welding until a big chunk of it eventually fell away effectively replaced by old tin.
The final piece in the jigsaw was the end of our panel.
)
Crumply-dumply to begin with but then…
)
…flat as a billiard table and, believe it or not, flat is by far the most difficult shape to achieve when starting with a non-flat piece of tin. Notice in this shot that the curved section of cockpit opening has now been grafted in and the panel is almost completely original except for the flat bit that wasn’t to remain flat for long because the next job was to put its shape back.
)
There you go… use it to replace the new tin underneath and hey-presto, a mostly original left-hand half to the cockpit opening.
)
Job’s a good-un… It’s had a sprinkling of patches inserted to chase out some rot and one or two fragments of the new-build panel remain but it’s essentially original.
The opposite side was a different challenge altogether.
Whereas the left came out of the water in scattered pieces with bits missing we discovered the other side complete and intact albeit somewhat crumply…
)
Particularly notice that big dig in the cockpit rail halfway along. That’s where the inlet lip got it when the boat folded in half. The inner rail was the same but we’ve mended that already, which is why you see it running straight and true behind the wrecked outer.
In this case, because we had all of it in one place, the decision was taken to dispense with the new-build panel completely in favour of rebuilding the original from scratch. We’d already gone some way down the other route by grafting the mostly intact curved cockpit opening into the new-build panel so that didn’t form part of our game plan at the outset and was recovered later.
)
Job one was to assess where the various twisted pieces were welded together then cut it apart along the welds. There’s simply no way you can make this shape from a single piece of material so it was fabricated from several sections and glued together.
)
Fortunately we’d already done the exercise on which was what in order to build the new panel so accurately cutting up the old one was a done deal.
)
Makes a little more sense now, doesn’t it, and notice also that the section in the foreground has already had some repairs carried out. We patched it to get that bottom edge straight to use as a datum for setting it up again. It started out torn in two with a big rotten patch in the centre where the forward end of the spray baffle was fixed with steel bolts about three inches long. You guessed it – dissimilar metal rot.
)
The affected area has been marked up ready for ‘loofing’ and you can see that the two, torn halves have been spot welded back together. The rot along the lower edge was caused by more steel screws used to secure the bodywork.
)
Getting there… you see the idea. Using that process we brought the pieces close enough to start setting up. Those dull patches on the sides of the piece, by the way, were caused by the shrinking disc but more of that later.
)
So far so good… At this point the outer rail has been freed of its nasty dig and it was here that yet another challenge came to light. You see, there’s a half-inch difference in length between the inner cockpit rails. The left one is longer than the right. It’s definitely not impact damage because they’re quite heavily built and no way is there half an inch difference due to the crash. It’s almost as though the cockpit halves were built by two blokes who couldn’t stand the sight of each other.
)
The problem was where to put the difference. Send it to the front and the semicircular opening would lose its symmetry as would the canopy that must fit to it so that’s no good but send it to the back and it’ll misalign the air intake throats. From pictures we have of the inlets under construction in 54 it’s plain to see they were built to the nearest inch so the problem may have been with K7 from the outset but there’s no way to tell so we decided to put it back symmetrically by reworking the outer rails. First things first though – we needed something to tie all the pieces together and that’s the job of the flat, horizontal deck, which we cut in two because it had a nasty stretch in the middle that wouldn’t chase out, well it would, but cutting it in half was a far simpler solution.
)
If you look in the background above you can see the new-build panel with the original curved opening grafted in. That was recovered next and put back where it belongs.
)
And so on and so forth… The second half of the deck was quick to follow.
)
From here it became a long, drawn out process of cutting-in the edges and welding followed by taking the tops off the welds with a die-grinder then hammer and dollying the welds to stretch them. It’s painfully slow because every weld is a most effective shrink in such a thin panel and if left it will hold the next area in the wrong position when its turn to be welded comes around. Even with everything in the correct place it’s still a case of slowly-slowly because heating the panel will also change its shape and there’s no point capturing those changes by welding things while it’s out of shape so you need to set up and perform each small repair then stop until everything cools and return to the shape you wanted before carrying on.
Works though…
)
Notice here how the panel has been grown downwards by the addition of a strip of new material. This allows for clamping the piece to the boat – something that’s impossible with the skin at the finished length – and to let us trim the finished job to perfection.
Next we had to start on the details and this is where weeks and months go by with no visual progress. Here’s an interesting detail.
In the accident the front of the boat came to a standstill almost immediately but the big, heavy lump behind it took no notice for about another nine feet and ploughed through the stationary wreckage wreaking all sorts of havoc. K7 is built such that all her structure concerned with keeping the water out is below the top of the frame whilst all the aero stuff is above and therefore gained no benefit from the strength of the frame when the water came up to meet it.
Now here’s something most peculiar. You see all these repairs going on, pieces of bent metal being straightened… 99% of the problem is getting rid of stretched material and shrinking metal is proper witchcraft so it’s amazing to find that parts of K7’s structure were hit so hard and so suddenly that the metal was actually squeezed into itself and shrunk by the impact.
This is the original closing piece from the aft end of the right-hand cockpit opening.
)
Stay with me here – it’ll all become clear. This piece was recovered from the wreckage, beaten somewhere near and then set up from whence it came. Next it was built into a replacement end for the panel by the admixture of some offcut tin and a welding rod or three. Cleaned up it looked fairly presentable.
)
Then we slapped the devastated end of the panel over the top and you can see the problem.
)
It’s about an inch short at the outboard end and this is entirely due to the fact that in a split-second the front of the boat decelerated violently while the aft section carried on. Frightening, isn’t it. That metal has squeezed in on itself like Plasticine and become thicker leaving it way short of where it used to be. We could bash it thinner again but we elected to let in a new piece instead and leave the artificially thickened metal with it’s artificially enhanced strength. We saw exactly the same effect at the aft end of the seat formers though they were subsequently stretched again with a hammer because they were completely intact only the wrong shape.
The other side was exactly the same so we cut and shut it appropriately. You can see here just how much metal had to be added to true up the back face of the foredeck.
)
That’s the shape sorted. Still a world of fiddly stuff to do but we’ll come back to that.
)
In the meantime we’ve been pulling our hair out (maybe not in my case) over another problem. Since the off we’ve always vowed to inhibit the inside of K7’s frame tubes against corrosion before she takes to the water again. The 1966 inspection by the RAF describes corrosion to the insides of the lower tubes consistent with what we see today and this seems to be a combination of her plunge in Lake Mead and her general neglect as she got older. It’s not got any worse during her 34 years on the lakebed but as we expect her to outlive us all part of our plan is to dose the insides of her frame with some Chemetall wizardry in the form of their Ardrox AV80. It’s horrible, brown stuff that sticks to everything it touches and glues your fingers together while nothing will wash it off and it spreads further and faster than baby poo once it gets away from you. It also protects bare metal like you’d not believe by drying into a tough, slightly tacky varnish from which water flees and it will take knocks and bangs without flinching; but how to apply it 23 feet up a 2-inch box section tube?
What we really wanted was a mist rather than a spray because Ardrox is very expensive and what we don’t use we’ve promised to the Concorde project at Filton so we didn’t want to pump gallons of the stuff into the frame just to have it go to waste.
Cleaning the longitudinal tubes proved simple enough. They were full of dust and rivet stems so we opened them at the stern and went inside. As you look at the back of the boat there’s a three-quarter-inch brass bung to drain the hull screwed into the frame at the bottom left corner so that was open already. All we had to do was put a similar hole in the other three corners and we were in business.
)
We used a rearwards-facing jet on the end of a length of 8mm brake pipe to blow the debris aft. The brake pipe was both rigid and flexible enough to penetrate all the way forwards past sleeves or where we’ve made repairs then the air was turned on and the pipe slowly drawn back. It was remarkably effective.
)
Three or four passes down each tube and they were spotless inside and we had two big tubs of rivet stems to add to our collection. Next we had to get the Ardrox in there. Propelling it was simple.
)
To the untrained eye this may resemble a fire extinguisher but it’s actually our Tube Internal Treatment System comprising a pressurized reservoir of Ardrox and a precision metering system. To this is attached a long lance – not unlike the 23 feet of brake pipe we used to blow the crap out of the tubes – with a spray nozzle on the end. But how to atomise Ardrox…
You’d think it would be a simple matter – just pop a suitable nozzle on the end and away you go – but it wasn’t. Nozzles are a science in themselves and everything we tried only resulted in gallons of Ardrox shooting from the end of the pipe like a racehorse relieving itself. Time to talk to a nozzle expert and to the rescue came a helpful gentleman called Roger Faulkner of PNR nozzles.
Roger kindly sent us a selection of small nozzles to try…
)
…but still we couldn’t get a result. More consultation with Roger and we made a small but vital modification to the T.I.T.S. and we were off. Suddenly we had a perfect mist of Ardrox and then the fun began.
)
Ardrox-man, as Rob soon became known, and his sidekick, ‘Mikosquirt the Atomiser’ were soon hard at work misting the length and breadth of K7’s internal passageways with gloopy brown liquid. It wasn’t long before the stuff started coming back out again…
)
The workshop floor looked like a crime scene with ‘bleeds’ of blood-like Ardrox springing from everywhere but at least we could be certain that the insides of the tubes were thoroughly coated, something later we later confirmed with our boroscope.
)
Next – prepare to stick some bodywork on.
Two things here. First – the entire suit of outer skins must be assembled starting at the stern; this because the panels are overlapped in such a way that the water is never allowed to force two skins apart.
)
You can see how it works in the above sketch. Now follow this to its natural conclusion and you soon realise that the first panel fitted has to be the one right at the back – the transom.
The other issue with the outer skins is the clamour that’s been going on for many months to see some of them fitted. The huge amount of painstaking work done by the team to turn out a perfect hull structure counts for nothing, it seems. All anyone wants to see is the wallpaper being hung. Grrrrrr! So we made a token gesture.
The problem with fitting the transom is that it’s where the rollover jig bolts on so the first thing we did was press one of the original lifting frames we used to get the boat out of the lake back into service to hang K7’s rear end from the ceiling.
)
Doing this with the boat inverted gave us two advantages. First, we had a better working height and, second, the upper frame tubes at this point slope downwards whereas the lower ones are parallel with the floor so running a 5000kg strop through the frame then onto the eyes at the ends of the lifting frame was simple. We took the weight then did a bit of housekeeping – a tiny amount of hot-work on some patches Mike Ramsay carefully filed from frame offcuts were used to close the Ardroxing holes.
)
We didn’t really need to do that as we’d opened them between the pre-existing rivet holes and they didn’t compromise the frame’s strength at all but we could so we did.
)
In the interests of thoroughness we popped an aerosol lance through the rivet hoes and Ardroxed the backs of the patches and the fronts were treated with Oxsilan to look after them until a gallon of choccie sauce was slapped over the top. Next we took the weight and gingerly stripped away the rollover jig. We’d not tried anything like this before so we were careful in case anything shifted unexpectedly though the physics of it said it shouldn’t. Sure enough, nothing budged.
)
The orange bucket, by the way, is to contain the lifting chains and keep them off the paintwork. Considering how much repair work we had to do on the transom I’d been quietly concerned that it was going to fight us when we tried to put it back but it gave in surprisingly easily when dry-built. Some stress-relieving was needed with a rubber mallet but generally it came quietly.
)
Meanwhile, Youth had seemingly vanished but was subsequently found under the suspended hull quietly cleaning Ardrox ‘bleeds’ off the frame until we chased the silly bugger out of there until the jig was reinstated!
)
We also failed to notice – mainly because us middle-aged gents, having lugged our abused carcasses this far through life, tend to take belated care of what’s left – that he should’ve put gloves on so he got Ardroxed hands for his trouble too.
So with the dry-build a success we mixed a bucket of choccie and got going.
)
Having keyed the paint with fine abrasive paper to ensure good adhesion we coated up the back of the frame then, following similar preparation inside the transom, another layer went on there.
)
Then we carefully aligned the holes and clashed it on.
)
This is where another story meshes with our progress because some time ago we realised we’d need a large quantity of rivets that had to perform to a very high standard in both holding the boat together and keeping the water out and I don’t care how simple the aerospace community say rivets are – they’re bloody not! The part numbers and specifications are an absolute nightmare with a thousand-million ways to cock it up so what we wanted was a man (or woman) who could point at the holes and say, you need an ABC/1234 to go in there. Enter Chris Houghton of Cherry Aerospace whom we called and said pretty please with sugar on until he was kind enough to not only tell us what the hell we were doing but also to arrange for a quantity of the very best rivets that money would normally have had to buy to be donated to the project.
)
And what a fantastic job they are too. CherryMax AB wiredraw rivets. The closest tolerance parts that Cherry Aerospace make, I’m told, and did they work? Did they ever…
What you ought to realise is that fitting the transom took an entire Saturday and there’s not many of those in a month and this is why progress can sometimes seem slow.
Another build relentlessly munching onward is that of K7’s new powerplant, which is now looking absolutely splendid on its Bettablast-painted cradle.
)
It’s half the battle having everything clinically clean because that’s your yardstick when keeping it that way. Likewise, if you build everything to a quarter millimetre one day you wake up to discover the whole job has turned out the right size and shape. Simple philosophies that make all the difference…
Our engine has been treated this way both inside and out and day by day parts are added until, just like the boat herself, sooner or later there’ll be nothing left to do but press the starter button. The oil tank is a good example. It’s made of stainless and therefore survived in good shape but many of its fittings paid the price.
)
Here it is as-recovered but look at where the oil pipes screw onto the right-hand end and you can see that the steel fittings have disappeared completely. It’s not a clever idea to put fine stainless steel threads together because stainless on stainless tends to spall and lock the thread so the fittings were ferrous and consequently dissolved to a biscuit-like material that crumbled to the touch and was lost forever. And though the filler cap appears largely intact it didn’t fare too well either because the corrosion was right through the grain of the metal and the second it was exposed to air it began to rapidly deteriorate despite everything we tried to minimize the damage. The new one is pretty though.
)
Having it made was challenging too because the machine shop I asked to tackle it is full of proper craftsmen but even they like a little more than a crumbly old chunk of alloy, an oil tank the likes of which they’ve never seen before and a few old photographs to work from. They made it happen though and what a beautiful job it is – likewise the new fittings for the ends of the oil pipes.
)
Of course the ends of the pipes had to come off in order to slip them over but we’re used to such things and they were quickly welded back on again.
)
Just another few original parts being worked back into the rebuilt boat. It’s a long time since those pipes felt hot oil pulsing through them and they could so easily have gone in the display case with the rest of Donald’s dead Orph’ but no, they’re going back on the new engine as soon as we’re 100% happy with the oil system. It’s needed some nurturing because our engine stood outside for rather a long time and because of the type of material the gearbox casing is made from you have to be plenty careful of the effects of water ingress. Despite stripping and cleaning every crevice and oilway we still didn’t want to put our brand new, specially-built oil pump in the circuit until we could be sure a chunk of magnesium hydroxide (or brucite, as it’s more commonly known) wasn’t going to float down the pipe and gouge lumps out of the pump chambers. Just to be sure we built a test rig to simulate the pump functions, a sort of artificial heart.
)
On the right is the good old T.I.T.S re-rigged to supply hot oil at 7 Bar and that vertical, black cylinder is a scavenge tank. The air drill lying on the cardboard has an improvised fitting that slots into the splines in the front of the engine mainshaft so we can spin up the compressor. The scavenge tank has Henry-Hoover plugged into the top and a pair of 8mm plastic tubes emerging from it inserted into the two scavenge oilways in the bottom of the gearbox. Switch on Henry and he evacuates the black cylinder slurping the scavenge oil into it.
As well as the main pump there are two others in the Orph’. One is an auxiliary scavenge pump to pull oil from the back of the gearbox and throw it where the main scavenge pumps can get at it. We checked this one out when the gearbox was stripped. The other is a metering pump that delivers periodic squirts of oil to such things as the bevel gear drive from mainshaft to gearbox and the turbine bearing at the back of the engine. We had to spin the engine while injecting the oil to be sure the metering pump and ancilliary scavenge were running too.
)
Most of the rigging was done by another Rob, or ‘Checkie’ as we call him due to his partiality to checked shirts. He’s at the back there trying to stop oil pouring from the nose of the engine while on the floor, with his finger jammed in the drain from the fuel pump that spewed oil because the pump’s not fitted, is Laurence ‘Lozza’ Chapman who came to get his hands dirty for the day. Lozza flies planes for a living but normally has someone else get covered in oil on his behalf.
)
We spent a fascinating couple of hours blasting gallons of mad-hot oil through passageways then trying (largely ineffectually) to contain the deluge that came back out again but the procedure was only a partial success because we were unable to make the turbine bearing oil-feed perform as expected. That’ll have to be investigated and put right when we get back onto it because that’s enough engine tweaking for now.
We tend to sicken ourselves with tin-bashing then go off to be jet engine techies for a change of scenery but the tin-bashing scenery is changing anyway and with K7’s structure now more or less complete our attention turns more and more to making her watertight. Next time the diary is updated the boat will likely be skinned over half her length. We’ve dry built her for a look-see…
)
There’re some weary rivet holes to lose and we’re investigating a build sequence that will let us assemble and fully rivet several of the panels before they’re loaded and fastened down. This (hopefully) will save a world of pain trying to set rivets in near-impossible corners – we’ll see.
Oh, and before I go… remember I mentioned the shrinking disc and more of that later? Well this is the most genius piece of kit ever invented for tin-bashing and if you like to mess with cars or seriously injured hydroplanes then it’s a must-have gadget.
)
It’s also a health and safety maniac’s worst nightmare. It’s basically a stainless steel disc with a turned up edge and what you do is throw the guard off your grinder and shove this on instead. Then you spin it up and wrestle with the immense gyroscopic forces until it’s positioned over the lump in your tin that you want rid of. It works on the most ridiculously simple principle – friction.
What happens is this. If you heat metal then quench it suddenly it contracts and shrinks. Repeat this process and you can dispense with some fairly hefty bumps in your wounded hydroplane. You can do this with a gas flame as you’ve probably seen us doing before but the trouble here is the speed with which heat soaks through aluminium and the slowness with which a flame pours it in – you end up working quite a large area. You can get around this with an oxy-acetylene flame but it’s way too hot making it easy to melt a hole in your panel. This is especially a problem when you have a series of small crowns near to one another as all you want to do is get rid of the crowns without shrinking the whole area. This is where the shrinking disc is absolutely brilliant.
What you do is push the spinning face of the disc against the crown on the metal and it heats where it touches – simple as that. Once it’s hot, and it only takes a mo to come up to temperature, you blast it with a spray of cold, soapy water. Or ‘surpy watter’ as we call it, derived from the phonetic spelling of the Geordie pronunciation. The surpy watter instantly shocks the hot metal into contraction then you reapply the disc and repeat as necessary until you’re standing in a puddle and everything you’re working with, including your grinder with its mains electricity supply, is dripping wet. The din is unbelievable and the disc will pick up and fire shards of mad-hot aluminium shrapnel if you let it get too hot, assuming it doesn’t take a hold of the sticky metal and catapult the spinning disc at your face. Like I said – the H&S maniacs would faint at the sight of such a lethal device but what a piece of kit and, like any slightly dangerous tool, a little common sense will tame it.
And finally… I was told recently of yet another H&S nutter who recently inspected a fully armed Tornado on the front line. It had 6000lbs of high explosives lashed to its belly, it was bursting at the seams with kerosene and was about to go airborne in a war zone but the aircrew couldn’t get aboard because the steps didn’t have a handrail…
Until next time…
February 2010. Part II
Have you noticed how difficult it’s becoming to buy proper light bulbs these days?
All you’re allowed, it seems, is those eco-do-good anaemic jobs that take a week to warm up then give out less light than my Hallowe’en lantern used to when I was a kid. Even the lanterns themselves have gone all disabled-access since pumpkins were invented. I’ll have you know that once a year the sheep of Northumberland went without their dinner because the farmer sold all his frozen turnips to us excited kids so we could inflict lasting tendon damage on ourselves mining the interior from what may as well have been a granite cannonball. Its contorted face, eventually backlit by a meagre candle, usually reflected the agony we’d put ourselves through to create it.
Not any more… this year my kids had a fantastic likeness of Capt. Jack Sparrow glowing through the skin of a supermarket pumpkin carved by my completely non-arty sister using only a plastic spoon and a stencil downloaded from the Interweb. On the other hand, whenever I go to my folks’ house the appalling light oozing from the eco-pansy bulbs they’ve been forced to adopt makes me feel like I’m looking at the world with semolina pudding in my eyes while they wonder whether they’re developing cataracts. And to what end? Oh yes, I almost forgot, we’re saving the planet.
One of the more ludicrous manifestations of human conceit is that we’re not allowed to die – ever. Even with all dignity and continence gone and a pressing desire to sample the afterlife some idiot will keep spooning gruel into you until you finally ooze through the mattress. Too many foxes… shoot them, snare them, gas them down the hole while they feed their babies; just don’t ever give them a sporting chance by chasing them with a dog. Too many of any species and nature will organise a thorough cull to balance things but too many humans and you get Sir Bob Bloody Geldof…
Naturally the best way to be sure no human ever dies is to make sure they never get ill in the first place so we’re told in no uncertain terms to cook meat thoroughly or we’ll get to munch on botulism and porcine tapeworms. How many semolina lightbulbs do you reckon you could run with the power it takes to cook your Sunday roast? About a hundred euro-do-good-bulbs for a couple of hours every Sunday as it happens and that’s without upscaling your carbon footprint to collect your migraine prescription.
But this pales into insignificance alongside what our idiotic local authority get up to every Wednesday night. Why Wednesdays (and sometimes Thursdays too) I have no idea but having invariably worked late on the tin boat my route home takes me first past this…
)
…then this…
)
…and finally.
)
Notice a pattern emerging? How about the pattern of towers each hung with four, 2kW metal-halide lamps? There are forty-eight of them in the pic above so that’s 96,000Watts to light a rectangle of grass in the name of grown men emulating my collies – only they’re not.
There’s no one there! I go home anywhere between 8.30 and 9.30 week-in, week-out and there’s never anyone there yet the lights suck on the National Grid like a newborn needs milk. There’s another two ball-chasing fields en-route with more of the same if I give Mike a lift home so that’s five within a couple of miles; (and I’ve since found another between writing and editing this piece).
I assume the ball-chasists were out earlier and that their lack of imagination will at least reap them some fitness benefits but once they’ve had enough falling down in the mud in the middle of winter why can’t they switch the bloody lights off?
I’d guess there’s bureaucracy at the back of it. I mean, there’s not a chance of the caretaker showing Bert the ball-chaser where the switch is… oh no. It’ll take a man in a high-vis’ jacket and a hard-hat (in case a tumbling communications satellite or re-entering lump of space junk gets him) to actually throw the switch and in the meantime they’re squandering more energy than a small sun. Let’s do some silly numbers. Take forty-eight lamps at 2kW, less the ones with popped bulbs that it takes eight do-gooders to change by the time they’ve written the risk assessments, and you have maybe 90,000Watts of lighting. The ball-chasists do their collie thing for a couple of hours then another hour seems to go by before Mr hi-vis-hard-hat arrives to switch everything off again, so say three hours per field per session and there’s a half dozen fields within a mile or two of our workshop so that’s over half a million Watts now …enough to light some 27,000 Euro-limpwrist bulbs, (when they eventually warm up, that is). That’s around 3000 average family homes with every single light on for a few hours every Wednesday and Thursday evening. Or you could cook Christmas dinner with all the trimmings twice a week for the crews of four Nimitz class aircraft carriers. Better still – if the local authority has that much spare electricity to throw away why not share it amongst the old folks during this especially cold winter instead?
But don’t you forget to recycle your milk cartons in case the planet gets poorly…
And while we’re on the subject of recycling here’s a snippet. Way back in the early days when the museologists were telling us we couldn’t fart near K7 in case methane reacted with blue paint and originality was lost I had a pivotal argument with them when wanting to shift something to get at a trapped pocket of mud. Here and there pieces were added to the boat by the simple expedient of welding them on, which means you can’t get at what’s underneath without shifting the weld. Now then, as a lifelong apprentice to the art of hot-metal-gluing, I know it’s simple to cut through a weld with a fine disc or a die-grinder, mend what you have to mend, then pop a new weld on top – simple – but that meant losing originality, apparently.
What’s the difference, I asked, between nuts, bolts, screws, rivets or a weld? They’re all just a means of fastening one piece of material to another yet we’re allowed to shift all the others but cutting through a weld then replacing it is a no no… You have to cut through a rivet to shift it too but that’s OK.
I was told and, get this, that ‘nuts, bolts, screws and rivets have no historical significance’.
Eh? You can’t grind out a few toenail-sized bits of weld but you can sling a big bag of bolts... I think not. I asked whether a bolt might take on some historical significance if it was last put there by Donald or Leo…
“Erm…” was all the answer I got.
Every fastener on the machine has been carefully bagged and labelled so we can put them back. Each will have its threads cleaned and checked before being slapped with a spoonful of assembly paste and wound back in. Apart from anything else most of them are sizes and threads that are a pain in the backside to obtain these days. Each is being carefully shot blasted then brightened in some of Chemetall-Trevor’s clever wizardry before making its way to ‘Hel’s Kitchen’ where a fine zinc-plate is applied in the interests of attention to detail and longevity.
)
Notice all the wires with freshly plated nuts and bolts hanging from everywhere while they dry… recycling, you see, and it doesn’t use a mega-squilliwatt of electricity either.
)
We’re very definitely an equal-opportunities employer. We have old and young (though technically the young oughtn’t to be interested).
There’s the great, Doddy, of course. Well into his seventies and the only bloke we know of to work on K7 both before and after she was wrecked, Bluetooth headset firmly affixed in case his mobile goes off while he’s tin-bashing.
)
Then there’s this young lad who turns up from time to time, though why any young bloke would take an interest in a two-ton fire-breathing, jet-powered blend of sex and exquisite engineering remains a mystery.
)
His name is already lost to us as he answers to ‘Youth’ and has hair and testosterone levels that us more mature gentlemen can only feel nostalgia for.
Couples are welcome too. This is the wreckage of Donald’s original seat pan. It was suspended in the water column by the scrap that carried it to the bottom and so missed the benefit of a cloak of anaerobic mud.
)
Good news is, though, that it doesn’t do much once the foam and wood seat plops down on top because the formers beneath are bombproof – they even survived the crash virtually undamaged – so it’s getting enough of a mend to rivet it back in then it’ll get a coat of paint and some doublers where it’s threadbare.
Jordan here is very handy on the tools…
)
…and the lovely Lucy can make patches with the best of ’em.
)
They’ll not be long having that seat pan back to useable condition.
)
The cockpit is coming together at an exciting pace. Mike and I collaborated on another important chunk the original of which vanished into the lake never to return and so had to be recreated from grainy, old photos. K7’s steering gear runs down the left-hand side of the hull and to keep Donald’s trousers out of the workings the footwell is partitioned off with yet another piece of tinware.
)
We’re cracking on with K7’s systems too and that’s lots of fun – spannering the parts that’ll make her live and breathe. This is the oil tank from her original Orpheus, not bad for three and a half decades on the bottom of a lake.
)
Even more astonishing is that we recovered almost enough useable oil from it to run the new engine.
)
It started dribbling from the oil pipes so we popped a cup under it, then another, and another…
I’ve been for a looky-see at the engine test facility and most impressive it was too. This is a small Rolls-Royce Viper installation instrumented and ready to go.
)
Pretty, isn’t it. The Avon next door isn’t so aesthetically pleasing but it’s a big bruiser of a thing that was found in a field, I’m told, and is only run occasionally for demonstration purposes.
)
There’s an ocean of buttons and pretty lights to make it all work too…
)
…but never mind that, it’s all so much old hat, because the boffins are busy writing an algorithm to run the start sequence and engine monitoring (and, presumably, the shutdown too) remotely over the Internet. We’ll be testing our engines in one of these cells later in the year to be sure they’re performing perfectly and that our start procedure is optimised. It’s very important to have it right to avoid engine damage, apparently. I daresay K7’s never was and that we’d get away with it considering the limited running we envisage but if the best brains in the business agree to work with you then you damn-well do it their way.
Speaking of the best brains in the business, our fuel control system is coming along nicely too. Three of the engineers who are working on it came to visit recently to dig out some spares from our comprehensive stash. Many parts are being re-made by the original manufacturer before the various rebuilt modules go into their test-hall but even they bought in some of the parts back in the day and a set of evacuated bellows would have been a show-stopper if replacements couldn’t be found. The ones from the lake had all perforated and filled with water but this presented no problem – I had a full set on the shelf. We sorted those then had fish and chips for lunch on the banks of the river Tyne. These good people will have their praises sung from the rooftops one day, by the way. Just as soon as their corporate PR people decide how they want to play it. Until then I’ll not be stealing their thunder.
And whenever there’s five spare minutes – something that doesn’t happen often – we get back to more mundane matters and smooth out a few more lumps and bumps in that left-hand cockpit wall.
)
It’s there or thereabouts now. It needs a guide-coat next – basically a thin coat of paint so you can rub it over with a sanding block to pick out the highs and lows. Having done that you raise the low spots to meet the highs then uniformly shrink the area back to give a smooth surface. It’s straightforward – honest – and excellent training for mending the upper fairings once we’ve patched the crumbly patches.
The upper fairings are still a bit of a way off, however, and we’ll not get to them if we don’t make some extra pennies so now for an appeal.
Finances are a little perilous over here because we’ve not done any fundraising in a while, the economy is in ruin generally and our media profile has been low due to our having nothing really newsworthy to report in so long so please, please, please take a look in our shop and treat yourself – go on, you know you want to.
One thing we’ve always promised, and we’ve stuck to it, is that all funds raised go directly into the rebuild so we have no paid staff to look after things like fundraising, which then looks after itself because we’re cheap to run; except things are getting expensive nowadays.
We’ll be releasing some new must-have items soon plus the third in our series of DVDs so hopefully we’ll return to an even keel shortly. Good pun, or what? The filming session was the usual masterpiece of subtle yet effective lighting, a professional cameraman and a skilled presenter…
)
And I leave you with a piece of art. It’s self explanatory.
)
February 2010
Doesn’t it drive you absolutely bonkers when people say or do things without engaging their brain first? When they just blindly accept what’s presented without wondering whether there’s a better way or fail to challenge stuff that’s clearly nonsense.
Way back in the eighties some university boffins decided that what would fire the imagination of us young, engineering neophytes was a lecture by someone who’d walked our path already. The first performer had been contracted by Kangol to invent a self-putting-on seatbelt arrangement for the American market so drivers didn’t drop their Big Mac Meal whilst buckling in. He was dull as drizzle. The second performer had worked for Rolls-Royce on an early incarnation of the RB211 and ought to have been more exciting but his tales of working stress calc’s on the screws holding the cowlings together in the event of a blade-off incident thrilled like mowing grass in the rain.
For that reason I fled such an awful prospect fast as I could and joined a couple of sports-car-driving associates who’d set up in business arranging mortgages for wealthy footballists and local gangsters. I was young, it was fun and it lead me, ultimately, to a training course at Abbey Life’s headquarters in Bournemouth where I met an amazing character called Clive Fletcher.
Clive was most notable in that he had only one hand, the other having never grown, he explained, because whilst in the womb with his twin sister he’d had his wrist pressed into her back. And no, she didn’t have a spare hand where it wasn’t needed – I asked that one.
He was president of the Society of One-Armed Golfists (I think) and could knot both his tie and shoelaces with the one hand he possessed but, best of all, Clive was a brilliant observer of humankind.
Abbey’s headquarters was a tall building, three or four floors, with the canteen on the top and a pair of lifts up the middle, which meant that come lunchtime, unless you were on the ground floor or fancied the stairs, you had to wait for the floor below to empty before there was room in the lift. This meant bloody long queues by the time you arrived in the canteen especially if you were on the third floor when the dinner bell rang.
“Watch this,” Clive said one lunchtime as stuffed lift after stuffed lift stopped to briefly display its passengers before sweeping them lunch-wards.
“Excuse me…” he held the lift doors and called the next batch of gluttons to attention. “Would you all mind stepping out for a moment.” He sounded very official and looked the part too in his sharp suit. Some exchanged glances before filing meekly into the hallway where they huddled, awaiting further orders until, at the crucial moment, Clive released the doors and, as they glided elegantly shut, slipped nimbly between them and grinning mischievously at the herd made a sound they ought to have recognised, “Baaaaahh,” he said. (Clive – if you read this, look me up)
Absolute genius… and the best part was that everyone involved took the point in good humour and learned an important lesson that day; one that came back to me when seeking out a snack last thing before bed recently.
As an officially adopted museologist in my middle age I take a new-found professional interest in anything with a label and often practice on my fridge contents as though they’re objects to be interpreted. I therefore became curious about a packet of Marks & Spencer breaded chicken breast that, as well as being specially selected (you’d expect someone to flick the green, whiffy ones off the conveyor) and British (fair enough, we have space enough over here to breed a few hens for local consumption) also boasted of being ‘hand trimmed’.
Come on, what exactly does that mean? What must be trimmed that a machine can’t handle? And how poisonous or unsightly is the bit that has to come off supposing one of the vast number of chicken breasts assumedly sold by M&S on a daily basis should slip by their army of hand-trimmers?
Further down the track you’ll find other specialists where the successfully hand-trimmed lumps of dead hen having been ‘cured’ (of what it doesn’t say) then ‘cooked’ are next, ‘hand coated in breadcrumbs’. You can see it can’t you... miles of hand-trimmed chicken streaming by as the ‘crumb-chuckers’ hurl confetti-like handfuls. Is there any need for a human to fling breadcrumbs? I think not so M&S should buy a crumb-chucking machine, rest their crumb-flingers, and pass the resulting production cost-down to the consumer.
Of course it’s all sales bullshit that, though probably possessed of a grain of truth in the interests of advertising standards, serves only to convince the masses that really they’re not paying good money for processed mush steam-cleaned from the miserable carcases of played-out battery hens.
But Waitrose completely stole the misdirection of the week award in my fridge this time with a simple label that read,
‘Discovered by Columbus
RED CHILLIES’
How brilliant is that? Are they hand trimmed? Hand picked or hand anything else? Who cares? They could have flourished around the back of a Venezuelan cesspit and been picked and packed by a leper but you’d not think to wonder because they were discovered by Columbus.
Most folk believe any bloody thing they’re told. Baaaaahh…
And that’s a big problem for the Bluebird Project now and again.
For example, wherever did the notion that Bluebird was allowed one run at 100mph originate? We never said any such thing and nor did anyone else so far as I know yet it was faithfully reported in the media, which meant it had to be true, so now I’m forever being asked whether it could be a bit dangerous to try and go straight to 100mph without a few extra runs to warm up. Uh-huh, we know this…
Then the press started calling to ask if they could come and interview the team prior to us making our one run at 100mph on January 27th. The origin of that is a proper mystery. We have absolutely no idea who chose the date but The Times had it in their diary, which made it law, so now we have people calling to angrily protest that it wasn’t adequately publicised and have they missed it.
Hello! Spend ten minutes on the net researching things and spare yourself the embarrassment of asking stupid questions.
These things do get better over time though. I’m off teaching the black-art of ‘conserveering’ to museum professionals soon. I had a go last year and was invited back so it must’ve gone OK; and I’m speaking at a big museum-type bash sometime in March too where I was asked to, ‘be controversial’. I can do that methinks, so all that nonsense about us being amateur, museological heretics bent on the destruction of a national treasure seems to have gone to bed at last. It’s also pretty much universally accepted that the HLF cocked up and let a flagship project slip their grasp but then it’s equally accepted that Stevie Wonder will pass his driving test before that useless shower get anything right.
But try telling people that we’re not going out to try and break a record or that I have no intention whatsoever of trying to drive it and, nope, they’ve read the opposite in the paper so it must be gospel. Baaaaahh…
One thing that was reported, strangely, and which also happened to be true is that we found K7’s throttle pedal. It turned up 36m south of where the boat hit the water and the only thing I can think of is that sometime later a char fisherman snagged it, got it off the bottom then lost it again having drifted south. There was some fishing line around it confirming the possibility. It came up rolled in a ball with various bulkheads and a chunk of the frame from F-19 but in isolation it was easily recognisable.
)
Here it is complete with the linkage that once attached it to its control run and ultimately to the fuel control unit beneath the engine. The tubular, and rather bent, link rod is actually heading off in the wrong direction in this shot but it made everything stand up for the photo. The assemblage was fixed into the boat at F-19 with a couple of dodgy brackets and some self-aligning bearings. We got one of the brackets back…
)
…the other remains in the lake and it’s a miracle the pedal stayed attached without it as there was nothing to keep it from simply popping out of the bearing and landing in a tree somewhere to the north. We gave it a few coats of TLC then gently placed it, complete with replacement bracket, back from whence it came.
)
The cruddy, old bracket is hidden away behind the bulkhead on the right and held by those four, blue pins. The new bracket is the one you can see almost amidships. Archive photographs also revealed that the pedal had a large footplate attached and screw holes testified to this so that went on too. Had we not recovered the pedal there’s little likelihood we’d have designed its replacement so ugly and agricultural. Got the job done though, didn’t it.
At some stage the cockpit floor was raised too, doubtless in the interests of driver comfort. Donald didn’t have very big feet so he’d almost have to hold his leg in mid air to properly press the pedal. An easy fix… a raised section was fixed between F-18 and F-19. It was a strange thing to build in that it absolutely had to be right because there was nowhere to go wrong in squeezing a slab of tin between the bulkheads according to a photo but it just doesn’t look like we expected it to when willed into solid reality.
)
We’ve been into some crazy conserveering again too. Take a peep below.
)
See the right-hand section of scrap? You’re looking at the underside of the right-hand cockpit rail and back when we did our dry build it was considered beyond our abilities as they were then. Not so now. It was recently extracted from the carnage and pushed about with a hammer. First we got it flat, straight and ready to accept that patch you see lying along its upper edge in the pic below, which is actually its lower edge, if you follow. (The flat bar lying on top is to clamp it flat during the welding process)
)
We knocked together a small fixture to position the ends of the inner rails based on data extracted from the rebuilt air intake mouths.
)
Then put the shape back into both rails with a spot of wheeling…
)
There you go – good as new. Now what was all the fuss about?
)
Bet you didn’t know the inner rails were curved like that… neither did we until we decided that was the only way to bring them parallel at the top then a good study of the archive pic’s revealed that this was how they did it in the olden days. The crash rolled the right-hand rail into a snarled mess and pushed most of the shape out of the left so it took a bit of working out.
Not as much as this though.
Remember how we let the right-hand half of the cockpit opening back into the new panels? First we built this.
)
We spent a long time getting the opening perfect in every detail around a wooden tool that became known as ‘Rob’s Coffee Table’. It’s a tight squeeze between those rails with a gap only a smidge over twenty-one inches wide to clamber through. Then, once we had it perfect, we chopped it up and welded in this ragged piece of scrap where once it was a thing of beauty.
)
It’s the original opening and we used the one we’d already built as a gauge to put its shape back before grafting it in. Not bad at all, though it did hurt a little cutting into our lovingly sculpted cockpit opening. Thank goodness the other side was buggered.
)
Well it was at the time but somewhere along the way it got slightly mended.
)
It still needs some work before the blue paint goes on but you see where we’re going. In actual fact we could send it all to the body shop as it is and it’d come out shiny blue, albeit with the addition of a slap of filler. There’d be no shame in that either because we’ve dug out no shortage of the stuff from the recovered panels but a properly mended skin shouldn’t need filler.
Of course the cockpit is an exciting place to be as it’s recreated and we all gaze upon it for real and for the first time but it isn’t half busy in there some days.
)
It wasn’t quite anticipated – though it always lurked as a possibility – that we’d end up with most of the original bodywork back on the pointy end but that’s the way it’s going. With the inclusion of the second half of the cockpit opening and both inner rails there’s now more genuine K7 up there than replacement parts. Not bad, eh?
Other stuff – we acquired a bagful of genuine Bloctube spares recently. It’s amazing what’s lying about out there in bins and boxes and a supply turned up eventually so we now have all the joints, rods, cranks and ball-joints we need to put K7’s controls back exactly as they used to be. That’ll be interesting. We have a visit soon from the good people who are sorting our engine too. The old workshop will need a spring clean to say the least! I’ve been to their place – they make horribly expensive-looking bits for the Eurofighter there – so it’s, shall we say, tidier than ours. It’s all go this year, and very exciting too.
Here’s a lovely item you’ll soon be able to add to your collection. This is Arthur’s latest painting entitled Patience.
)
Arthur and I collaborated on this one. Me supplying reference material in the form of sonar shots, photos and underwater footage – Arthur creating this stunning image.
Believe me, this is exactly how K7 looked on the bottom of the lake only without the underwater visibility. And here’s an interesting twist. You see the fragment of wreckage in the foreground, the piece with the flags on. Well that was really there just off the main wreck and when Arthur painted that small piece he ground some genuine paint from the boat into a very fine powder and mixed it with his paint to get exactly the right blue.
Now here’s the deal. Arthur has very kindly allowed us to produce fifty prints to help the project and Chris at Metroimage has agreed to print them. From there they will go to Arthur who will not only sign them but will add a couple of brush strokes using the genuine ground up K7 paint making each one effectively an original. When these are gone they’re gone so if you want one get one sooner rather than later! Have a look at this.
.
Thanks to Arthur and Metroimage for all the support and to Mike for the fabulous little promo video and let’s not forget Steve Rothery who composed the acompanying piece of music entitled The Wreck.
By the way, the name, Patience, was my idea. I always imagined K7 waiting… waiting for someone to come and rescue her and to feel the tools of man working on her skins again.
This opportunity has come at a particularly opportune time too because funds are low at the moment and we don’t want to have to slow the build for the want of a few quid. We really need to wrap this job up next year or we’ll be pushed into third place if it tips into 2012.
Our dear Queen has her diamond jubilee in 2012 and that’s before another bout of Olympics fervour subjects us to hoards of people running, jumping and throwing spears. Groan! Time to get back to work…
End of part 1.
January 2010.
This coming October it’ll be ten years since I cautiously crawled down 140ft of rope provided by the navy in 1967 (we found it reaching for the surface from an old clump weight and nicked it smart-ish) and crashed into the mortal remains of Donald’s Bluebird. Where did all the time go? It’s frightening.
The team made its annual pilgrimage to Coniston again this year through weather reminiscent of early 2001 when we were diving every weekend. How and why did we tolerate that? We don’t even do the January 4th, freeze our knackers off at the end of the jetty thing these days, preferring instead to imbibe a gallon of beer and stuff our faces in The Sun Inn.
)
We enjoyed an hilarious evening with the WAGs and a gaggle of kids most of whom weren’t even born while K7 was in the lake so it was a little depressing next morning to acknowledge the end of the Christmas holidays and square up to another year. The tree came down after a treacherous drive home through blizzard conditions, decorations were stowed for another year then I finally wandered down the local to relax with a nightcap.
“I lost two and a half litres of blood, you know…”
That woke me up... The girl beside me, blonde, a bit curvy (if I’m to be polite) and not very old, was telling her story. Two and a half litres – that seemed a lot. About five pints. She didn’t look big enough.
She’d come to whine at her mate, the barmaid, but things got busy so I got it instead.
“You sure it was litres and not pints?” I asked sceptically.
“No, litres, definitely. They said there’d be some blood but it was everywhere…”
I sipped my beer and pictured the mess.
“I was in labour for fifty seven hours before the bairn was born... and then…they wouldn’t let me go outside for a tab!” (Cigarette, in Geordie-speak).
Her resentment was boundless but the horror was lost on me.
“They said I might fall over ’cause of all the blood and stuff and wouldn’t let me out of bed; but I needed a tab and I’d been in hospital for days so I was down to my last one. My last one!”
The pack she slammed on the bar to make her point bore the stark legend, ‘smoking may harm your unborn child’.
For all I was dismayed it wasn’t for her reasons and now I was curious about the ending – so I could write it down here, mostly. So, feigning empathy, I listened…
“And he (I was soon to discover that ‘he’ was the boyfriend and father) was ‘on the drink’ that week (as though entire weeks are normally set aside for such things) so he didn’t get to the hospital until the next day, then he was still rotten with a hangover. I had to send him straight back out for more tabs…”
But this was the best part…
“Did you know,” she said crossly, “that they don’t sell tabs in the hospital?”
I think I was supposed to be outraged.
What? One of life’s staples denied in such a caring environment – how could they?
“It kind of goes against their ethics doesn’t it,” I suggested instead.
“Eh?”
“Well they’re in the business of trying to extend your life, not shorten it, aren’t they.”
But I may as well have discussed the Large Hadron Collider’s recent head-on crash between two beams of protons with the combined energy of 540 billion electron volts and how this brought scientists a step closer to proving the existence of the Higgs Boson sub-atomic particle. She abandoned tab availability to whinge about the council instead.
It seemed all her pregnant friends from the homeless list received a roof within two months but her suffering lasted a full eighteen and even then she wasn’t impressed. Unfortunately, the interior décor wasn’t to her liking so, whilst waiting for the new plaster to dry, the six-week deadline to move from homelessness to council cosseting expired and the property was being offered to someone with genuine need. How much misfortune can one individual endure?
Her trials reminded me of poor Donald out there on Lake Eyre with a dejected press, unexpected rain and mile after mile of knackered salt – not!
But the bit about the council buggering about (right or wrong) did hit a nerve.
I remembered a schoolteacher from way back; her husband had been a Japanese POW in WWII leaving him with a pathological loathing of rice… show him so much as a grain and he’d work himself into an awful state. I remember sort of getting it at the time and this was the mid seventies so he’d had thirty-odd years to get over it.
But that’s not how it works. For example, although the Hapless Lottery Failure led us a merry dance for four long years and we’ve been rid of the spineless fools since 2006, any form of bureaucracy gives me a shiver. If the real world ran on bureaucracy we’d be extinct as a species and I pondered this last week as I went cap-in-hand for help from industry, again.
Let me explain…
Just suppose that absolutely fundamental to K7’s return to the water was the removal of a lamp post on her route.
Suppose also that the lamp post came under the jurisdiction of some powerfully resourced, global company used to fiercely defending its position in the market. What would happen is that you’d find the project manager in charge of lamp posts on their contact page with a direct line, e-mail and probably a picture too. You’d read up on all the successful projects he or she had successfully completed then call to say, we’re the Bluebird Project and we’re going to get a tune out of Donald Campbell’s boat except your lamp post is in our way.
It’s like ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, you strut before both judges and public hoping you’ve got the steps down.
We’ve done a half-decent job up to now so we’re usually invited to convince potential benefactors that their logo slowly sinking beneath the surface of Coniston Water won’t be beamed to millions worldwide. You get one roll of the dice and fools aren’t suffered so if they buy-in you have to work bloody hard to earn respect until the president steps in and calls whoever runs the lamp post department to explain that budget is available for training so best grab an apprentice and get them up to speed on lamp post removal starting quick-as with the one in our way.
Then there’s the bureaucrat’s way… God help us!
Twenty phone calls may connect you to the Department of Public Erections who’ll tell you they only meet twice a year and you should write via their legal department. What was the collective noun we chose for them back in the day? a ‘dither’, I think, and it still fits perfectly.
However, the chink in bureaucratic armour is to get one of them thinking a colleague might steal an advantage and get their puckered lips a rung closer to that great arse in the sky so it’s usually possible to get someone to hear you out. After some months a committee will gather nervously to inform you that moving a lamp post can’t be considered further until every moaning old tosser in Christendom has been consulted in case one of them uses it as a lighthouse when walking the dog and might break an eyelash tripping over the kerb the one night it’s missing.
Incidentally – don’t dog owners do some strange things? ( I have two dogs, by the way) I wrote a piece awhile back about ‘Mrs Dog-Coat’, a crazy old biddy who bollocked me rigid for being environmentally unfriendly with this Bluebird thing while her unfortunate dog roasted alive in a quilted coat under the August sun – the point being that she was too misguided to even take care of her pet never mind bleat about burning a spoonful of kerosene. (Diary Archive 6th August 2008)
Well I met Mr Dog-Coat the other day. This bloke had at least chosen the correct meteorological conditions to apply a quilt to his mutt – approximately ten inches of frozen snow – and was enthused by the Bluebird Project too but concerned that getting the boat wet constituted an ‘unnecessary risk’ whilst in the same breath telling me how he’d recently flown to an avalanche zone to slither down a mountain on two strips of wood… Nor had he noticed that, despite its quilt with sleeves, his dog was running about in its bare feet.
Odd, isn’t it, that we suggest getting an old boat wet and we’re instantly rugby tackled by a bevy of health and safety maniacs but say you’re going skiing, mountaineering, scuba diving or free-fall parachuting and no one cares two hoots who you crash into, run over, fall on or drown.
I digress as ever...
The commercial world would uproot your lamp post in five minutes flat then plant it again before nightfall. The bureaucrats, on the other hand, wouldn’t get close to moving the offending street furniture until they’d drudged their way through the next phase.
Canvassing moaners achieves nothing except proving that moaners have been canvassed unless there’s enough of them to cause an underwear malfunction in Whitehall. Next you have to chase about raising money to pay for a report by a ‘consultant’ who once saw a lamp post before being horizontally promoted into bureaucratic retirement for not being very good at it. If you’re lucky they’ll next squander public money without you having to lift a finger but now and again you get to fill in the million forms of many and various funding organisations then stick six months onto the timetable until their committees meet. Your fifty-page options appraisal finally arrives about a year after you first asked and covers the whole gamut from leaving well alone in case a rare species of bat chooses to nest on the warm bulb that summer – assuming it’s not been swapped for one of those dingy, do-gooder jobs that don’t actually produce any light and therefore any heat – to pulling the thing out of the soil forthwith and the inevitable effect this will have on some office-bound twit’s carbon footprint. Consultants, the bureaucratic variety at least, never commit in any way just in case they end up down a rung on that ladder.
Eventually, about two years later, the committee finally sits to consider your request and passes a motion to move three litter bins on the high street whilst leaving your lamp post exactly where it is!
But did you notice recently… rather a lot of water tried to wash big bits of Cumbria into the Irish Sea yet new bridges shot back up overnight and a whole railway station sprouted in only seven days. I bet the desk-jockey in charge of risk assessments was in the huff that week. The chance to bugger about for months on end, to puff up into a self-important, little tin-god for the foreseeable future and create an ocean of paperwork was swept away in one necessity-driven swoop. Just shows what can be done when the bureaucratic control loop is short circuited. Not that I have anything against health and safety awareness per se… It’s just that to quote Chuck Yeager, “The best way to fly safe is to know what the hell you are doing.” And as we soldier bravely into the fourth – and hopefully penultimate – year of our build we’re hoping that we just about know what the hell we’re doing.
The year began with a couple of pieces of good news too. Our approach to the aerospace community for help with valves, widgets, gizmos and pipes was met enthusiastically – as you’d expect from industry where someone is in charge and empowered to decide stuff. But, surprisingly, the bureaucratic machine munching away at our request to ‘sensitively display K7 in a controlled environment following her conservation-led rebuild in order to properly interpret not only record breaking generally and the Campbell dynasty in particular but also the entire social fabric of the fifties and sixties’ (try quoting that pile of museological manure on a single breath) was given a boost with a particularly accommodating draft proposal that will now go forward for all those dog owners to bicker over. I own two dogs, by the way. Border Collies, which, I was informed tonight, are the cleverest dogs in Britain according to a recent study.
The irony of all this paper pushing is that the process may prove so slow that we’re well beyond our target completion date before the shouting is over but this may prove a godsend in the grand scheme of things.
We always saw rebuilding what we pulled from the lake as a three-year effort – one year to strip and clean what we had, another to dry-build it and the third to assemble for real. This means we’re behind schedule because we ought to have a centre hull by now. But factor in the unmendable floors and the missing chunk of frame and we’re quite justifiably eight months adrift. We’d then allowed for however long it was going to take to build the sponsons and systems, which is this year, for launch in 2011. We’ll just have to see how we get on.
The floors are in the final stages with the rivet twins often perched back there spewing unending commentary drowned occasionally by the blatting noise of the rivet gun or the occasional high, whizz of an air-drill as an awkward rivet comes out again to be upsized or replaced.
)
Mick is the ‘block-man’, pressing a polished, metal block against the stem of the rivet to first swell it into the hole then swage the end into a mushroom that firmly clamps the aluminium skins together. It’s a very skilful job that disproves the old adage that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Rob, meanwhile, mans the rivet gun on the other side. He has to drill the hoes in the first place and make the call regarding whatever rivet is to go in it. I think that’s why they mutter endlessly at one another. Worse still, Rob still makes us suffer ball-chasing on a Saturday afternoon but his team suffered a proper drubbing last week at the hands of some high-falutin team with, it seemed, not a single Englishman kicking a ball for them so maybe he’ll not put it on next week in case the same thing happens.
)
Next job for the rivet-twins once those floors are properly buttoned up is clearing out dead rivets from inside frame tubes so we can inhibit them before the outer skins start going back. It’s easier with the skins off but still a proper, fiddly job made excruciatingly difficult because the largest hole we’ll allow in the frame tubes is 10mm and some of the bigger chunks of rivet debris will only just pass through with a bit of jiggling.
)
As an aside, here’s an example of mindless bureaucracy working in our favour, for a change… See that elegant, little forcep-like gizmo being used to manually extract rivet fragments. Its proper use is the removal of beads, peas, bits of paper and anything else small children pop into their noses or ears with frustrating regularity. On the end of that long proboscis is a delicate set of jaws to grapple very tiny items a very long way up your baby’s schnoz. Now here’s the point. Our local hospital put this instrument to good use the moment it came available but, presumably because bureaucracy moves with all the urgency of tectonic plates, they had no facility in their paperwork to book the used instruments into the hospital dishwasher or whatever they employ to make their surgical knives and spoons good to go again. So what did they do with these beautiful pieces of engineering smeared with little more than a fine gloss of earwax or baby snot? Yes – they threw them in the bin. They only needed a rinse under the tap, for goodness sake! We’ve extracted dozens of metal splinters from an assortment of fingers as well hundreds of rivets with ours yet no one has died of blood poisoning yet. They’d not be so stupid in an African or Russian hospital.
Meanwhile, Mike has been exercising his prodigious talent for being (by his own admission) anal and anoracky by working minor miracles at the pointy end. In his own words, here’s a good example.
*
Sticky Business
By Mike Bull
We’re all very aware on the project that pride in a weld well done or rivets well set doesn’t impress our average viewing public anything like as much as shiny blue paint or a proudly displayed Union Flag would, and as many workshop visitors are as impressed by Bill’s design for the rollover jig as they are by the splendidly reconstructed structure of the boat suspended within it. Likewise, drop the new seat into the reconstructed original cockpit and even some of the team go into a hush for a minute, as if it’s Donald’s own upholstery they are gazing at rather than a latter-day reproduction. It’s the human element- seeing something that can be related to the person that once sat inside and operated this proud craft.
Well, there’s perhaps no more human an element to Bluebird the craft than her cockpit, Donald’s place of work and ultimately of course, where he died. Endlessly altered between 1955 and 1967 it’s the human focal-point, a place that everyone will want to see; like the rest of the boat it must be absolutely spot-on in every detail, but unfortunately for us it’s totally packed with odd little fixtures, fittings, widgets and tiny details!
Take for example the dashboard- as I write the original remains to be recovered, and the full story of the researching and creation of the replacement item is a tale for another time. But just the complicated series of brackets that held it in place along with the steering column have taken no end of working out, with virtually nothing to work on but the original cockpit photos (of which we have exceptionally good copies, and also some pics that have never been seen outside of the project) and the evidence left in the recovered remains- in the case of the dash, three holes in the one remaining cockpit rail and a couple of original scribe marks. For all the hours I spend in the workshop, I spend as many at home endlessly researching this stuff, and it’ll be good and it’ll be right, but boy have I worked for it!
But sometimes you just get it so easy, it’s spooky. Sometimes, someone comes along to help you, as was the case when I recreated one small detail of the new dashboard- the labelling. Nice chap he was by all accounts too- his name was Donald.
At some point, Donald Campbell returned from a trip to the USA with a ‘Dymo-Mite Tapewriter’. You know the things- sticky-backed plastic strips of various colours are fed through a hand-held device, and there’s a rotating wheel to select the letter you want. Choose your letter, squeeze the handle, and the required figure is embossed into the plastic tape. They were all the rage in the 60s and 70s, and I’m sure many of us can remember printing out rude words on one as children. (Or maybe that was just me?)
Apparently, Donald was pleased as punch with his new purchase and showed it to all and sundry, and it was by this method that he made the labels for his final dashboard in 1966 in black, red and blue Dymo tapes, along with labels also for the Bloctube fuel control box that was down at his right hand side.
As luck would have it for the budding cockpit re-creator, Donald’s Dymo machine fell into the possession of his daughter, Gina following his death and she’s had it ever since, tucked away and doing nothing until she came to visit us in the workshop recently. Gina had no recollection of the machine having ever been used since, and it certainly still had her father’s reel of half inch blue Dymo tape in it.
)
Gorgeous bit of kit, isn’t it? So while everyone else that day was oohing-and ahhing over the boat, and various children and grandchildren were being hoisted in and out of the cockpit with Mr Whoppit, I hunkered down in my corner and set about printing out a new set of labels on the same machine that had made them in 1966, and in the case of the blue ones, with the same tape!
)
The machine was a delight to use, much easier and better than my own modern-day plastic version. Now have a look at this-
)
That’s one of the many original labels recovered from the Bloctube box, and a new one made on the same machine. Look closely at the letters, or at the slight misalignment between the ‘E’ and the ‘L’ of ‘FUEL’; they are EXACTLY the same!
Okay so it’s anal in the extreme but as I always say, ‘anal’ is the first four letters of ‘analyse’ and it brings an authenticity to our new panel that is absolutely second to none; so when people look into our recreated cockpit, and their eye is naturally drawn to the wording, they’ll be reading something made on Donald’s machine, and with Donald’s blue tape. How priceless is that?
(I made two full sets of all the labels in the end- and you’d be surprised how many there actually are- much to the increasing amusement of my colleagues who, whilst I stood there going click-click-click, made every comment going from remarking on my excellent wrist action, to asking if I wanted to be alone with the Dymo-Mite or take it home for the night! I very nearly made a label that said ‘GIT’ to apply to a certain baldy head…)
I guess it was a no-brainer that Gina would let us use the machine for the rebuild, but I sincerely thank her anyway for trusting me with it. So there we go, that’s one tiny detail easily sorted to the ultimate in authenticity; now for the other few thousand…
)
*
And was Mike a pain with that machine… just a little. We considered pouring water over the pair of them at one point to cool everything down but the finished result was spectacular as will be the rest of the cockpit but it’s not much use if the water gets in so we recently embarked on something of a brave (or stupid) experiment.
You see, we’re yet to start on the engine cover or tail fairing, both of which have crash damage and corrosion but, perhaps more significantly, will be seen and critically appraised by the viewing public. Even today someone looked at our meticulously rebuilt hull structure, waved dismissively and asked, “But when are you going to put the outsides on?” I usually say they’ll not be going on until the last possible second because the boat is much easier to work on with them off leaving our visitors invariably crestfallen but, truth be told, they’re going on soon and when it comes to sorting the upper fairings we’re going to have to be good at mending everything the old girl can throw at us if she’s going to look good as new without having to replace great tracts of tin.
Enter… our guinea pig panel.
)
Here it is in context – sort of. It’s the outer skin from the left-hand side of the cockpit, the first piece we ever lifted from the lake.
That was a trial in itself. Lifting things out of deep water is easy – sort of. You go to the bottom and tie a lift bag to the thing you want. Think of the bag like a small, hot-air balloon. As I say, you simply tie it on then blow it up with air or whatever gas you can spare until its buoyancy overcomes the weight and, whoosh, off it goes surfacewards in a storm of bubbles. This process can be a little violent so with experience you learn to fill the bag gently and get a feel for when it’s about to leave. That way you can hold it at arms length and start its journey with a gentle, upward push. The moment it rises the gas inside expands, increasing its buoyancy and therefore its ability to lift but holding on too long is a dangerous practice because the human body is also full of gas in places, which can also expand, and will most certainly do so if the bag takes you with it.
Apart from your drysuit, counterlungs (if you’re on a ’breather) and whatever buoyancy compensating device you’re diving with there’s the small matter of gas-filled body cavities to consider. The, ‘full-to-bursting’ reflex is woefully weak in human lungs so you have to be damn sure you remember to breathe out should you find yourself ascending uncommandedly or there’s a danger your lungs will pop admitting compressed gas into the space between the outside of the lungs and the inside of the chest cavity (pulmonary barotrauma) resulting in anything from a collapsed lung to the contents of your chest extruding through your mouth like so much bloodied sponge cake and gristle. For this reason I should have realised how ill-advised slowly sinking into the muddy lakebed whilst blowing a bag knowing nothing about how big the partially buried piece of scrap in front of me really was. The bag took more and more gas, its lanyard creaking with tension until, without warning, a great chunk of mud and clay erupted beneath my knees as Bluebird’s left-hand cockpit wall, complete with its frame section and several outriggers, tore free and shot past my faceplate with the urgency of an express train. How it failed to snag anything on the way I will never know and, suffice to say, my underpants were discreetly retired after that dive and our salvage procedure modified thereafter to preclude this ever happening again.
The offending piece didn’t look half as dangerous washed and dried with a chunk of the main spar fairing still clinging on and in the middle an oval blister hastily applied Elastoplast-like to make the steering work after the hull was thought complete. Look also bottom right and you’ll notice a hole right through the panel. This is where the hardened steel steering rod snapped and punched through as the cockpit was wiped off from left to right.
Museological wisdom was sought and said we ought to conserve this panel as a good example of what not to do with your hydroplane but it was the only representative piece we could play with in place of a skin from the upperworks, albeit somewhat thicker, so we compromised.
)
Stripped of the blister, spar fairing and everything else removable it didn’t look pretty when dangled where once it was riveted but like meeting an ugly girl with a great personality we could see beyond the unsightly bulges, badly applied makeup and poor complexion. (I’ll be in trouble for that simile). Then a discovery… See where the blister used to be? That roughly cut hole in the cockpit wall… It seems the hull was completed then the systems guys were invited to come and get their steering working. Certainly, none of the steering appears on the drawings. So they did, but in the process they fell foul of the cockpit skin when trying to get the control run offset outside of the frame. Not to be beaten they cut the hole they needed then slapped a blister over the top to keep the water out thus perfectly preserving a small area of original 1954 blue paint one coat thick and applied at the factory before Bluebird even got her bottom wet.
)
Look from the one o’clock position around to 3 o’clock and you’ll see proper 1954 blue. We chopped it out and kept it. Yes, yes, yes… we know, it’s museological heresy but live with it because we chopped out another interesting piece too.
)
It’s the bottom, right-hand corner of the skin where the fractured steering rod punched a hole in it. The boat landed almost flat on her left-hand side; if you don’t believe me slow the crash footage from ‘Across the Lake’ taken from behind and you’ll get the idea. This caused the whole cockpit to deflect to the right and the steering rod, an inch thick, made of tough stuff and firmly fixed in a spherical bearing in a steel bulkhead at F-15, wasn’t going to give so having taken all it would tolerate it failed just ahead of F-15 and snapped back blasting a hole in the skin as effectively as any bullet. Quite extraordinary, so we preserved the evidence.
Now that we had a crumpled slab of mildly corroded tin with a few clinging, blue flakes and all the juicy bits cut off and bagged for the museum it was time to bash some sense into it…
)
The English Wheel – that green thing – is a stretching tool. It forms compound curves by gently squeezing the metal between a flat roller on the top and a curved one beneath. This panel used to be a compound curve, i.e. curved along its length as well as width-wise so we gave it a bit of a push then this new lad, who’s started turning up quite regularly and seems quite a good hand, took the paint off so we could see what we were dealing with.
)
Having ragged off all the interesting bits we then started adding new. This piece came home with the long-missing cockpit frame section.
)
It’s the small, sloping piece from beneath the forward spar box and it tore free in the crash and clung to the frame as it tumbled through the air to splash down 120 metres away. We hung the whole forlorn mess from the side of the boat and considered the ragged lid we’d pulled from the latest can of worms.
)
The trouble is, you can’t really change your mind at this point or someone will ask why you didn’t just leave the paint on and shove it in the museum instead of messing with history. Now it’s neither nothing nor something… so we sat for a think while Mike made more pieces of cockpit.
We only got the left-hand cockpit rail back. The other can be clearly seen being carried up the beach by Navy divers in 67 so we knew that wasn’t coming home and the one we did get didn’t look too clever on presenting at A&E.
)
But we hit it with things until it got a bit straighter…
)
You can see it here down the left of the cockpit facing its new, shiny counterpart. They’ve not been curved as per the drawings at this stage because we didn’t immediately realise they were supposed to be so they were straight for a while but almost three years later their treatment reached top of the list once more. And in that crumpled rail was hidden the most fabulous piece of treasure.
)
See those four holes? Two are intact on the right, the upper-left one is a bit stretched where the rivet pulled through and the fourth forms the bottom-right corner of that corrosion hole. There ought to be two more at bottom-right but a patch has been inserted where they used to be. Then look above and you can see a pair of scribe marks at right angles to one another. Any guesses what all this could mean?
)
Make sense now? Yes – those damaged rivet holes and scribe marks located the left-hand end of the angle that holds the instrument panel. They gave us data to within a millimetre or two allowing Mike to ‘grow’ the info across to the other side and get this part of the cockpit absolutely spot-on. Notice also that on the right the deck is covered in by the flap tray.
Originally, K7 had a pair of power-operated spray baffles or ‘flaps’ extending down the sides of the cockpit, deployed at low speeds to keep spray out of the engine intakes, they retracted as she planed onto the water surface. The idea was swiftly dropped in the interests of weight saving but the flap trays hung onto their name as that’s what they’re called on the drawings. One we recovered in a zillion bits, which we painstakingly pieced back together and we cheated with the other.
)
If you look very carefully you can see where the original piece ends and the new section has been grafted on. Here’s a clue, look along the right-hand edge where it’s turned down and notice how far towards the bow the holes extend. Where the holes stop is where old meets new so it’s less than half original but it’s so true to how it should be that we’re claiming it and painting it silver, like it or not, and being sufficiently honest that any future student of museology worth his or her salt will do enough research to find this admission and be satisfied. It’s our first and only cheat on this scale by the way and we’ll tell you if we do it again and, in any case, the opposite flap tray more than makes up for it because we had every right to bin this one and no need whatsoever to mend it.
)
It worked out OK in the end though.
)
Still a little crumply here and there and you’d be excused for imagining that it’s a case of mending stuff for mending stuff’s case but you’d be wrong. More treasure, you see, this time half dozen holes that unlock another important piece of history.
See this squished heap of junk entwined like newly smitten lovers…
)
It’s a big chunk of the foredeck representing a section from the cockpit opening to the aft edge of the front spar. Well, it used to be. It ended up about a foot across but from the wreckage came this.
)
Which became this…
)
And with the help of a sprinkling of holes in the mended flap tray reconciled to a solitary drilling in the upper frame tube (the original frame tube we spent four freezing months finding rather than the new part the museologists would have knocked up out of plywood) we were able to perfectly position the forward, left corner of the bulkhead that carries the upper deck.
More scrap was dug from the pile and tweaked back to useability until we had what was variously referred to as the ‘dog kennel’ or ‘bird cage’ until we settled on ‘bread bin’.
)
The structure was grown from that tiny shred of evidence in the flap tray from the forward-right corner as viewed here across to the left then aft with only the aft-right half of the furthest bulkhead being non-original. And here’s another interesting aspect of all this salvaging of scrap metal.
)
Take a look above… see the downward facing brackets either side of that ragged, half-moon cutout at the top of the bulkhead? It’s made of two halves; they’re positioned here by those two sets of yellow pins. The one on the right is original and it’s the bracket that picked up the upper edge of the instrument panel. The left half is a copy but, crucially, along with the shiny angle piece below, they position the instrument panel to within a millimetre or so. No guesswork needed. And that ragged cutout? Improvised surgery to move the airspeed indicator to its final position in the dying days of 1966…
)
With that done some ideas had occurred to us for mending that sad mess on the side of the cockpit. What it needed was a patch or two…
)
Patches are easy. Most folk seem impressed by them but, honestly, they’re a doddle. All you do is cut off the piece you don’t want, make a new piece to fit the hole and glue it in. A few days of doing that – and we had to be ruthless in this case because they have to keep the water out – and it was time to have a heat-shrinking party.
Five things you can do with metal… cut it, weld it, bend it, stretch it and shrink it. Crash your tin hydroplane and you’ll get lots of stretching so shrinking becomes the order of the day when it’s time to put the bits back. Of all the ways of shrinking doing it with heat is most fun. First, you trap the lump or bump you want rid of by clamping or pinning around it onto something solid then you make a small circle on its crown with a bar of ordinary soap. Next, heat the spot with a blowtorch until the metal expands into an angry blister and the soap begins to blacken. At the crucial moment – and only experience will tell you when – you whack the softened metal in on itself to lower the blister then quench the rapidly shrinking area with a cloth dipped in freezing water. This gives it a proper fright and it tightens the panel most impressively. The way it works is that the hot spot is softer than the surrounding metal so when you hit the domed blister all the metal can do is squash into the centre thickening as it goes. It’s very much a team game too with pretty much everyone joining in whether to quench, mop up the floods or simply find the soap…
)
Several bold heat-shrinks will tighten a badly stretched area whilst annealing the metal so the resulting irregularities can then be washed out on the wheel.
)
And when faced with areas rippled with small stretches the big Eckold hammer and its relentless shrinking dies soon gobble them up.
)
There we go – nothing remotely difficult there. It took a while but it’s worth it. There’s still a fair amount of small cosmetic work to do and some ragged rivet-holes to lose and re-drill but otherwise it’s done and good to keep the water out.
)
It’s a shame that small panel right in the bow had to be made from new – we never found the original though we do have the one from the other side – or we’d have authentic bodywork the whole length of the boat on this side. The good news, though, is that our panel mending experiment was thoroughly successful so when the time comes to mend the upper bodywork you can be certain it’ll not only be 100% original but good as new too.
Another piece we never found – and this piece still rankles so you never know – was the instrument panel so Mike filed a new one from a slab of thick tin. This is the 1966 version that became the 67 evolution and it’ll be suitably evolved when the cockpit opening is complete and we can get it looking absolutely authentic.
)
It was mounted on rubber shock-mounts, we know this because half of one of them remained bolted to the wreckage, and it was a strong piece of material so the likelihood is that it left the boat in fairly good shape because it wasn’t strongly fixed and so was unlikely to be badly damaged when it tore free. The only way we find anything on the lakebed is if part of it sticks above the mud but if this wasn’t bent double it is likely to ever remain down there under the silt.
But not to worry, on balance we’re doing OK and even before this piece was ready to upload we’ve moved on apace with another full box of bits for the paint shop, more exterior panels on the way and a deal with another aerospace supplier for the world’s greatest rivets to keep everything together and the water out.
Don’t forget the forum and our pic of the day, which occasionally becomes pic of the week depending on workload, and we’ll be back with more in due course.
See the Diary Archive for previous entries.