January to February 2006
9th January 2006 - 15:30
Happy New Year to one and all.
Despite overdosing on turkey and beer we’ve been hard at work at this end during the holidays.
The process is closer to chemotherapy than conservation at the moment as we cut and curette under the corrosion in search of good metal but it’s coming good.
One of the more worrying prospects was getting the vertical tailfin off. Why must it come off in the first place, you might ask.
The answer is that the fin is made of a different material to the rear cowling onto which it’s solidly attached and to make matters worse it’s fixed in place with a typically over-engineered, steel saddle that bolts into the underside of the tail fairing with the usual zillion bolts and rivets.
Now, for those not of an engineering persuasion, if you bolt a buffet of different materials together then soak them for, let’s say, thirty-four years – what you get is a galvanic feast going on between the different metals resulting in all kinds of strange effects.
It’s not uncommon to find bolts in perfect condition but missing their nuts due to corrosion. Or thick coatings of completely the wrong oxide as was the case with the aluminium engine mounts that were red with rust.
The only real way to deal with this mess is to take it all apart and treat everything individually so the fin had to come off.
Worrying, why? Because we didn’t get the instruction book with this thing and it’s not always simple to see how it all went together. Even when it is seemingly apparent what goes where, you can never be too sure whether to get a bar under it and give it a good shove in case you’ve missed something breakable.
This is why it took three solid days of freeing rusted fasteners and drilling rivets before the damn thing began to show any signs of moving at all.
Alain and Mark spent ages under there carefully drilling rivets.
When taking rivets out it’s vital to drill them on the centres and to exactly the same diameter otherwise you can’t put the same size rivet back in the resulting hole – it takes forever, especially on rotted rivets.
But it gave in eventually, just like everything else.
So now we can get underneath to chemically etch out the corrosion. The metal turned out to be in great condition despite everything – on the top at least.
We still have to defeat an inordinate number of bolts to get the steelwork off the underside but once all the exposed metal is stripped, cleaned and given a fresh coat of protective paint it’ll last forever.
Don’t forget to sign the guestbook and let us know what you think of the site and we’ll add more stuff as the week goes on. Did I mention that the engine is out?
11th January 2006 - 16:30
Having shifted the tailfin, and being on a roll, we decided to go for the next major hurdle. Getting the engine out.
We tried to organise a couple of days when those kind people who’d offered their time could come up and get dirty but the weather conspired against us resulting in sub-zero temperatures and blizzards of snow. Some people did brave the elements, however, and after a bit of preparation and much reorganising of the workshop we decided to have a pull on the engine.
Our workshop, very conveniently, has a pair of steel beams across the ceiling placed there by the previous owners specifically for lifting purposes. With little effort we jacked K7’s cradle onto a set of 10mm thick steel bars enabling us to easily push the boat backwards and forwards. With what we judged to be the centre of gravity of the engine directly beneath a beam, we wrapped a strap around it and lifted it a few millimetres with a chain-block.
Finding the true C of G took a little experimenting as the front of the engine has dissolved completely and although our spare engine was available for comparison it could tell us little in this case.
Having found the correct point we then made up a short lifting bar with an eye-bolt welded to the top face and ratchet-strapped it around the nimonic-stainless combustion chamber.
Most of the disconnects had been made already – the low-fuel-pressure and engine RPM senders were freed years ago by the engine-ancillary gearbox dissolving and the front engine mount snapped so we were left with only one connector on the fuel control unit, (don’t know what it’s for but we’ll find out), the static-jetpipe-pressure tapping and the JPT (jetpipe temperature) thermocouple to disconnect. All went well until we had the engine suspended half in – half out, then it caught us out.
The main fuel line turned out to be routed through one of the hull frames and not directly to the filter as I’d thought. Safety had to come first as the engine was dangling dangerously so I took the decision to cut the line.
Heartbreaking stuff but it’ll join back together.
Then, with the last disconnect made, we lifted Orpheus, engine number 711 clear of the hull.
Note the engine cradle waiting to receive it to the right.
So with a push on the wheeled trolley along the overhead beam…
The old lump glided gracefully across the workshop…
…and onto the cradle.
Now we can get into the last of those awkward corners of the hull and find out exactly what we’re working with.
Whilst you're on the website, you may notice we now have a FAQ page. It's in its infancy, but why not check it out and let us know your comments.
19th January 2006 - 10:30
So, with the fin off and the engine out and a day spent coughing up dust whilst removing another couple of buckets of dried mud from what used to be the space beneath the engine, we turned to an issue that’s been prickling at us since day one.
Literally hundreds of people contact us on an ongoing basis wanting to look at the wreck but as this has always been discouraged by Gina there are very few who actually make it across the door. Most of those who do are there on business, inspecting the hull with regard to the rebuild project and a few model-makers have been allowed in but it doesn’t amount to much.
We therefore decided to clean up the fin and make that bit accessible at least by putting it in the Ruskin Museum. It was actually Alain’s little project and appeared to be something we could wrap up in a day or two – that was until we actually made a start.
First off, we carefully followed our conservator’s training and washed the whole affair with baby shampoo, a substance with which I’ve become fairly expert of late.
That brought it up quite nicely…
…but as you can see, there were a few flaky bits here and there. Worse still were the sinister-looking blisters where crystalline corrosion had taken hold beneath the blue surface and begun munching at the metal.
Sorting this meant another foray into the world of conservation as we lifted each blister with a scalpel blade or plastic scraper then brushed out the white powder.
Finally, the surface was chemically cleaned using a chemical called Deoxydine, which seems to be a sort of acid-cocktail. Whatever it is, it leaves the surface spotless so after a quick rinse with de-ionised water, (the stuff for topping up car batteries that contains no chlorides), and drying in front of the space heater, we touched in the freshly prepared bits and gave the surface a good polish.
Next on the list was to find a way to bolt such an awkward item securely to a wall without the danger of it being nicked, falling on some innocent person’s head or being damaged in any way by the process itself.
We didn’t care too much about wrecking Vicky’s museum though so with a few bits of stainless-steel box section borrowed from the stores and a welding set…
Don’t panic – I was only welding the hanging bracket, it was a tiny spot-weld and we’d wrapped the endangered area of tailfin in a fireproof overall. Building the bracket on the fin was the best way to be sure that it fit perfectly and therefore didn’t pull any stress into the fin when bolted to the wall.
The fin on its bracket… or is that the bracket on its fin?
…and a detail of the clamp around the pitot.
Don’t worry about this bit either, there’s neoprene foam in there and it doesn’t carry any weight. It’s there to stop the fin putting a twisting load on the bottom mounts.
Finally, we hauled it over to the Ruskin and had a lock-in at the museum and a proper pantomime as we installed it on the wall.
Paul Allonby was there with his camera, still recording events after almost forty years and Michaela turned up from the Westmorland Gazette. Vicky ran for cover as soon as the electrical spotlight track was torn down by our electrician-in-residence, Rob Ford, and we started drilling holes in the wall.
But doesn’t it look fantastic up there?
30th January 2006 - 15:30
We had our monthly inspection from the Grand Poobah of museology this month. Chris came up to see how much destruction we’d wrought over the Christmas holidays and to make some ethics-based decisions that we were happy to pass upwards. We guessed he’d have the answers and wouldn’t dither about and weren’t disappointed on either score.
One of our questions concerned the lead weights in the stern.
For those not intimately acquainted with the story of Bluebird’s last days, what happened was that Donald couldn’t seem to get her up onto her planing position due to the altered centre of gravity resulting from the new and untested Orpheus installation.
At Leo’s suggestion they lashed sandbags to her tail to alter the trim and hey-presto… up she came.
Poor Robbie Robinson was then tasked with casting lead sheets in the lid of a biscuit tin and bolting them into the back of the boat below the jetpipe.
Thirty-nine years later we had to get them back out again to clean behind them and get the water-brake off.
Problem was, they’d been bolted either side of a flimsy aluminium bulkhead that didn’t have a hope of holding them when Bluebird came to a sudden stop and it fell over backwards trapping half the lead behind it.
Incidentally we found yet another chunk of wood wedged under the lead – more ‘advanced engineering… rocketry, what have you’.
Initially I thought Donald’s team must’ve deliberately bent the bulkhead in 66 / 67 so the lead ingots wouldn’t foul the underside of the jetpipe and jokingly accused Robbie of the crime, but he just blamed Donald. We finally decided that Donald wouldn’t have battered his pride and joy on purpose so Leo had to be the culprit.
But in the final analysis all were unfairly accused as after removing half the lead it became apparent that the damage was done in the accident. Notice how far the bolts tore through the metal sheet.
This left us with a museological conundrum. We could batter it straight in which case it would fit again and we could get it out but we’d have put a bit of a dent in its history too. Trouble was, it had to go, or we couldn’t clean behind it so we collectively passed the buck and let Chris decide.
Now then, we all have to learn to take rivets out properly but not on the real deal so we’ve sourced some old aircraft bits to practice on but they haven’t arrived yet.
It took some close supervision and a quick lesson in rivetology before we were allowed to wield tools on the dozen or so fasteners that had survived the crash.
Then with a bit of pulley-hauley, as they used to say on the old sailing ships, the bulkhead came out in its somewhat squashed condition…
…thus allowing us to get the rest of the lead out.
I think a competition to guess what weight of lead was in there might be fun. The pic shows slightly less than half of it. Anyone fancy a guess?
We also learned this weekend that we’re going to have to strip Bluebird rather deeper than we’d originally thought.
You would imagine that after almost five years in our workshop she’d have dried out properly but no. The further we go, the more water we find so she’s probably going to have to come completely apart before we can say with absolute conviction that we’ve eradicated all sources of rot and she’s stable once more. What fun!
3rd February 2006 - 16:30
Here’s an interesting interlude. Whilst removing the various bits and bobs from within the hull we came across a strange black cylinder connected to the outside by a pipe and to where the cockpit once was by a wire.
This curious item proved to be the bilge pump but connecting it to a battery proved it dead as dead can be. Nothing daunted, I took it to bits and cleaned everything.
The wiring and some other nameless bits went into the dishwasher at home, which I’ve discovered is equally adept at cleaning bits of Bluebird as it is with and pans.
The pump proved to be beautifully made as I discovered when recording its dimensions. It was circular to within four-hundredths of a millimetre but it was also designed in the days before decent shaft seals came along so the main shaft was packed with dozens of rubber and steel washers.
All the O-rings were left in the warmth for a few days to see if they’d expand a little – and they did – so with some oxygen friendly, silicone grease from the dive kit bag, they went back in the hole, along with the multitude of pump seals.
At some point along the way Donald must’ve lost the proper fitting where the wires went in though it’s possible to see where it went, so they’d stuffed the hole with putty, which hadn’t worked so well as a water-proofing agent when submerged for thirty-four years at forty-three metres.
The wiring had to be dried out therefore and its connections checked. The motor brushes felt better after a liberal application of release oil too and then when reconnected to the battery and dunked in the kitchen sink came the moment of truth.
It ran again. Not only did it run but it ran beautifully with a contented and uniform whirring noise. Water was soon spurting from the outlet pipe causing me to hop around the kitchen with glee.
Now it’ll be bagged and put away for the day we reinstall it and connect up the wires.
20th February 2006 - 16:00
It’s been a couple of weeks and this is mainly due to me being incapacitated with gout, which is possibly the most painful affliction known to man and certainly the worst agony I’ve ever experienced.
However, there is some progress to report, for example, we took the spar out.
What we hadn’t expected was to find so much water still trapped in the various nooks and crannies. What seems to have happened is that down at forty-three metres where the water pressure remains at a steady 5 Bar absolute (about 80psi) it’s been forced past sealants and through tight fitting joints. Now that there’s no similar pressure gradient in the opposite direction the water has no reason to get back out.
The upshot of this is that Bluebird is going to have to come apart completely in order to stabilise her. When I say properly I mean every panel and every rivet.
Shifting the spar was job-one as it seemed likely that it was full of water too.
First off we had to strip the cowlings off the spar. They looked knackered at first but all the bolts came out eventually and guess what… They’re OK, we can fix them and put them back!
That freed up the spar and we’ll not bore you with how many bolts were holding it into the spaceframe. The laborious task of shifting them fell to Dave who spent a few days getting the fixings out without breaking any as per the rules.
Then came the problem of how to get the spar itself out of the hole – needless to say it didn’t move when we gave it a shove.
To the rescue came Alain who happens to be an ex Land-Rover nut quite used to hauling his bogged down vehicle out of eight feet of mud, over a forest or up a cliff and who owns as a result the only car jack we’ve ever seen with four feet of lift!
With a bit of ingenuity and some wooden blocks to protect the underlying material…
It pushed out with surprising ease. And yes, it had a million gallons of water inside.
While all this was going on, Alain had been working at the other end because we’re shortly going to mount the entire hull in a rollover jig so we can turn her over and remove the bottom skins. Off came the water brake, rudder and stabilising fin with Alain winning first prize for physical injury as he worked spanners in the lower confines of the hull.
The planing shoe was full of water and jetfuel too but the water brake is brands new, incredibly heavy and will soon be joining the bilge pump and fuel pumps on the list of things that still work.
27th February 2006 - 15:00
Here’s a treat for anyone, and there have been a few over the years, who ever wondered what K7’s underside looks like.
Due to the persistent dripping of lake water whenever we remove anything the decision was taken during Chris’ last visit that we’d have to put K7 up on a rollover jig and remove the skins to get at the frame.
Great… because it’s not as though the local tool dept. at B&Q has a Bluebird rollover jig so off I went off on the scrounge to see an old pal of mine, Phil Turner who runs a local company called Ivanhoe Forge.
Phil’s dad started it all many years ago knocking out garden gates and the like, now Phil makes beautiful architectural ironwork for clients all over the UK and probably the rest of the world too.
www.Ivanhoeforge.co.uk
Initially, all I wanted to do was sift through his scrap bin in search of some heavy enough material to build the jig myself but instead, Phil asked me to sketch what I was after and three days later two of these nifty little things arrived.
Thanks Phil…
Then they lay about for three weeks until I could walk again – sort of – but having the upstands solved only half the problem. Next we had to work out a way to hang the boat from them though as I was a steel fabricator in a former life we were already well on the way to cracking the problem.
Dave and Alain came over and together we cut some metal.
Picking up the back end wasn’t too difficult as there are bolt holes everywhere from the water-brake, rudder and fin. We utilised almost all of them and because Dave is a specialist surveyor it wasn’t long before the workshop had its first laser show as he surveyed in the steelwork and declared K7 an inch out of true as a result of the crash.
We’ll get that back when we re-attach the front end.
Taking hold of the front was a bit less complicated though the frame is somewhat crusty up for’ard and will need a few judicious metal-grafts before we can declare it 100%.
We spanned the hole where the spar came out with a chunky length of box-section and picked up on the spar bolt-holes at both sides.
Next task, having secured both ends of the hull, was to haul the whole assemblage off the cradle on which she’s rested since 8th March 2001 so following a number of false starts and some interesting rigging ideas she finally went airborne.
Then with 17 inches of added lift the upstands were slid into position.
There followed a few hours of hard work to secure it all. Dave drilled holes in the floor, Alain bashed masonry fixings into the concrete and tightened them down until he couldn’t put another ounce of weight on the spanner whilst I welded in extra steelwork to create an over-engineered solution of which Leo would definitely have approved.
And then – with everything bolted up solidly and the floor cleared for action…
I’m going…
She turned upside down at exactly 12:35, so far as we know for only the third time in her life. Once whilst under construction, then again on 4th January 1967 and then today.
Notice how far the floor skin was bent backwards. That was done in the crash and I’d supposed that after being squashed flat under the weight of the boat for almost five years it might’ve flattened a bit, but no. Immediately the weight came off, it sprung right back to exactly where I remember it.
Incidentally, if anyone can remember the documentary, you may recall that BBC health and safety policy meant that they insisted on taking a commercial diver along to act as fall-guy between us and them in case we did anything dangerous and you may also remember me arguing on the barge with him over a proposed action.
Picture this. The boat is the correct way up on the lakebed in zero-visibility, four degree water with her tail in the mud whilst we’ve lifted the front clear by pulling on strops wrapped around the roots of the main spar. This has raised the forward end of the flat underside clear of the mud but the twisted panel you can see behind Alain’s head remained curved under and speared into the lakebed.
This effectively left a tunnel about half a metre high by roughly a metre wide beneath the boat through which it was proposed to pass a second strop in case the spar tore out of the rotten frame. After all, we had no idea at that time whether it was about to do just that.
This brilliant idea was to send a diver through the gap under the hanging boat to secure a strop though the job had to be done by one of us as the longest surface-supply umbilical brought by the commercial team to help with a salvage job in 42m of water was only 28m long. Or at least that’s as deep as it ever went, and I ought to know, I was attached to it at the time.
The scheme was absolute lunacy and this was why I kicked off and invited him to do the job himself, which he declined to do.
As usual, the task fell to our team so we ended up passing the strop with a boathook and unnecessarily risking two divers when the job could have been done in much greater safety once the boat was an extra metre out of the mud.
Never mind, she’s well out of the mud now though the lake seems reluctant to relinquish its claim on her. Guess what happened when we turned the hull over…
Yep, gallons of water poured out, but on a positive note, how about this for anyone out there who still has concerns about how much strength remains in the old girl. Not only is she strung up by either end, she didn’t fall in half when an 18 stone fat bloke sat in the middle either.
I went up there to retrieve the lifting equipment that we’d forgotten about in all the excitement and to rest my foot! That immaculate planing wedge is cold on the behind, by the way, and for all you model makers in search of perfection let me tell you that the underside is painted charcoal grey and the planing wedge has three different angles of attack machined over its length. More of that later as the next job is to strip off the bottom skin.
Dave’s surveying was so precise that the underside ended up absolutely level from front to back when we flipped her. Clever, eh?
And we’ve been informed this week that we’re soon to be visited by a distinguished delegation – from HLF no less – and they’re bringing some ‘experts’.
Don’t remember this happening before…
Now we’ll be able to get definitive answers on how to tackle the dissimilar metal corrosion between the skin and the steelwork and a material spec for carrying out frame repairs – I can’t wait.
*
And while I think of it, here comes another of those public apologies – well, sort of – as I’ve been told off for my unfair treatment of museologists.
I’ve been slagging them off and giving them an undeserved hard time apparently though in my defence, my history with museologists is not unlike my history with girls in that I tried all the bad ones first.
From being a diver to suddenly finding myself in charge of an iconic museum object took about a week and being a great believer in seeking good advice I immediately asked for help from the museum world.
Chris Knapp helped out from day one and thankfully proved to be a notable exception but the majority of museologists, I’m sad to say, tended to view me more as though I were something adhering to their shoe than someone coming to them for guidance.
“How come you are in charge of something so important?” they’d ask with an unsubtle blend of envy, disbelief and disgust.
“It ought to be in the hands of a proper museum – not a rank amateur. What do you know about museums, conservation, preservation, ethics…”
“Nothing,” I’d reply, “That’s why I’m here, asking for advice. I just happen to be the guy who found it, raised it and now has to look after it for a while.”
And they were only the ones who would lower themselves to answer the phone or reply to e-mails. Most ignored me completely.
One eminent member of the cult openly admitted to ignoring me at the outset when he later apologized for having done so and his apology meant a lot as I seemed to be gaining some acceptance by that point, but most of the breed remained impossible to talk to, especially when the decision was taken about what to do with the boat.
“We’re going to rebuild it to as near original condition as…” But I’d get no further.
“Oooh!” I may as well have said we were going to concrete the hull into the floor and use it as a latrine.
“Museums are for the public, you know. Not your personal indulgence,” they’d patiently point this out while I’d think back to all those hundreds of guestbook entries and encouraging e-mails and tell them…
“But this happens to be what the public wants to see. Haven’t you been reading the papers, listening to the radio…”
“Tut, tut, tut.”
The museologists would shake their heads sadly as though dealing with a deluded child and start explaining slowly, presumably in the hope that I’d grasp it this time, about conservation and ethics.
I just wanted to yell at them.
“Don’t tell me museums are for the public then sneer at me as though you know something I don’t!”
“I AM the bloody public and there are millions more like me who can’t suffer your snotnosed conceit or the unending discharge of pathetic bureaucrats terrified that their fragile, personal empires might suffer a dent or two at the hands of such a ballsy project.
The public actually want to see a real boat and not a pile of scrap. They want to hear it roar again because a whole generation wasn’t born when it last ran and if you don’t believe me just take a look back through our completely un-censored guestbook.
The sad fact is this – in many cases, though fortunately not always – museums are not for the public at all. They’re for the museologists who’ve gone weird because they have only each other for company and who seem to view the public as a grubby, ignorant race who dare to trample through their lovingly conserved collections.
It’s not all bad though, as with every walk of life there are good and bad it’s just that it took a while to sort it all out, and so…
If you’re a museologist, and you’re reading this, and you happen to be forward-looking, adventurous and appreciate that your average Joe-public prefers noise and violence to dust and ruin, then please accept my heartfelt apology for maligning your profession as beneath that staid exterior it can actually be very exciting.
And if you’re the other type, stop hiding under your desks and crying about risk assessments and funding issues. Roll up your tweed sleeves and give us a hand here!”