25^th June 2007

Only a quick update this time… We kept you right up to speed with developments up to the beginning of last week then took a week off.

The first Saturday off since September 06.

I spent the week on the set of Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars for our friends in the USA), ironically as one of the ‘experts’.

For those unfamiliar with Scrapheap, two teams of three have to build a contraption out of scrap then compete to see which one works best. To help them each team has an appointed expert.

The challenge was to raise objects out of 6m of water in Pinewood Studio’s underwater stage and because someone at the TV company had the blindingly simple brainwave of appointing experts who actually knew a bit about the problems and how to tackle them the other expert, whose family firm are leaders in deep-sea salvage, built a grab while I went back to diving for an afternoon.

Building things from scrap is an everyday occurrence around here and diving is like riding a bike – you can still do it but wonder afterwards where you found the energy all those years ago.

Here’s the MK1 Scrapheap diving helmet – also available in blue if you choose to chop a butane bottle in half rather than a propane one.

It performed beautifully after we clashed 20kg of roofer’s lead onto the outside to kill its buoyancy and fettled the air supply. The boys topside in our improvised dive-support-vessel did an outstanding job of managing the air supply and dragging the scrap into the boat as it fired to the surface on lift bags.

Altogether a great experience but you’ll have to tune in March for series 10 to find out what happened and which of the teams were eventually crowned the winners.

Having thus abandoned the Bluebird Project for a week not a lot happened but some progress has been made.

Remember how we made up a batch of doublers for the angle pieces that connect the aft outriggers to the outer skins?

This was due to corrosion in many of them.

Well, last week our mates, Bill and Debbie at Bettablast were good enough to paint another batch of panels for us along with the new doublers.

But – and it’s an important ‘but’.

Were we to simply paint them silver and rivet them in place future students of K7 would never work out what was original and what we’ve added – so we painted them a hideous green.

Now before the angry e-mails begin, yes, we know that Donald didn’t like anything green but the entire inside of his boat was painted green with chromate primer so he had no right to complain.

Yes, we know it an awful colour but you’ll not see it unless you go searching and there’ll be no green bits on the outside.

It’s also a fully reversible, museologically-correct fix that allows the original to stay whilst being easily distinguishable from what’s new so the tweedies can whine all they like, they dreamt up the ethics that spawned such a gruesome idea.

This is a conserveering exercise after all, which involves taking a bit from the conservators’ camp and the rest from common-sense engineering practice.

It actually looks OK when assembled.

Other news  - we have some smart tee-shirts, short-sleeved Oxford shirts and BBP overalls on order for the shop so they’ll pop up soon.

Otherwise we’ll be back in the workshop on Wednesday evening as usual. John at PDS reckons he’s still on target to have the frame with us for our September target. We always said 12 months to take the hull apart and another 12 to put it back together again.

Then we have to add interesting things like pumps, tanks, electrics and an engine. Sponsons to build too… best crack on.

16^th June 2007

OK here it is. You asked for wide shots of our work to date so here they are but understand two things first.

One, our friend and mentor, Chris Knapp told us to justify everything and that ‘reality dictates’ and these, being the few crumbs of common sense ever to emerge from the museum fraternity, have been strictly adhered to.

But the other thing Chris has drummed into us is that according to their ‘ethics’ museologists never, ever lie to their public as long as you simpletons sit still and pay attention while they tell you what’s best for you…

The Bluebird Project, on the other hand, has only ever told it how it is and so have frustrated the conspiracy theorists and confounded the critics. We’re a bunch of fanatics with a pile of scrap and that’s about all so be assured that everything you see and read here is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.

The other thing is that back in November 2001, Gina asked whether rebuilding K7 was a viable option. Nine months later after working 24/7 on the problem we were not only in a position to say a very definite ‘yes’ but were also armed with enough scientific data to prove it ten times over.

It’s been suggested that my unending criticism of the Hapless Lottery Failure amounts to little more than petty vindictiveness but the truth (and we don’t lie to our public, remember) is that they messed about a great many willing and enthusiastic people as determined as the rest of us to see this fantastic project through to its conclusion.

I tend to take this personally because in my naiveté where the cliquey world of museology is concerned I approached would-be helpers from industry without ever realising that they were about to be crapped on by a breed who couldn’t find their own behind in a phone box if they used both hands!

My mistake – never to be repeated…

So as long as other applicants continue being subjected to more of the same bulls**t I’ll not leave the HL-effers alone.

Until they expend the proper time, money and effort to fairly assess every case laid before them – especially one so important to British heritage and for so little money – I’ll be on their case.

Had they bothered their lazy, bureaucratic backsides to read our proposals properly and appoint experts who understood simple stuff like how to sit the correct way on a toilet seat they’d have realised from a very early stage that we could do things like what you see below and by now they’d be basking in our reflected glory.

Not our fault they’re collectively stupid but everyone deserves a chance so live and learn, bureaucrats.

One of Dave’s pic’s here. Does this look vaguely like K7’s front end to you?

It does to me and there’s a simple reason for this. It is.

You’ve all seen it come together from fractured bits of frame and blasted aluminium.

K7’s bow section is that the stage where we can use all you see in these pic’s. There’s still a huge amount of work to do if we’re to conserveer her back to running condition but the worst is behind us now so take a good look.

This is not some mock-up or replica. Here you see the original front end of Bluebird K7 as reassembled by the Bluebird Project team over the past couple of months. There are new pieces but only where we didn’t have the ones that travelled with Donald on that final run or where mechanical strength has been lost in the original.

In a way, not getting everything back is kind of appropriate because as long as fragments remain on the bottom of the lake there will always be a wreck site and that’s part of her history too.

In the above pic’ you can see the stringer around the floor and the two top crossmembers that we welded in but apart from that it’s all the real deal.

Here’s a shot looking forwards with the spar-box in position. Again you’re looking at panels that were stripped from the frame in that horrifying impact but which we’ve recovered by dint of hard work and unquenchable enthusiasm – we never added a figure into our application for enthusiasm. What’s it cost and do you buy it by the kilo and if you found some people giving it away would you take it and use it to your advantage?

Alan Dodds rests for five minutes while Alain works on a doubler for the F-18-P outrigger.

Upside down in this shot as we add the stringer that ties the floor to the outriggers. The stringer is about the only non-original part you can see in this shot.

Below – the whole deal with new skins.

And from the other side.

This side didn’t fare so well in the accident. Because K7 was facing right of track when she hit, all the panels on the port (left) side were crushed against the frame and held together by the outer skins but those on the starboard side were blasted outwards and away by the inrushing water. We don’t have as many of the parts from that side and this is where all of the new outriggers now live.

Every one of these outriggers are the real thing. Only the F-23 bulkhead right in the bow is new.

Below, the starboard side includes a couple of new panels but looks OK for it.

Here’s the structure from the inside. One of ‘the Rivet’s’ piccies this time.

And you know something – this is what it’s all about; being part of a team, enjoying the banter and the company of good mates, rewriting a bit of history and taking great pride whilst doing a great job. Can’t buy that feeling…

14^th June 2007

Almost there with phase-one of K7’s bow conservation programme. The frame is back together and all the bulkhead and outriggers are all aboard again.

Yes, we promised to show you the whole job at this stage but sadly it was a lie and there are two reasons for this.

One, our ‘pet-paparazzi’, the loveable, Michaela Robinson-Tate of the Westmorland Gazette is leaving us for a better life with BBC Radio Cumbria.

Michaela was aboard Predator through that chilly March of 2001 as we recovered K7 from the bottom of the lake and has been with us ever since. She was a quiet, young reporter back in those days contented to scrawl hieroglyphics into her reporter’s notepad then translate it into tales of ‘flippers’ and ‘oxygen tanks’ to the unending chagrin of the UK’s finest divers.

Now she’s a cheeky and demanding ‘Deputy Head of Content’ and next week will write her final Bluebird story for the Gazette so as she came in on a high we thought it only fair that she left on an equally triumphant note.

And so, as thanks for six years of not telling hideous lies about us despite working in journalism, and for being our friend, we thought we’d let Michaela show you that we weren’t kidding when we said we’d rebuild Donald’s boat.

The first pic’s of the reconstructed cockpit section will appear in next Friday’s Gazette with a comprehensive update later in the day on the BBP diary.

On behalf of the whole team, Michaela – and I think I can safely speak for the Ruskin crew and Gina too when I say this – we wish you all the very best in your new job.

And never forget… pinball tables and dolphins have flippers – divers have fins!

See if you can spot the nervous young paparazzi amongst the nutters on the jetty… (Pics by Steve Rothery of Marillion (www.marillion.com))

The second reason why everyone is having to wait for wide shots of the bow is that we’ve not quite completed the spar-boxes yet.

What’s a spar-box?

Fair question and the answer is that where the spars emerged through the frame – and don’t forget that both spars went through the frame until the forward one was lifted – Ken designed watertight boxes to keep the lake away from Donald’s feet.

The front spar-boxes were rendered redundant from 55 or so but they lurked within the structure for the rest of Donald’s tenure and somehow remained clinging to her wracked structure until we bagged them to the surface as tangled bits of tin.

Here’s a mental exercise for you. This picture is of the piece of frame we raised in April and it’s upside down too just to further confuse. Now follow the piece of frame tube from bottom-left across to the right and you’ll see something poking downwards into the jetty. It’s one of the angle pieces used to secure the raised spar to the frame and ought to be poking upwards.

See the square of aluminium above it? That’s the inner blanking plate for where the spar used to pass through the frame and around it is the remains of the portside spar box.

Here it is on the bench as recovered.

Scrap – surely! I mean, you can’t even see it when it’s installed and it’s not used for anything anyway. We could leave it out and no one would even notice, or care for that matter, but you know how it is in our workshop.

To make matters worse, because it’s only a water-baffle and not structural, it’s made of 1mm sheet. If you thought the 1.6mm BB3 stretched a long way this stuff is like bubblegum!

This is where it fits.

Between the F-20 and F-21 portside outriggers but as you can see, it has two G-clamps holding it square and it’s all stretched and split to buggery…

It would have taken an hour to build a new one so we decided to stuff this one into a cabinet in the museum with a label saying ‘Donald’s knackered spar-box’ and cut some new metal – that was until John started tapping at it with a hammer. Unable to resist, I then welded up a couple of splits to make it a little more rigid.

That was the beginning of the end.

John produced the top face from amongst a pile of unidentified wreckage fragments…

…and I found the last remaining piece hanging about in the paint stripping bath (yes it still works as well as ever).

Now that we had all of it we decided it would mend after all.

Tony Dargavel knocked up some repair pieces for the ragged corners.

So we glued them in then performed some mild titivating.

The structure goes all complicated in this corner. It’s not the simple overlap of the outrigger as it appears. Notice the joggle in the repair patch… This is because the material below the joggle is set into the outrigger to allow the end of another panel that wraps around the bow to sit flush with the front face of the spar box. Then yet another skin is joggled behind that one before stretching aft to F-12. There are four thicknesses of material riveted into this corner.

Wish Ken was still with us, I’d love to ring the old bugger up and ask him why he had to so over-engineer such a quiet corner of his boat!

And then, as the welding and tin-bashing reached a crescendo, the little spar box at last began to calm down and some of the spring went out of it. Suddenly we could get most of the rivet holes lined up but there’s still a way to go so we’ll show it to you when it’s decided it wants to be a spar-box again.

Work continues on all aspects of the rebuild and just as the outriggers and spar-boxes are being steadily brought back to life so is the frame continuing to receive attention.

Having created the new crossmember for the front end, Dave went on to sculpt some beautiful gussets for where we’ve put original steelwork back but the metal has not been in great shape around the fractures.

Here we potentially faced more moaning museologists because the proper, engineering-fix would be to cut the ragged end off the tube and graft a new piece in but that would be both historical destruction and LOOF so what we do to shut them up is weld a gusset over the affected area.

No loss of original material, completely reversible, no shortage of mechanical strength, fully justified and dictated-to by reality, and properly conserveered so moan if you dare, Tweedies.

On a completely different note; remember the cruddy, old LP boost pump we spannered out of the auxiliary fuel tank?

It didn’t look so good when we found it but by the time we’d finished twiddling with its innards it at least looked happier and went round and round.

But looking good and performing properly are two wildly disparate requirements so off it went to Martin and the team at Kearsley Airways for a technical once-over.

They’d already supplied a boxful of bits to get it back in action then generously offered to give it a function test too.

In the meantime, two things happened.

Kearsley’s went daft with work maintaining the RAF’s presence in the skies over Afghanistan and Martin got promoted to big-cheese so some time went by before this happened.

I wasn’t going to take these components out of their sealed plastic bags for the sake of a photo so here is our fuel pump plus the engine-driven hydraulic pump for the water brake both rebuilt and fully functional and with the test reports to prove it.

Not only that, but those who’ve read the diary over the past nine months or so will know that we rebuilt these ourselves and so when the shaft seals developed slight leaks on both pumps while under test, Kearsley were under no obligation whatsoever to fix the failings of us amateur pump builders – but they did.

Suppose we run Bluebird for perhaps five hours a year – and that’s a thorough engine test followed by enough five-minute trips up and down the lake to satisfy everyone – these pumps have a good thirty years service life in them before we’ll even have to take them down for a look-see…

Sincere thanks to Martin and the other unsung heroes at Kearsley Airways for doing these things in support of our project. We couldn’t have done this without you.

Back in the workshop, we had a couple of visitors this weekend too. This one doesn’t really count as she’s well under forty but she served admirably to lower the team’s average as Tony pointed out; you’ll understand in a minute.

Piccy courtesy of John-Dipsy using my camera – I think.

Due to domestic necessity my niece, Sophie, spent half the afternoon in the workshop with a pack of bum-scratching, sweaty blokes all trying to remember not to swear where she learned (amongst other things) to guillotine and bend alloy sheet then clamp it in place, drill a few holes and pop the skin pins in.

“You can tell your pals at school on Monday that you made a real bit for Bluebird,” I told her, because she actually made a small strengthener for F-19.

She shook her head dismally and replied,

“They all think a bluebird is something that says tweet...”

I just know they’re in for extra lessons next week.

Our other visitor is someone you’ve met already – Alan Dodds.

He’s the tin-basher who worked on K7 back in 1955 at Ullswater. He called up on Thursday and said he was chucking his kit in the car and coming over to spend a day with the lads – and what a day!

Just as he did the last time, when I was his only audience, Alan formed a curved panel with his hammer but this time for the benefit of the other guys who’d missed it first time around.

‘The Rivet’ had a go at grabbing a video clip…

Then Alan went on to work some real magic.

We showed him the recovered remains of the skin from the very tip of the bow. It wraps around from the forward end of one spar box to the other and forms the link between the floor and the foredeck. We only ever found half of it but it proved sufficient.

Alan wasn’t scared of it in the least as we would have been – we’d have found it daunting and would’ve pondered for days in case we took the wrong approach but all he did was hammer and roll it flat then pin it onto the hull.

OK, so the museologists would argue that he destroyed history with every hammer blow but the scrap piece is still there with flakes of blue paint attached so it can go into the museum and furthermore I’d argue that this wonderful craftsman, who worked on K7 back in 1955 and returned in 2007 to work on her again, actually made more history than he destroyed this day.

And so, having learned what was needed from the scrap piece; Alan then stuck a great slab of material to the side of the hull and started chalking and chopping.

With the quiet and unhurried confidence of someone long-used to his craft, Alan spent the afternoon skilfully trimming and rolling new skins for K7’s nose until, with them fitting perfectly, we were next treated to a lesson in how to roll joggles along the edges of the panels.

This is where the edge of the material is formed into a shallow step so that when one skin overlaps another they end up flush-fitting on the outside.

We utilised one of our redundant rollover jig stanchions to mount the swaging rollers then we were off. Alan guided the material while I turned the handle. He proclaimed himself ‘cross-eyed’ but seemed to have no bother. We tried it again after he’d gone home and went off course on more than one occasion.

See how it works?

Now then, we’ll not bore you with all the fettling and fixing that followed so just feast your eyes on what it looked like by the end of the day.

Scary, eh? It looks like a boat! The skins are still oversize and need finishing but pretty impressive stuff.

We learned more from Alan in one afternoon by feeding off his relaxed confidence and picking up his tricks than we could otherwise have taught ourselves in six months. What a great bloke – we agreed unanimously, he can come back next week.

6^th June 2007

An interesting announcement last week… Cumbria Vision offered us quarter of a million quid towards the museum side of things – I may have mentioned this already.

Sad thing is that we could have had that money months ago because it was rolled in with the Hapless Lottery Failure’s bid and the forward-looking people in charge of what was then the ‘rural-regeneration’ pot were prepared to give it to us way back then only to be let down along with the rest of us by the HL-effers.

Cumbria Vision have proven themselves remarkably proactive, visionary (as the name suggests) and loyal to the Bluebird Project though their contribution is dependent on others chipping in and unfortunately the wheels of bureaucracy turn in such a crippled fashion that there’s a real chance of us missing the boat – so to speak.

Bureaucracy seems to be the inverse of one of those property-clubs, offering a safe haven for individuals with zero dynamism, people skills or business acumen.

Instead of chucking in their few quid with all the others to buy a derelict house and do it up, would-be bureaucrats invest their meagre ability to push paper and attend meetings in a herd mentality and the security of knowing that anyone with an ounce of common sense would never knowingly stray into their arena.

Then they make life-changing decisions for folks like us – not!

It’s kind of fun to be the tail wagging the dog from time to time and I receive more than a few private messages of quiet encouragement from members of their ranks after they’ve struggled through a tortuous day’s meetings, dissected The Guardian then bathed the kids. Good on you – you know who you are.

But getting back to the quarter of a million caper; the sad fact is that we may miss the chance to collect from Cumbria Vision because the forms won’t be processed quickly enough with other, less dynamic funding agencies. Time will tell.

But ultimately it’s not a problem. You see, just as the engineering contingent are striving for their gold-medal position – a fully operational, rebuilt K7 – so the museum team are going for a world class attraction for Cumbria as a whole and Coniston in particular.

The total spend is gauged to be 750K but that’s not only for the extended hall to house Bluebird, it includes things like an enlarged reception area, improved toilets and such,  plus a larger shop area and a stunning display.

Clearly, there’s a long way we can come back from that position, in fact one story sprang to mind as we discussed recent events.

It was way back in 2001 and not long after we’d recovered the boat but before Gina decided we’d best rebuild her.

The team went to the Ruskin armed with a plan of K7 and a tape measure to see what would fit where.

We busied ourselves with seeing just how much we could squeeze into the space available until we happened upon what looked like an old park bench, painted a muddy brown, forming part of the display.

“We can chuck this out,” someone suggested, whereupon an indignant and well informed park-bench-anorak popped through the floorboards and proceeded to declaim its entire history as well as reciting the owner’s name of every distinguished backside ever to be parked upon it.

It had, we were told authoritatively, resided on the platform of Coniston railway station since George Stephenson was a boy… had weathered two world-wars, innumerable ups and downs of the railway industry and only succumbed when the station was finally closed for good sometime shortly before Sir Richard bought his first plane.

“So…” said Capt. Connacher, in a thoughtful manner and with impeccable comic timing, “It’s used to being outside then.”

We all roared with laughter, mostly at the park bench historian who had no counter for Graeme’s logic, and yet a serious point underlined Capt. Connacher’s wit.

And that is that we have nothing to worry about because even if the museum receives not one penny towards an extension, the existing hall is big enough to house K7 anyway.

Only just, it has to be admitted and the park bench would have to go, but she’d fit in there and if we swap the big window in the northwest corner for a door we can get her in and out too.

We could build a conservatory big enough to house her (or the park bench) and I’ll donate just such a thing if necessary so there’s simply no way we’ll be beaten.

None of it is any good, however, without the star of the show and she’s coming back together as you’d expect with no compromise to her conservation, safety or functionality.

Here’s another example of conserveering.

This is the tip of the bow but as you can see the frame tubes are severely damaged. They broke at both sides of that semicircular section (on the welds as usual) with the virtually severed piece clinging to the long-missing bit of frame.

We realigned it to the rivet holes at the front of the floor panel (proving once and for all that the frame was built more than 10mm out of true at the front during original construction) and welded it back together.

But the metal here is seriously tortured and sleeving the curved section would have been a nightmare so we did the obvious thing and simply added an extra crossmember.

Dave ground it to size and I welded it in. This is one of his pic’s actually.

The new crossmember is firmly in position and if you study the arrangement of clamps and that piece of stainless box section you’ll see that a replacement flange plate to attach F23 is also set up and ready for welding – another of Dave’s masterpieces.

Now the entire front frame is original, nothing lost though, admittedly, several new pieces have been added and the extra crossmember is doing all the hard work as well as allowing us to tie the wounded floor panel directly into it with a row of existing rivet holes that originally only attached the floor to the corrugated panel beneath. Now they’ll pick up the corrugations and the new steelwork with the floor panel sandwiched in between.

Our missing F-23 bulkhead was next on the list. We thought we did well to recover and mend F-22 so F-23 was always going to be wishful thinking…

Rob’s former was spot-on so we set about bashing some metal around it.

This isn’t the former you’re looking at, by the way. It’s another piece of shaped plywood used to make a sandwich of the alloy sheet. The former is on the other side.

Those are fairly extreme curves in the outer corners so we had to take it off the former once or twice for some shrinking and trimming.

Then some fettling with the knocking sticks…

…John marks off where we have to cut to clear the frame tubes… then voila!

It fits; one more part that’ll still be riveted into this beautiful machine long after we’re all long gone.

Here’s another outrigger, this time F-21-S and it has special significance but back to that in a mo’.

We only retrieved half of it and it looked like this.

And then like this…

Yes, it would have been easier to make a new one but what to do with the original? So we did the usual and made a new top half for it and glued it on.

OK, you’re wondering, what’s so special about yet another squashed outrigger and the answer is easy. It’s the last one. We’ve fixed them all now – all the ones we’ve been able to find, that is.

Some pieces surfaced in 67 and others remain in the lake but here in 2007 we have the greater part of the boat ready for the next stage.

Next we need to reunite the front and rear frame sections and to that end we had a visit from John Getty today – he seemed to like what he saw, which is high praise indeed from a man of his engineering ability.

After that we’re to complete a full trial-build from F-13 forwards to sort all the rivet holes and front skins and then it’s into the rebuild for real.

The target to begin reassembly is September 07 as we’ve allowed two years to construct the hull and the disassembly / preparation stage is almost complete.

Next week we’ll fit all the cockpit panels and let you have a look at the whole thing.

We can take great satisfaction in knowing that not one structural panel has been written off and the blue-painted, outer skins from the cockpit are going into the museum to remind visitors of Bluebird’s tragic accident and long hibernation.

May 29^th 2007

Right, down to business... Those who requested endless tin-bashing can mail us and call a halt at any time but until this happens we’re going to bore you to death with F-19.

Remember how we were able to make it look like it once did? Well that’s not too difficult. We’ve made many of the structural parts of K7’s front end look as they did but the crucial difference is that within most of the hull we have endless scope for replacing their lost strength in the form of doublers or additional structure. This we simply could not do with the submerged portion of F-19 – or so we thought – because one face of it is outside the boat while the other is hard against a frame tube and the concern was that should it fail later when buried so deep in the structure, K7 would end up ‘home-ported’ for good; a truly horrifying prospect.

This problem consumed us for weeks. What to do… make a new part?

That would be difficult to justify within the (strictly adhered to) ethics of conserveering where you take an old component you’d like to conserve and engineer a means by which it meets its originals design criteria without losing any original fabric - hopefully.  (Remember the mantra – justify it, reality dictates… then add, make it work again.)

In this case the original part would probably do the job but as our aim is to run K7 again then safety must top the list and ‘probably’ just isn’t enough.

Chucking the original would fill our ‘Loss Of Original Fabric’ (LOOF) box in one fell swoop as well as being like watching an old friend sail into the sunset never to return so far as the team is concerned.

Solving this one promised to stretch our ingenuity but conserveering is a forward-thinking discipline so the answer crystallised eventually.

The aluminium bulkhead attaches at either end to the raised steps on the longitudinal frame tubes and in the centre to the transverse crossmember but the crossmember is not at the same height as the steps so if we kept any additional structure level with the rearward face of the crossmember and between the steps we had considerable scope to insert a steel, watertight bulkhead directly ahead of the F-19 lower panel.

This is a laser cutting machine in action.

Despite having watched this process for fifteen years I still marvel at it much as I continue to watch the planes turning over my house on their approach to Newcastle (UK) Airport every day and never tire of seeing them.

This is a piece of 2mm thick steel being effortlessly sliced using only light. Incredible, isn’t it.

I took the F-19 drawing over to Matrix Lasers to see my old mate Ronnie Coxon. His company has cut hundreds of thousands of components for me over the years but we still enjoy these minor challenges so up went the drawing on the digitizing tablet followed by some skilled laser operating by Ron’s colleague, Ray.

The end result looked like this. Now that’s a professional piece of work.

Ah, almost forgot – the folded edge was taken care of by more mates and business associates.

My great friends, ‘Gemini’ Paul and his wife, Christine, introduced me to one of the blokes they share a factory with.

Tosh, I think he’s called, set up his hydraulic bending brake and pushed the edge of our bulkhead over. Thanks mate.

We then took the roughed-out bulkhead back to the workshop and offered it to the frame.

In a situation where a millimetre can make the difference between fitting and being nowhere near it was pretty close.

Consider this. The boat was constructed to Ken’s drawings in fifty-something then smashed to smithereens in sixty-seven.

Then we dragged the twisted bits out of the water and put it back together again in 2007 – to the same dimensions.

Today we directly digitised a portion of one of those drawings then had a computer direct a laser to cut it from a sheet of brand new steel for us – and it fits! We’re doing something right.

John fettled it for an hour.

Then someone got to fire up the TIG-set and weld it in.

Here’s the deal. One fully recorded, ethically correct, museologically-reversible conserveering strategy that not only satisfies the structural-strength, watertight-integrity and safety issues for the lower edge of F-19 but also allows the original alloy panel to stay as it matters not a jot anymore whether it splits, cracks or falls off completely. It’s mechanically redundant now; though warmly welcomed along for the ride.

Then just as one challenge fell to our persistence along came an unexpected nuisance of a problem to test us further.

Remember how the front corner of the cockpit inner floor had a big bite missing? Well actually, it was being pulled into strange shapes by a damaged area that we subsequently cut away to let the greater part of the panel spring flat. (The front end of K7 is upside down in the above pic).

The flat piece then allowed us to jig the front frame back together with help from the two lower crossmembers but we couldn’t leave it like that.

We’d assembled a full set of outriggers for the opposite side and made up one of the longitudinal stringers that tie the bottom of the outriggers to the floor and outer skins.

But the other side had a chunk of floor missing so the time came to stitch it back in. We made an identical stringer for the other side then set the floor up and welded it.

Looks OK, doesn’t it. Well it wasn’t. It took bloody ages to clamp each inch of weld and glue everything back together only to have the welds pull what was once a flat panel into all sorts of horrendous shapes, then with everything complete, it dramatically tore itself apart with cracks as it cooled.

We tried everything – pre-heating the metal, keeping a blowtorch on it and allowing it to cool slowly after welding, various grades of rod and settings on the welding kit but to no avail. Each time we allowed it to cool it cracked everywhere.

Alan from Leengate Welding Supplies was consulted as he has years of experience with every metal imaginable and Birmabright 5 was proving a real headache.

Most of the boat is BB3, which we’re mending with H22 (you may have seen this scrawled on the new pieces here and there) and 5000-alloy rods. (BB3 and H22 are virtually identical 5000 series alloys)

H22 is the marine-grade aluminium that ThyssenKrupp have been kind enough to donate and possesses very similar properties to BB3.

It bends and forms easily and welds beautifully but K7’s inner floor is made of BB5, which doesn’t bend at all – unless you crash your boat.

It’s a duralumin (copper / aluminium alloy) containing a quarter percent of chromium and this makes it hard as hell and virtually unweldable.

The nub of the problem is that the BB5 floor panel is not only thicker than most of the rest of the material used in K7’s construction (2mm against 1.6mm), and therefore has less give, it also has an elongation value thirty-percent less than the BB3, which means is that it simply won’t stretch.

Remember the materials science lesson with the bar of toffee? Well in this case substitute a sheet of glass. It won’t elongate – it’ll crack. So run a weld through this stuff then let it cool and contract and watch what happens next. Get the idea?

This left us with three options.

We could write-off the entire panel… Not a chance!

Or we could cut out the damaged bit for good and weld in a patch made of the far more ductile H22 with big radii in the corners. This would undoubtedly work but the LOOF box is only six-inches cubed and already an inch deep in scrap so we have to be careful.

The third, and most interesting of Alan’s suggestions, was to try welding with a 4000-series rod. These are almost pure aluminium and therefore very soft.

By running a weld down either side of the crack then another up the centre we could (in theory at least) create an area of metal with sufficient ductility to prevent it from cracking when it cooled.

The appropriate rods were duly acquired (FOC) and we tried again.

Success! It’s still awful stuff to weld and some of the worst cracks needed chasing around a bit but it’s just about done. Another original panel saved.

That, however, is the good news. The bad news is that where the repairs have been made the mechanical properties of the metal have been irreversibly altered. The normally rock-hard BB5 is now so diluted with pure aluminium in the welded areas that it’s much softer than the rest of the panel.

Not to worry. It’ll keep the water out to our perfect satisfaction and there’s plenty of scope down in that corner of the boat to TIG some small, steel outriggers into the frame (reversible, conserveering process, of course…) to pick up the floor and put the strength back.

More of that when we work out how to do it.

Other news – PDS are still cracking (no pun) on with the big bit of the frame and we have a series of meetings coming up to discuss how on earth we can accurately stick the two sections together again. We don’t have too many bits that span the break but the main, outer floor skin – all eighteen feet of it – is going to be a real treat. Not only is it also made of BB5 but it’s heavily damaged at the forward end and picks up every bulkhead from F-1 to F-19. No room for error with that one but we’ll work it out.

Did anyone notice that Cumbria Vision agreed to fund the museum side of things to the tune of quarter of a million this week? Greater faith and commitment than the Hopeless Lottery Failure ever managed. (The Westmorland Gazette called and asked for a quote and that’s what I gave them – very much doubt they’ll print it).

There are strings attached and much still to do, as you’d expect, but a quarter of a million quid proves that we’re being taken seriously and that the museum folks are battling as hard as the rest of us.

Meanwhile, work continues relentlessly.

We’ve mended everything in sight now to the point where we can use it; there’s still much detailed work to do on many components but what can be saved has been separated from that which cannot. The truly wrecked material is threatening to raise the tide in our LOOF box to a dangerous two inches!

But having stuck every last piece of reclaimed, original material back onto the frame and designed appropriate repair-strategies for what’s there the time has come to knock up the bits we don’t have from the material that Thyssenkrupp sent over and compared to recovering trashed panels it’s a walk in the park.

Rob is our chief wood-butcher and has become most adept at cutting out formers from some clever plywood that proved tough enough to blunt his circular saw!

We asked the wood-yard over the road – Percy Hudson’s – to donate a few scraps of hard plywood and were promptly given a material that destroys Rob’s tools. Perhaps they’re trying to tell us not to come scrounging…

Here, Rob’s making a former for the F-23 bulkhead, from right up in the pointy end, and he’s elected to trash our air tools rather than wreck any more of his own gear.

We’ve completed the stringer that passes around the bow too, the one that picks up the inner floor, outriggers and outer skin.

John gave it some final tin-bashing…

…then I fastened it down, drilling a hole in my finger in the process. Notice the bleeding knuckle. It hurts, pushing a 3.2mm drill through your finger bone!

The finished job looks OK though.

We’ve been making the occasional outrigger too. We’re only missing a couple and, compared to repairing the ones that Donald wrecked, making new ones is ridiculously easy.

Truth be told, it would have been so much simpler to declare the whole front end a write-off, so far as aluminium parts are concerned, (everyone would have believed us) and fabricated new bits. But this conserveering lark is a real buzz.

Here, John sets up the new F-18-S outrigger. Take a flat piece of material, one of Rob’s formers and a hammer…

And finally, I’m not joking here, Keith’s paintings are proving astonishingly popular so you’d best hurry if you want one from the original signed and numbered batch.

23^rd May 2007

You know how sometimes things just fall together…

Since 2001 when we lifted the boat until September 2006 when the decision was taken to commence the rebuild we have received literally hundreds of offers of help from more sources than you could imagine.

Many we struggle to think of a use for whilst others you just know are going to come good sooner or later.

Then once in a while things just slot nicely into place.

One offer we’d received was from a guy called Chris Jackson and his company, Metroimage in London.

If ever we needed any printing, pictures, display boards for the museum, that sort of thing… Very handy, we thought, but we’re still a way off needing such things so Chris and I bumped into each other from time to time and swapped the occasional e-mail but nothing came of his offer. That was until Keith Hick contacted us. The next part of the story is best told in Keith’s words. You see, Keith is an artist and a pretty, damn good one too.

*

As a young child growing up in the early 1950’s, two heroic exploits made an impression on me in 1952. At the beginning of the year the front pages of our newspaper told of the dramatic efforts to tow the Flying Enterprise into Falmouth. With her cargo torn loose by an Atlantic storm the Flying Enterprise was abandoned by her crew, leaving her Captain, Kurt Carlsen, alone on the heavily listing and drifting Liberty ship.

Spectacular pictures brought the fight to save the ship by the ocean-going tug, Turmoil, to the nation’s breakfast tables and the thrilling ship-to-ship leap by her Mate, Kenneth Dancy, to join Carlsen. ‘Dancy’s leap’ became the stuff of legend. Although Carlsen was to lose his ship, he was saved along with Dancy and one day I hope to capture that brave leap on canvas.

Later that same year, John Cobb took his brand new jet boat, Crusader, up to Loch Ness and seemed within relatively easy reach of a new world water speed record, then held by the American, Stanley Sayres in Slo-Mo-Shun IV. I remember being utterly spellbound watching the television news film that evening in September, as Crusader hurtled across the Loch only to disappear in a welter of spray. John Cobb, holder of the land speed record in his Railton Special was no more and Donald Campbell was to assume the record-breaking mantle within three years. 

Donald’s bravery in raising the world land and water speed records over the next decade continued to catch my eye as I finished school, went to college and began work. That fateful day on the 4^th January 1967 left another indelible impression, one that must have burrowed deep into my subconscious, for a few years later I began my own ‘Bluebird Project’.

Having decided to capture Donald’s achievements in piloting K7 and the Proteous Bluebird to record speeds and secure both records for Great Britain, I began work on the first canvas. Researching the subject through books, publications, photographs and recollections pointed me to portray K7 at speed on Coniston Water. My dilemma was how to achieve the impression of speed on canvas. The ‘roostertail’ tail spray produced just the right effect and this was assisted by light catching ripples in the foreground. So, “Campbell across Coniston” was finished…

…and now for two more portrayals of K7, “Bluebird at speed” …

and “She’s tramping!”

*

See what I mean? Keith painted these then tucked them away never to be seen. But there’s more.

*

Two further canvases of the Proteous Bluebird car followed in rapid succession: “Ready to go”

and “403.9 mph”,

both set at Lake Eyre, Australia, in 1964. Once again, the importance to depict speed brought a solution to the second of these two works with a dust trail thrown up behind the car is just discernable as she hurtles towards the viewer.

The last canvas in the series was the most difficult to finish. Having portrayed Donald’s life in the first five works, the sixth painting, entitled, “A sunburst in the storm of death” was started, then laid aside for six months. I thought about over painting with a composition from within the cockpit as K7 sped down Coniston Water. Discarding the over painting idea, I took a deep breath and completed the canvas. Perhaps the next in the series may well be that exhilarating view from the cockpit which Donald saw countless times.

Because the paintings were such personal works of art and not completed as a commission they have remained in the family home, almost exclusively, for over thirty years. On one of their rare outings, my wife, Sandie and I visited the film set at Coniston of the TV film made in 1987 starring Anthony Hopkins as Donald and meeting the cast at the invitation of the film’s director.

The last time the complete set of six paintings was placed on limited display was a visit to the K7 Club meeting at Coniston in January 2001.

*

Good, eh? That ‘Sunburst’ one is my personal favourite.
Keith called up to say that he’d be happy to let us use his paintings to further the project. How bloody marvellous is that? He came over to see us and what we’re doing and had a good look around the project workshop. A true gentleman.

Needless to say, Chris’ offer of help suddenly seemed the perfect next step so I gave him a call.

What happened was this – when Keith first got in touch and so kindly offered his work to help us out I thought, ‘hmmmm, I wonder if he’s any good,’ only to be completely blown away by the drama and technical excellence of his paintings. Then I thought, ‘hmmmm, wonder if Chris can make a proper job of reproducing them…’

I needn’t have worried.

In due course, and after much to-ing and fro-ing with negatives and such, the most beautiful set of prints turned up wrapped in tissue paper and delivered in a sturdy cardboard folder with Metroimage on the side. They really are stunning and guess what – Chris and Metroimage are also donating their work to help the project. Chris sent us a few words…

*

I joined Metro Imaging in the early eighties when the company had three employees and went on to build one of the largest professional imaging companies in the UK.

I started out as a jobbing photographer and quickly realised I was more technical than creative so swapped sides of the camera.

Metro started life as a film lab, producing arty prints but we went headlong into digital fifteen years ago and added photo retouching, image asset management over the web and pre-press services. We also bought a lighting company and opened studios giving the business a long list of services.

These days with film in its swansong we are firmly in the digital arena but we still produce arty prints…but on a digital system not in a dish!

*

Needless to say – you can now find Metroimage on our sponsors page and a limited edition run, only fifty of each print, available on the new page at the top of the main menu.

Keith will sign them and I’ve had a word with Gina and she’s happy to sign them too. I’ll even sign them if anyone is interested…

They are produced on top quality paper and honestly look like originals. They come in a tube so you can choose your own frame and each will be numbered so there’s no cheating!

The deal is this – both Keith and Chris have agreed that we can use fifty sets of these prints to help get our big blue boat back together (after which the paintings will likely retire to Keith’s attic for another thirty years) – a fantastic gesture from both gentlemen and I speak for the entire team when I say that we’re enormously grateful.

One other thing. As Chris has to fit the production around his other work and we have to pin down both Keith and Gina to ensure  the proper signatures, etc, are in place, please be a little patient with us but you can be assured of an extremely high quality and exclusive item. The wait will be worth it – I promise.

12th May 2007 (click on an image to see it in a hi-res pop-up window)

    The cockpit frame is ready to go. Remember we brought it home and heaped it on the workshop floor.

    You’re looking at the nose of the boat and can see that the right hand (as you’d sit in the driving seat) cockpit wall is intact, though badly bent, whereas the left hand side has split in two. The curved crossmember (visible spanning the cockpit walls) was originally at the forward end of Donald’s seat and was found completely separated from the other sections.
    The right hand side was located close to the impact site, the crossmember mid-distance between the impact site and main wreck and half of the left hand frame turned up beside the wreck itself.
    The missing piece of left-hand frame has already had its story told.
    There’s not a straight piece amongst them.
    Job-one was to give ourselves a datum from which we could begin to put the thing to rights so Dave and I set about constructing a jig.

    Don’t be fooled by its apparently simple construction – Dave the Rivet is a professional surveyor and I’ve done a bit of welding here and there so it’s absolutely level both across its width and lengthwise; and the legs are perfectly vertical according to Dave’s digital levels and lasers. Next job was to slap some scrap up there and see how it looked.

    It looked awful – everything proved bent or stretched out of shape – this was going to be an epic.
    We crawled around it for half a day then retired to the pub for a strategy meeting. The blue clamps are holding a piece of scrap box-section because the vertical frame tube was all over the place and we wanted to hold it straight while we thought about it.
    It seems the reason why the right-hand cockpit wall came up in one piece and the other side broke in two was because of the differing nature of the failure from one side to the other at that vertical frame member.
    There was once a crossmember at this point – frame 17.

    Take a look at the curved frame between the steering wheel and the ‘Bloctube’ fuel-cock lever
(That’s the black thing lurking down the right-hand side of Donald’s seat. Pic nicked from the SRG collection)
    You can see the F-17 crossmember comprising a U-shaped tube looping under the forward edge of the seat ( a portion of the right-hand side of it is visible in the pic) and a horizontal one across the floor (hidden beneath the seat).
    But here’s another rather shocking image of it – never previously released – from when the cockpit was reconstructed for Steve Moss at AAIB to aid in locating Donald. You can see the fuel-cock on the left.

    This is looking aft, Donald would be facing us were he sitting in the pilot’s seat (The severely disrupted structure aft of the crossmember) and you can see that the left-hand cockpit wall is still there as far as F-17 where it broke.
    What happened in the impact was is this.
    On the left-hand cockpit wall, both top and bottom longitudinal frame tubes failed completely, first at F-17 where the heat-affected zones around the welds were exploited and then at F-15 at the back of the cockpit where the frame met the much stronger structure supporting the main spar.
    The reason the frame sections separated completely at this point is because both fractures occurred at the forward face of F-17. The front frame section then glanced off the water like a skimming stone and flew 200m whilst the aft portion, which came adrift milliseconds later, went pretty much straight down.
    If you study the above picture you can see how the outer skin has wrapped around the vertical at F-17, proving that this failure occurred before the one at F-15.
    The other cockpit wall behaved a little differently.

    Examine the hi-res version of this pic and you’ll see why. The vertical tube in the middle is where F-17 used to be welded and again the structure has failed at this point on the heat affected zones, but look closely at the fractures and you may spot the crucial difference.
…The bottom tube has failed forward of the vertical whilst the top tube failed aft of it and this allowed the vertical to behave like a torsion tube and keep both halves together. Notice how the aluminium skins have been blasted outwards in the pic above and folded inwards in the earlier one.
K7 struck the water facing right of track and the cockpit was wiped off from left to right.
    This piece of detective work is all duly recorded for future students along with detailed photographs and x-rays of each and every fracture. Some of our findings, each with proper scientific data to support them, have caused controversy but they’ll not be swept under the carpet. It’ll all be there for historians to sift through in the fullness of time and why not? We have nothing to gain or lose through accurate reporting.
    In the meantime, our mission is to make K7 good to go again.
    The F-17 vertical certainly prevented the frame from separating but at a heavy price.

    The ragged area (above) is where the crossmember pulled out of the top longitudinal  on the right-hand side and the black line is our equivalent of where the surgeon draws on you with a marker to remind you in the hours before the op’ where he’s about to stick the knife.
    Using a 1mm thick cutting disc the section was surgically excised.

    Notice the amazing condition of the inside walls – barely even rusty. We kept trying to tell the HL-effers, and the Tweedies, but would they listen?
    There’s a new bit to go in but first we need to be sure that the frame is straight again. No point making a repair with everything out of alignment and by doing the hot-work with everything strapped up helps to minimize any unexpected movement.
    You see, everything is trying to pull itself apart with residual stresses.
    Take a brand new piece of box-section tubing and cut the side out to make a repair patch only to then watch in dismay as it twists itself into a new shape – something it’s wanted to do since it was a newly made piece of box but couldn’t do because of the shape it had been forced into during manufacture.

    Another quick lesson in metallurgy – take a wire coat hanger and cut one of its straight lengths with a pair of wire cutters. The cut ends will instantly spring away from one another because the wire never quite got used to being coat hanger shaped…
    Likewise, Bluebird’s frame still carries stresses from both its original fabrication and that awful crash, which wrought it further still.
    We have to be extremely careful when cutting or welding anything as it’s not uncommon to find that something has moved significantly simply because it’s been waiting to do so for half a century.
    John-Dipsy sorted the basics with Alain’s super-duper Land-Rover jack. It’s great for pushing things and can easily equal then exceed the forces involved in the crash.

    Next, ‘The Rivet’ built a tool, that we spot-welded to the frame, to pull fractured frame members back by degrees with the twist of a spanner…

    …so that yours-truly could perform open-tube-surgery.
    In some cases there were internal fractures that simply couldn’t be reached from the outside – where diagonals and verticals met at a longitudinal, for example.
    In theses instances it proved simpler to remove a tube wall, make the repair from the inside, then weld the wall back in.
    We use TIG welding throughout.
    Tungsten-Inert-Gas.
    If anyone has tried gas welding with oxy-acetylene the process isn’t too much different except that the flame is an electrical plasma shielded with argon gas to keep the oxygen away.
    Basically, you create a weld-pool with the torch – a small area of liquid metal shared between the bits you want to stick back together –then feed in a filler rod. The filler rods, comprising the appropriate material for the job, melt into the weld pool increasing its volume and bridging the join so when everything cools and sets you have two pieces of metal firmly glued together.
    Now this process ought to have been enough to ensure that the frame never fell apart again and it’s a good job we sacked the Hapless Lottery Flop because by now their ‘experts’ would be convening endless meetings, the protagonists of which would need to commit ten weeks in advance as they have other meetings, to the effect that any further intervention in the frame structure would surely represent poor value for money.
    The museologists would be ordering new tweed trousers too, as generally speaking, euthanasia is their preferred policy where machines are concerned and what the Bluebird-Project proposed would next breathe life back into the frame for another hundred years.
    With potentially wounded material immediately either side of the fractures despite our testing and careful welding we elected to internally sleeve the damaged regions for a distance of 200mm either side.
    We could have simply cut out the damaged zone and welded in a new piece but with a little extra effort we didn’t need to. The original material went with Donald on all of his record attempts so it stays!
    In went the sleeves – made of the same T60 steel as the frame.

    Then back went the original top wall of the tube.

    …a bit of titivating to be sure of a clean job.

    And yet enough is still not enough…
    You see, wherever the longitudinal tubes are joined in Ken’s drawings they’re not only welded and sleeved, as we’ve done, they’re pinned as well so Mr. Rivet set about giving our repairs the belt-and-braces, Ken Norris approach.

    These aren’t any old bits of scrap we’ve bashed in there either, notice the pin already punched flush in the left foreground and the other about to be driven home, they’re ground and hardened dowel pins – nothing but the best. We pinned the tubes vertically too and once all was set up we welded them solidly.
    Definitely not value for HLF money, unless you plan on using the thing as a jet-powered boat again, which we do, so now K7 can take to the water once more with no concerns over the longitudinal frame tubes.
    Now back to the F-17 crossmember.
    We cropped the ragged ends back a few millimeters then welded in short filler sections expertly ground to size by John-Dipsy. You’ll notice also in this shot that we’ve replaced a section of longitudinal tube wall. We’ve actually taken out two of the four faces and inserted a repair. This is because the tube was bent like a banana over a metre and a half so rather than replace the whole thing – the stuff is impossibly strong and springy and wouldn’t bend back without risking damage – we made a repair over approximately 300mm, which is enough to take out much of the bend whilst conserveering most of the original tube… a reluctant but necessary compromise.

    The top ends of the crossmember (below) took much careful piecing back together but they’re about there now – only some small gussets to weld into the V-shape at the top of the pic that we can’t get into easily. (Frame is upside down in this shot)
    When the upper welds of the F-17 crossmember were devastated in the crash the failure jumped from one side of the weld to the other whilst never leaving the heat affected zone so fragments of the crossmember were left stuck to the F-17 vertical and vice-vrsa. The result was that having cut and curetted away all the metallically-necrotic tissue we had a wound of almost 20mm to close.
    Our graft seems to have taken nicely though.

    One day – perhaps – when we’ve proven that all was needed was a dash of daring and a cupful of courage the tweed-types will admit that they were wrong and that we were capable, despite their ingrained conviction that being mere members of the public we needed guidance in such matters, of rebuilding this iconic boat without losing their precious ‘original fabric.
    I love to dream… but not to that extent.

    Museological vandalism or bringing a legendary object back to life?

9th May 2007 (click on an image to see it in a hi-res pop-up window)

    You wanted tin-bashing… we’ve been back amongst F-19 slowly resuscitating it from the dead.
    We’re cultivating a sort of symbiotic relationship between K7’s cockpit frame members and her panels at the moment.
    When the boat hit the water most of the aluminium skins were instantly stripped from the frame and sank onto a fairly well circumscribed area of lakebed.
    Collecting them was simple by comparison to retrieving the scattered pieces of frame where the cold, brittle steel, weakened at its welds since the day it was built, fragmented on impact and followed no defined laws in its violent redistribution.
    But what is fundamental to this project is that we’ve painstakingly collected it all back together and in the workshop we appreciate for what it is…lumps of metal.
    There are many considerations when working with these old materials especially when you think of what they’ve been through but it’s only steel and aluminium at the end of the day and metal is a known quantity in the Bluebird-Project workshop.
    Take a look at this conglomeration.

    Here’s the left hand section of F-19 from a new angle with two important differences. Look at what were previously splits either side of the frame tube and you’ll see that they’ve been partially welded, but more importantly, the whole thing is fastened to the cockpit frame.
    Just about everything at the pointy end took a tweak in the crash so it’s impossible to realign the shattered pieces of frame or the panels if you treat each in isolation.
    We measured that a piece of 16swg BB3 stretches, on average, 6mm before it splits so wherever you have a tear in the metal you have 6mm of material to lose and where the split ends you have somewhere between 0 and 6mm to deal with from there to where the stretching began.
    The steel behaves similarly but stretches a little further and that’s without any twisting or bending along the length of a tube.
    But reattach a piece of alloy to a section of frame whilst maintaining the specified clearances around the welds and, like kids caught in an act of naughtiness, each will reveal the other’s misdeeds if tackled correctly.
    We have the drawings for the panels and we know how far they stretch before failing so we can bring them back and pin them to the frame, which then has no option but to show us how far it too has been blasted out of alignment.
    This is what PDS could never have done without the panels and it proved easier to tackle it at our end as the panels need so much fettling – something we’ve geared ourselves to do as the build-proper approaches.
    So, having sorted the alignment problems with F-19, the time came to start making serious repairs.
    Were this supposed to be pure conservation we’d already have a few tweedies in rehab through overexposure to museological vandalism but pure conservation is a pathetic approach to an object as charismatic as Bluebird K7.
    The museologists are learning though – the clever ones at least – as we receive quiet encouragement and queries from their ranks about the possible application of engineering solutions to conservation issues.
    Our main conserveering exercise this week remained F-19, which just about resembled a bulkhead last we saw of it and so could have been justifiably hung in our ‘artifact-rich’ display with a patronising label under a tweed-friendly light bulb while we built all new parts for K7.
    We could also have put F-19 back as it is but it wouldn’t be very watertight and that’s no use. Need to fix such problems.
    “Justify it,” I hear Chris say.
    Simple, K7 is a boat and water p*ssing in is a big no-no. The time came to give F-19 a proper sorting.

    John-Dipsy’s new section proved to be a proper item of indeterminate parentage. We knew it was absolutely precise to Ken’s drawings but unfortunately it’s about the only piece that is at the moment!
    It fought us for days and as is usual in these cases all it takes is a millimetre error at one end the panel and suddenly nothing fits even closely.
    It gave in eventually though.

    This shot is bound to confuse because what you’re seeing is the back of the panel after new has been welded to old – new bit to the left.
    Because this is old material, and often we’re welding up corroded fractures, our process is to put a forty-five degree weld-prep on the faces to be repaired then fire plenty of good, clean filler-rod into the first weld.
    Next we turn the job over, use an aluminium cutter in a die-grinder to clean right back to pure material from the opposite side and then weld it again. That way we have good welds on both sides with no inclusions or impurities. The rods are 5000 series alloy so the material isn’t compromised.
    Give it a polish with a mop-type disc and you’re a step closer to a useable panel.

    Notice that we’ve now put the joggle halfway up the new section to let the left-hand outrigger fit cleanly inside it.
    Nine and a quarter million miles covered – three-quarters of a million to go and on the way we have to deal with more corrosion than is healthy for this particular panel.
    Unfortunately, the executive decision was taken to patch the worst bits. Small corrosion pits can be cleaned out with the aluminium cutter then filled with weld but the big bits were beyond this fix.

    So they were carefully removed and consigned to the ‘lost original fabric box’ whilst carefully shaped patches took their place and were welded into position.

    More fettling followed…

    And now it’s watertight again. It looks much better too but all that welding pulls it out of shape and holes that lined up perfectly beforehand are suddenly half a hole out. The best cure is to carefully stretch and shrink with the tin-bashing hammers until everything begins to play the game – that and having the now completed cockpit frame as the best jig in the world.

    The shiny, silver bar across the bottom, by the way, is part of the assembly jig we built for the cockpit frame and not part of the boat in case you were wondering.

    Have to make the outriggers fit next.

5th May 2007 (click on an image to see it in a hi-res pop-up window)

    Got into trouble over the last diary entry, I did.

    “Never mind all this soft stuff about who’s doing what and how great they all are,” I was told firmly. “Where are the nuts and bolts… the tin-bashing?”

    The fact is that having showed you all one bulkhead – and a particularly knackered one at that – coming gradually back together, I imagined that we’d made the point about our actually rebuilding this thing rather than creating an interpretive model…
    Thought you’d all be bored stupid with more of the same.
    But no, it seems, more tin-bashing is required by popular demand. So here’s one right from the start.
    Frame 19.
    Here’s a pic’ stolen from the Speedrecordgroup collection. (http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Speedrecordgroup/)

(Sorry about the poor quality of the large pic)

    The tip of the bow is to the right. See how it slopes downwards to the step and then continues aft as a flat bottom.
    The bulkhead at the step, at F-19, is particularly significant because it’s the only one to extend outside of the boat and therefore serve the dual role of providing structural rigidity whilst keeping the water out.
    F-19 consists of four panels though only the bottom one had the job of keeping Donald’s feet dry.
    The bulkhead emerged in two separate sittings, the first sections to surface being the torn away centre portion of the lower panel, the right hand outrigger and the top panel, normally situated behind the instruments and spanning the top frame tubes.
    In Kens original design it also served as a former for the foredeck
    The bottom crossmember from the step came up at the same time though this major find was entirely overshadowed at the time by the fact that the throttle pedal came with it.

    The tubular crossmember is clearly visible and we can be seen gripping the bottom of the F-19 panel that once kept the water out.
    The right hand outrigger and top panel are the crumpled mess to the right.
    The left hand section of the bottom panel and left outrigger eventually came up with the long-elusive piece of cockpit frame – in fact that fragment of the lower panel was the only piece we observed above the mud.
    Here’s the right-hand outrigger still clinging to the frame. It’s the vertical piece nearest appearing yellow under its coat of chromate primer. You can just see the end of the skin that once comprised the step at the top of the picture.

    Is everyone keeping up?
    The bottom panel was torn into three parts. The left we recovered as well as the centre but the right-hand end is somewhere in the mud at the bottom of Coniston Water and is likely to remain there until advancing technology and the next team of powerfully motivated individuals make it their mission to prove a point...
    In the meantime, this is the left-hand end of the lower panel after cleaning and blasting. It’s in poor shape but recoverable – just.

    The rectangular cutout is where it fitted around the lower, left frame tube. The straight (sort of) bottom edge was outside the boat and the curved section (top right) was inside the cockpit roughly under Donald’s left knee.
    Go back in the diary, to the little video clip of when we first found the missing cockpit wall, and this is the piece you’ll see poking from the mud.
    But for this fragment we’d never have found that main frame section. Sometimes you just get lucky.
    And here it is reunited with the centre section. We used the original crossmember tube to jig it all together as the rivet holes haven’t moved.

    We’ve stuffed the left hand outrigger in there too. It doesn’t look to be in good condition and has been only roughly tapped into shape but what’s important is that the rivet holes are beginning to line up. Notice the skin pins holding everything together.
    You can’t get those pins in there if the holes are less than perfectly aligned.
    Notice also that the right hand end of the bottom panel is missing – time to make a new bit.
    Below; John-Dipsy blanks out a piece of 2mm H22 marine grade alloy and whacks it around a wooden former made to Ken’s drawings.

    Then follows a spot of fettling and filing until it fits to the millimetre.

    We’re making real progress now and the right hand outrigger has also been popped in there to check the dimensions. Looks promising.
    Next came the top panel – hmmmm.
    Not a good one, this.
    It took a big smack, nor is it an easy one to put right with channels formed either side to slot into the outriggers and a turned edge to make it comfortable against Donald’s shins when entering and exiting the cockpit – a real bitch of a thing to straighten.

    Still… we’ve tackled worse so after a bit of tinkering we bashed it to where light is visible at the end of the tunnel for F-19 and cautiously acknowledged that it’s something approaching a bulkhead again but the work has only just begun.
    The truth remains that we could have made a new one in the time it’s taken to get this far then taken a week off.
    It’s easy to illustrate the process in a dozen pictures and a few hundred words but it takes an age of careful fettling to get even to here.
    Still, it wouldn’t be Conserveering if we simply made new bits… It would be bureaucratic archaeology, or something similar.

To be continued…

1st May 2007 (click on an image to see it in a hi-res pop-up window)

   We’re still cracking on at the same breakneck pace over here – without compromising quality of course.
    If you own a dog and have ever left it locked up for a while or take it to the beach or the countryside in the car you’ll have some idea of what we were like when finally let off the leash and into the workshop.
    We finally got the green light last September and haven’t stopped since. You’d expect enthusiasm to wane and wives to drag us indoors but thankfully it’s not happened and we’re over the worst now.
    The team has stuck together as winter threw itself either under the roller shutter door of our workshop or straight down the lake; not to mention the gnawing uncertainties of an extremely ambitious project.
    We had no idea, remember, whether we’d be able to find that piece of frame. We’d never refurbished twisted, ‘Birmabright’ panels or welded them before. We’d not worked with the fancy T60 steel that comprises the frame either but now we’ve done it all and feel halfway confident that not much can catch us out now.
    We’ve grown into a tight team, each with their own specialty, and polished our skills with each passing week.
    The massive and ever-expanding picture archive of the project and conservation logs has previously only contained folders regarding dismantling this or cleaning that but now there’s a new folder, the wonderfully titled,
‘Rebuilding Bluebird’.
    Within are many sub-folders containing pic’s of cleaned and refurbished components.
    It’s a great feeling and a just reward for the unflagging team effort considering that we only began for real in September 2006.
    We couldn’t wish for a better crew.
    For example, John-Dipsy has been tin bashing again, this time making a repair piece for a missing section of the F-19-1 bulkhead. This is the frame at the step in the bow.

    Until a few months ago, John had never hit a piece of alloy with a hammer.

    But it fits rather nicely.
    And Dave set about pulling some wrecked T60 tubing back to within a millimetre of where Ken drew it so it can be repaired and reincorporated into the finished boat.

    Tony Dargavel must have either shot-blasted or stripped the paint from hundreds of panels and other components yet he never seems to tire of it and can always be found either at the blasting cabinet or up to his elbows in paint stripper – in this case cleaning one of K7’s forward spar boxes.

 As they supported Bluebird’s outer skins they were left in place when the spar was raised and simply boxed in. We have both of them and they’ll fix.
   And yes, Chemetall-Trevor’s stripping bath is still going strong. I enjoy startling visitors by plunging my hands into it after showing them how easily it removes paint. (Then I rinse them under the tap).
   Rob keeps plugging away at whatever is to hand. Here, a piece of forward body skin with a strange fitting attached to it, which he set about salvaging.
    Notice the small radio on the edge of his paddling pool. He sneaked it in to listen to football of all things and the wrong team too and so was immediately banished to the far end of the workshop with his tools.

   Alain can usually be found spannering away under the old engine…

…or mending something around the workshop and I’m forever tweaking about with bits of aluminium.

 Then we recruited another volunteer.

    Meet Alan Dodds, merrily raising a curved panel and making it look easy.
    It’s much like the ones he raised in 1956 to cover the ends of K7’s raised front spar.
    Yep, Alan worked for the Carlisle company, James Bendall & Sons as a panel beater and was part of the original team to carry out the mod’s on Bluebird’s front end when the spar was lifted. He met Donald and Leo and had some great tales for us as he demonstrated that he’s lost none of his skills.
    A spot of wheeling came next…

    And there you have it – a demo of what can be done when you’re a real panel beater.

    But here’s the best bit. We asked Alan whether he’d come over and make some parts for real when we start rebuilding the cockpit, which is happening sooner than you’d imagine, and he accepted.
    How cool is that? One of the guys involved from K7’s very earliest days coming back to help knock her into her final form over half a century later.
    On a slightly different note – remember we observed that the frame was slightly out of true from the outset and that this was going to cause problems?
    Well what it actually did was create an impossible situation for the techies at PDS.
    How do you tell a precision engineering company to ignore the drawings you’ve provided because, although they’re technically correct, you don’t actually want your finished product to be represented exactly? Instead what we really need is the whole affair building about quarter of an inch cocked to the left – or is that three-sixteenths?
    It was a hopeless position for PDS so we took the executive decision to retrieve the cockpit frame to this end and try to work out precisely what’s needed before continuing.

    So now we have this forlorn pile of junk on the workshop floor imbued with yet more of Donald’s infernal bad luck. If it could laugh at us it surely would but we’ll fix it somehow…

15th April 2007 (click on an image to see it in a hi-res pop-up window)

With our waterborne adventures behind us – for the moment at least – we’re busy creating new ones in the workshop.
   The Hapless Lottery Fund, because they never came close to grasping what we were about, dreamt up some weird ideas (contradictory as a rule) that we tried desperately to dispel over the years
   Poor deluded souls convinced themselves that we’d have to chuck half of K7 away and start again.
   We patiently explained that even the most badly battered panel, as long as it wasn’t rotten in which case you really do have to admit defeat, can be straightened and re-used but we may as well have explained it to the dog.
   Mending such damage, however, would require the expenditure of more man-hours than it took to construct the Millennium Dome not to mention huge sums of money and this is where the male-bovine-excrement would begin to spatter all over again.
   What would be the ‘heritage benefit’? (Whatever that means) Would we be offering the public value for money?
   In order to provide value for money we’d have to chuck bits away and fabricate new parts as fixing the originals would consume too much time and lottery cash. The whole exercise would offer little in the way of ‘heritage benefit’ and not represent the all-important value for money, which would then make our front end a replica and the hapless-lot don’t fund replicas, only interpretive models.
   They’d therefore not pay for the new bits yet having someone else stump up for them instead seems not to redress the value for money balance as we tried that when they refused to pay to connect up the steering.
   “Why connect up the steering if you’re not going to use it?” They argued, their lack of vision preventing them from seeing that one day we might and that the public, whom the HL-effers ultimately serve, may actually appreciate it.
   They suffered a spot of poetic justice the other week when the Olympics budget took a two billion quid transfusion out of them without so much as a thank you.
   Big bureaucrats eating smaller ones – like weird nature with incompetence for an energy source.
   We’d also have the museologists bleating by now, if we’d not sacked them too, about how you can’t straighten anything anyway because it’s historical vandalism if you do. It has to be left as it was because it’s a snapshot in time – nowhere is it written down how many snapshots of battered aluminium are enough?
   If you listen to all this rubbish you’d get nothing done – as was the case for over four wasted years during which we lost our chief designer – so here’s what we did last week.
   Our museological mentor, and one of their tiny minority vested with any common sense, Chris Knapp, left us with two phrases that we chant like a mantra when making important decisions. With these two small instructions he condensed industrial conservation into something anyone with half a brain can follow and as the Hemorrhaging Olympics Fund have just been told by The National Audit Office to ‘simplify their procedures’ because all their jobs come in late and over budget the HL-effers would do well to take note.
   “Justify it,” Mr Knapp orders when we suggest straightening anything.
   “The water will p*ss in if we leave it like that,” is our usual answer.
   “Reality dictates,” he tells us when we point out that Donald bent it in the first place and the only way forward is with crowbar and hammer.
   That’s it; you don’t need any more.
   Armed with the above you can fix anything.
   So here is the bulkhead from frame 22 labeled by dear old Ken as F-22-1.
   Here it is as-recovered by ROV in January 07.
   Even Novie isn’t sure what to make of it.

And this is how it looked when washed and dried and placed on the workbench for further consideration…

   What we’d like to do is put this piece back.
   No I’m not joking.
   Justify it… Were Chris to ask me the question directly I’d state simply that it’s bent and we’ll never make the rivet holes line up in that condition therefore we have to fix it. We could make a new one but why when we have the original? Then we’d go for a pint and work out how it’s to be done.
   Another thing – just to give you an idea – the boat is numbered from the stern towards the bow with F-1 being about eighteen inches forward of the transom (that’s the flat bit at the back where the water brake was bolted for any non-boaty types).
   The upward-sloping underside of the nose begins at F-19 the rear face of the front spar is at F-20, the front face at F-21 then comes F-22 leaving F-23 at the tip of the bow so this particular piece of wreckage was right at the heart of the crash.
   And so, much persuading began, to convince it that it really does want to be a piece of Bluebird again one day. Reality dictates that we hit it with a hammer or it’ll be bent ’til the end of time but first a short lesson in metallurgy.
   Next time you stop to put fuel in your car pick up a bar of toffee or similar, take it from its wrapper and firmly grasp each end. Next, pull in opposite directions until it stretches about half an inch.
   Now consider how you might return it to the same size and shape it once was and ask yourself what kind of a job this must be with a piece of stretched aluminium…
   Here’s another – find a piece of stiff wire, a section of coat hanger will do nicely, and grip it at either end. Bend it into a U-shape then without moving your hands try to bend it straight again.
   It won’t straighten where you just bent it. Instead it’ll bend either side of the original bend leaving you with a W-shape.
   Why is this? Because you work-hardened the wire where you bent it the first time so the act of trying to straighten it again just exploited the softer areas either side.    But now they’ve work hardened too.
   Spend a while getting it straight as you consider what’s involved with a twisted sheet of alloy.
   So spend a while we did until…

   Not bad, but don’t imagine for a second that it’s good to go. Take a look at the bottom edge for starters. Not exactly straight, is it? It’s s’posed to be though.
   Any tin-basher will tell you that a flat panel is the hardest to achieve.
   I mean, why would you ever want to make one when you buy (or beg in our case) material off the shelf that’s already flat as flat can be?
   It can be done but we don’t want to work this old material any more than necessary so compromise is inevitable.
   Having brought back F-22-1 to some semblance of its former self we then turned our attention to the two outriggers that fit either side of it to make a complete bulkhead.
   Part of the right hand outrigger (F-22-1-S (for starboard)) came up with the bulkhead in January 2007. The rest of it we already had. That came up attached to the right hand cockpit wall in February 2001. The two torn pieces looked like this when we began.

   And like this after a few hours of tapping about. (Note the split down the right hand side)

   Still a million miles away but less than the ten million where they started but there’s still the small matter of it being torn in two.
   Its opposite number (F-22-1-P) came up in April 2007 with the long-missing section of mainframe. It looked like this with its paint off…

   …but turned out to be altogether better behaved than its opposite number and responded fairly well to a spot of flagellation.

   Next step, get it all precisely back to shape so it can go back into the rebuilt hull.
   Aligning the bottom edges was straightforward – we made a simple tool from the salvaged floor to reproduce precisely the rivet holes that originally fastened it down.

   That’s the strip of alloy along the bottom edge and now Donald’s cockpit is slowly coming back together. Having thus contained the dimensions at one end and sorted the angles, as this part of the floor slopes steeply upwards, we then had to re-jig the top edge.
   However, remember I mentioned stretching this stuff and how to send it back from whence it came? We found ourselves desperately in need of a small shrinking machine.
   A what?
   It’s a little beastie that grasps the metal with the pull of a lever, then, with a further application of pressure, squeezes a small amount of it together as you might with that piece of toffee to force it back to where it originated.
   There are manual techniques involving hammers but you can only work this metal for so long before it turns to icing sugar so the relatively gentle approach of a small shrinker was deemed far preferable. I set about obtaining one.
   Steve at Airframes pointed us at a company called Frost (www.Frost.co.uk) who retail panel beater’s kit and car restoration equipment so I called and spoke to an extremely helpful bloke in the techie-help dept.
   He confirmed that we needed a shrinker and gave me details of which model but my request that we beg a deal on it was met with the suggestion that I call Mike the MD on Monday and see what he had to say.
   Mike didn’t say too much when I called up and explained what we were about but he did promise to check out our website and call me back.
   Now then, my patience is limitless with some things but better resembles Novie playing the violin when I’m left waiting for important calls… so I rang first to find Mike firmly on the team.
   A big thanks to Mike at Frost tools and look at this, the top and bottom edges of the F-22-1 bulkhead shrunk back perfectly in seconds.

   We went on a rampage and finished off about ten panels in an hour with this amazing machine.
   If you mend cars or make stuff with sheet metal and don’t have one of these – trust me – you need one!
   You can do clever things like put a straight bit of material in its jaws…

   …munch away for a minute or so – and turn out one of these.

   Clever, eh?
   As it happens, the top profile of our bulkhead is not strictly relevant anymore because after Bluebird’s front spar was raised and the new foredeck installed extra panels were riveted to the tops of the bulkheads in the bow to raise them too and this left us with dozens of rivet holes that we could use to pick up a strengthener for our recovered bulkheads.
   We’d already made some MDF formers and from there doublers for the F-12 port and starboard outriggers and they turned out OK.

   Above are the original outriggers (top and bottom) with their new doublers so we followed our wining formula and knocked up a strengthener to pick up our F-22 bulkhead and its outriggers.

   There then followed much late-night welding while some of the team took an hour off to relax – and some didn’t.

   Thankfully, Bluebird’s aluminium welds easily and with the appropriate rods, as donated by Leengate Welding Supplies a few weeks back, we know the materials are all matched.
   Having repaired all the damage, done a bit more fettling, then made a final check against the drawings, F-22 was then placed in the tender charge of our shot-blaster in residence, Tony Dargavel, for a lick of glass bead.
   The glass actually polishes the surface and peens it smooth. We’ll not paint these bits until the last minute before final assembly in case they require some final tweaks.
   Not bad for a crumpled piece of scrap.

   Three things.
   Notice that the square cutouts that allow the frame tubes to pass through aren’t symmetrical and the gap between the left hand outrigger and the bulkhead… It appears the frame wasn’t square at the front from day-one.
   It says on Ken’s drawings that these cutouts should be dressed to clear the welds by 1/8th of an inch but these are more like 3/8th different from side to side so it seems the frame was cocked to port, which has opened a huge can of worms for us repairing the panels and PDS repairing the frame – more of that when we get our heads around it.
   Secondly, the panels are still a little battle-scarred. We could have gone on nit-picking forever but to what end? Hasn’t this metal been tortured enough? What would be the ultimate use of perfectly flat material buried deep in the bow where no one can see it when we can quit while we’re ahead without risk of further weakening the alloy?
   And finally - didn’t the Hopeless Lottery Flop cry on about a ‘conservation-led approach’?
   Best we can do when it comes to conservation, I’m afraid.

4th April 2007 (click on an image to see it in a hi-res pop-up window)

(and thanks once again to Mr Rivet for the pic’s)

Right, that’s it… no more clutching our silly hats as a knife-like gale tears down Coniston Water past a seven metre survey vessel crewed by nutters bent on retrieving a worthless piece of scrap when not a hundred miles away exists the facility to make an identical replacement.
    The water on the Bluebird site is exactly as deep as Nelson’s column is tall and beyond six metres the suffocating dark hides a lakebed of the finest silt. It’s cold down there too.
    Remember also that forty years have elapsed since K7 shattered into hundreds of pieces and sank and to this day we have no accurate account of how much was retrieved back in 1967 or what is now lost forever.
    The list of excuses for failing to recover the missing piece of frame is long and valid but ultimately unsatisfactory and as poor an apology for giving up as you’ll ever come across but there you have it.

*

   The tweedies and bureaucrats always had it in their heads that what we wanted to do was affix a replica front end onto the original aft section then declare the boat whole again.
   Donald’s rebuilt Bluebird.
   But, as history has recorded, the debt of thoroughness owed to their employer by the HLF ‘experts’ was left unpaid and not one of them at any time bothered to consult with us on what we really intended for the cockpit.
   Had they done so they’d have taken a step backwards at the sheer commitment and determination of everyone involved to recover all of the missing parts and return them to the finished boat.
   But could it actually be done?
   We know that some substantial pieces came out of the water in 67 but unfortunately their re-emergence was not properly documented.
   For example, the police inventory of recovered material clearly lists the steering wheel and column while making no mention of the F-20-1 bulkhead to which those items were attached along with Bluebird’s bespoke, Burman steering box and yet all of these components are clearly shown being marched up the beach in photographs taken at the time.
   Was our piece of frame recovered back in 67?
   Has our relentless searching of the crash site in 2007 been doomed from the outset?

*

   It took a whole week to get the sonar computer back on line; most of that time being spent in a re-design to eliminate the chance of a repeat failure.
   Problem was, by the time it was ready, we were steaming towards the Easter weekend – start of the Lake District silly season – and a time when you definitely don’t want ropes, umbilicals and clump weights all over the lake.
   It’s also the beginning of the visitor season for our museum and as we’ve covered the lake shore with promotional material, which (encouragingly) disappears as fast as we can replenish it, we’re hopeful of a few extra bodies through the door this year.
   Come the summertime, if we’re to get anything done, we’d have to switch from hoping for good weather out of season to wishing for poor weather when it ought to be glorious so we made the executive decision that as the place was about to go daft we’d cram a couple of last-ditch-effort days in before announcing our failure.
   And so we found ourselves on the lake Tuesday and Wednesday.
   Job-one was to test the sonar.
    We knew it worked but were unable to demonstrate this with hard data last time. Then the wind picked up and made turning the boat with a towfish out back decidedly dangerous.
    Thus defeated on that front we decided instead to shoot all the clump weights we had, lash ourselves immovably to the silt, then chase down a theory we’ve been working on for several weeks.

    Take a look at this pic’ and tell us what you see…
    It’s obvious enough that a chunk of something has flown off in the crash and splashed down not a million miles from the camera as K7 sinks in the background (left) but where is that on the lake?
    We have no idea where the camera was, how big the object might be or any of the distances or angles involved…
    In fact, about the only thing we could say with some certainty, is that the splash is east of the sinking position and probably not more than 200m from the impact site as that’s how far the spar went, which we know because we lifted it in 2001.
    Call it 250m for safety’s sake and you have a piece of lakebed the size of two thousand table-tennis tables – work that back to football pitches if you prefer.
    Factor in that were this really the frame it’s an extremely heavy piece and from experience we knew that very little was likely to be showing above the mud.
    Not put off in the least we ploughed on; systematically cleaning out an area east of the crash zone then continuing towards the north – but without result.
    Could it have gone west, north or maybe further northeast than we’d already looked? Theories abounded and frustration took its toll on us all but the only thing to do was to keep thoroughly eliminating small areas of lakebed at a time.
    What if the flying object was the frame and we were in the right area but it had landed flat with nothing showing above the mud? We knew the steelwork would be buried – the other pieces of cockpit frame were – but ragged markers of aluminium had always flagged their whereabouts. What if though… what if?

*

    Then amidst our awful frustration a blast from the past arrived to cheer us up.
    Carl Spencer took an afternoon off and came over to visit with us.
    Those who’ve followed the project from our early, fumbling exploits on the lake will remember that Carl was one of our key players back in those formative days.
    We were short of a skilled diver when the recovery op’ started and I was just too busy with a project that seemed to be expanding faster than the universe to go out and recruit one. I asked Sally Cartwright and ‘Beanie’ Woodfine for ideas and as one they suggested Carl.
    I’d never heard of him but their glowing reports sealed the deal.

   “Phone him up, if you could, tell him what’s going on and invite him to join us in the morning,” I said then went on with whatever it was I was busy with.

   Next morning we had a new diver whom I was surprised to discover was a Brummie.
   We’d never had one of those before but we couldn’t really hold it against him.

   To this day he tells me he’s a ‘plumber from Cannock’ and I insist I’m a ‘welder from North Shields.’

   “Go with those lads, they’re about to dive,” I suggested whereupon Carl, after the briefest of introductions, got to dive the Bluebird wreck with video camera in hand.

   He seemed a little stunned when the boat came back but rapidly went on to become one of the main boys and one of the three divers responsible for recovering Donald.
   We were therefore delighted to see him last week. Just like old times.

    Carl has since gone onto greater things than splashing about in a humble Cumbrian lake.
    His project to dive and survey Titanic’s sister, Britannic, took us all out to Greece in 2003 where we got one over ‘Hollywood’ Bob Ballard of Titanic fame by locating the minefield that sank the great ship where his efforts with the American, nuclear-powered N1 submarine failed.
    He sent us a ‘well done’.
    Carl and I worked again together on the X5 project in Norway last year. It was all my mad idea whilst Carl was the motive force behind our borrowing two Royal Navy minesweepers for the duration.
    Now these boys had a sonar system to be proud of and what a privilege to be able to put our hands on it for a day or three.

    This is the op’s room aboard HMS Quorn, the warmest place we could find in that frozen Norwegian fjord but that’s another story.
    Back to Coniston… Carl had just returned from Australia this week after traveling all that way to give a presentation to some midget-submarine veterans then stopping off in Hollywood on the way back to discuss his part in a movie.
    He’s journeyed to the Titanic aboard the Mir subs, is a fellow helicopter pilot, runs a highly successful business and is a superb diver. It was great to get back together so we all downed a hot chocolate at the Bluebird café then hopped aboard Predator and went for a nostalgic play about with the sonar.

*

    At this point I must thank Tritech in Aberdeen for their unwavering faith where all things sonar are concerned.
    They’ve supplied equipment, software development, technical advice and support beyond the call of duty when it came to keeping our underwater search operation going.
    Their high-resolution sidescan and scanning sonar systems are simple to operate, robust and easily adaptable to the demanding things we ask of them.
    I mean, their sonar heads were never designed to be stuffed into the top of a truncated road-cone and lowered to the lakebed on a cable …

    How many wires?
    And check out the world’s most expensive road-cone. The blue thing in the top is the latest Tritech sonar head.
    We showed off all our new-fangled kit to Carl, as he’s not been part of the evolution we’ve undergone as a search team since he stepped ashore in May 2001, and boasted of our new capabilities.
    Into the water went our array of sensors and the crew threw the usual banter back and forth while sod-all showed itself on the screens – it seems that Carl has applied for astronaut training! No I’m not kidding.
    Us relative under-achievers, in the meantime, continued plugging away at the myriad targets that litter the lakebed.
    Plastic bottles and tumbleweed far outnumber all others but we’ve also seen pieces of lost diving equipment from the 2001 expedition, huge eels and a hiking boot to name but a few. Each must be checked, recorded and eliminated.
    A typical scanning sonar shot looks like this.

    Think of it as looking down from above on a circular section of lakebed – as though we could shine an extremely powerful spotlight on the bottom and see what lay within its beam.
    This circle is sixty metres in diameter and in the ten o’clock position the ROV is approaching an unknown target.
    By this time we’d gone so far to the north-east we were in danger of having to climb the steep slope up to the shore and then, to the astonishment of all aboard, this drifted into our camera’s view.

    Now this was serious… undoubtedly a piece of Bluebird but almost a hundred metres from the sinking position and two hundred metres from the impact site – it had been thrown one hell of a long way!
    We recognized it immediately as part of an internal bulkhead from the cockpit and the atmosphere was charged in an instant.
    The distinctive curved edge gave it away; we were suddenly very excited bunnies as we knew that a simple bulkhead hadn’t flown so far on its own without fluttering back into the water.
    Something big and heavy had carried it and whatever it was lay beneath the mud.
    Now did we mention that Carl had thrown his dive gear aboard just in case something exciting happened?

    And so with as little effort as one might expect of someone donning a raincoat and popping an umbrella, Carl slipped into his kit…

    …and dropped over the wall gripping the end of a rope with which to secure the booty.

    It’s always fascinating to watch the divers working on the bottom. We can see them but they can’t see us.
    We first used this technique with the police divers on a body recovery and heard through the underwater comm’s that they couldn’t locate the target. We were later able to demonstrate that most of them never left the down-line – embarrassing to say the least.

    Carl is heading out from the centre towards the ROV, which is sitting on the target providing a light source and a route to follow with its tether.

    Notice the trail of silt kicked up by his progress all the way to the target as for the first time since 1967 human hands grasped this part of K7 and worked on it once more.
    We watched, fascinated, as Carl bashed around on the target for five minutes or so. I knew from personal experience that he’d long since lost any kind of underwater visibility and must be working in pitch darkness by feel alone.
    We get no more than a glimpse of what’s happening on the video and then the mud smothers everything.
Vid Diver arrives.

    He also had to be up to his waist in liquid mud and exerting himself severely on a closed loop of computer-managed breathing gas yet the sonar image continued to show him working hard for several minutes more until…

    … returning at last.
    Notice that the ROV is now separated from the target and the diver is on his way back, drifting slowly now that the job is done and making no wake this time.
    Carl later explained that he’d moved the ROV before starting work in case he damaged it
 I stood on it once and as a result it arrived on the surface full of water and about two grand away from working again. Told you Carl was a veteran…
    Five minutes later he drifted to the surface relaxed as if he’d nipped down there for a coffee and a pastry, climbed aboard, then stretched out comfortably atop a basket of ropes.
“Let me know when you need me back in,” he teased in his Brummie accent as the rest of us took the weight on the rope.
    “It’s a big piece,” he informed us nonchalantly. “Tried to lift it and disappeared into the mud myself instead.”
    We were all grinning madly…

    Three months of skirting the divorce courts and now we could almost see a way clear to putting two fingers up to the lawyers once and for all – it was unbearable.
    Three of us dragged Carl’s gear aboard as Graeme crept the ROV through the mud to make an inspection. We made ready to pull like hell.
    “Is it likely to come off the rope?” I asked.
    Carl assured us otherwise.
    Graeme called from the wheelhouse that I was going to like this.
    “What is it?”
    “Bloody great bit of frame tube with a rope around it,” he replied excitedly.

    Our fingers froze and dripped cold lake water as we heaved on the rope but as the strain built we realised what we had was one heavy piece of wreckage incoming so we pulled for all we were worth until…

    Three month’s work – triumph at last.
    Our long-missing piece of frame emerged lashed at both ends and in the middle; no mean feat in a hundred and fifty feet of black water a couple of metres of mud and no visibility whatsoever. Notice the brown stained part in the centre. That’s the only bit that was visible above the mud and because of that the frame is in as good condition now as it was when it sank.
    Thanks Carl.
    And while I’m thanking folk there’s a whole host of deserving others.
    The Bluebird-widows… our wives and girlfriends (mostly wives these days demonstrating how much can change in six years) who’ve given of themselves unstintingly as we’ve torn loose our remaining hair and spoken a foreign language of latitudes and longitudes since Christmas.
    They’ve been great as have the die-hard members of the team. It has to be said that picking out corrosion and sanding down filler is totally soul destroying work but week-in, week-out, Rob and Tony Dargavel have kept their appointment with history and donated Wednesday and Thursday evenings to such mundane tasks as well as making the odd trip out on the boat.
    Most of us have been out on the lake most weekends for as long as we can remember and it’s become a family affair especially for the rivets – Dave, Gill and the Mandrels, Skinny and Bogart.
    Rarely, if ever, has the project witnessed such support and solidarity. It was easy when we were all single blokes and now it’s easier still as we arrive on site with packed lunches and the promise of a meal on the table when we arrive home frozen and exhausted.
    Novie remains a load-bearing, structural member of the team as does the Hannarack and I was reminded by Alain, who’s been involved longer than anyone else but me, that it would be good policy to give the original dive-team first refusal on the recovery work. It never occurred to me that any of them would still be interested – how wrong can you be? Thanks to Sal and Tim for all that sponson structure and the throttle pedal.
    And of course, Capt. Graeme Connacher came along for the ride. He’s a great bloke and we’d be lost without the chance to fill his house with sleeping bags and his fridge with beer so a huge thanks to all involved. We got there in the end.
    Right – back to the workshop.