31^st August 2007

It’s been a while.

What I forgot to mention is that Alain has been on holiday for a fortnight. He didn’t go far, mind you, but it was still somewhere with no Internet (or Sky tv or mobile coverage - Al)so we were temporarily silenced.

Life continued, however, and on Wednesday morning I took my little daughter swimming as I do every week; so having splashed around for an hour we retired to the café where the baby munched a teacake and I enjoyed a swift cappuccino before handing back to Mammy then braving the office for the rest of the day.

But this time I spotted something I’d not seen before…

On the wall beside the bar was a ‘Roy Castle Clean Air Award’.

I knew he’d died from passive smoking but not that awards were given in his name.

So I Googled it at my earliest convenience – when did the verb ‘to Google’ enter the English lexicon?

Have a look at http://www.cleanairaward.org.uk/

It’s all a bit redundant in the UK now that we’ve successfully banished those casual bearers of lung cancer to the car park but the name, Roy Castle, stuck in my mind because when I was a kid he hosted a popular TV programme called ‘Record Breakers’.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/titles/recordbreakers.shtml

I’m assuming that we’d not be doing any of this but for a certain record breaker so Roy Castle inevitably struck a chord along with Ross and Norris McWhirter who dreamt up the Guinness Book of Records in the first place thus promoting the whole idea of being bigger, better and faster to a vast audience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norris_McWhirter

It was a great show, as I recall, where they’d try to break a record every week on-screen whether it be cramming two-dozen Royal Marines onto one tottering motorcycle or some fat bloke trying to guzzle a million baked beans in ten seconds using only a toothpick…

There was a ballet dancer once too – who tried to tie his ankles in knots whilst scrutinised by judges using a slo-mo camera. He got his record on telly as well…

Where’s this daft Geordie going with all of this? I hear you ask.

Well there was I in a cosy café breathing the whiff of chlorinated water whilst attempting to manage a mad two-year-old and getting all nostalgic for a particular episode during which some nutter attempted to spin what seemed like a thousand plates on springy sticks firmly anchored to the studio floor.

All began in fine fashion and the plates whizzed around happily to the audiences’ delight but the performer kept increasing his whirring workload until the discs he’d first spun-up began to wobble perilously.

Undaunted he quickly attended to those about to fall and with a few deft wrist movements soon sped them back to temporary equilibrium before moving on to launch some more.

Baby Lucy vacuumed her orange drink sealing shut its neck due to a critical design error by the ‘Fruit-Shoots’ packaging dept. that slams down the lid on her favourite juice immediately a small person creates a negative pressure gradient within the bottle. Knowing her dad would fix it she shoved it across the table.

“Oh Noooo,” she said, shaking her little head.

And as I unstoppered the juice I pondered the man spinning his plates and what was next to be done with our Bluebird-project after I’d handed our offspring back to her mother and strapped myself securely into my office chair.

We have one hell of a lot of plates spinning at the moment…

Take, for example, the frame.

OK, so it’s mostly repaired now, but there’s still a daunting amount of detail work to complete between when it comes back and its imminent dispatch to the paint-shop, which then means liaising with subcontractors, hauliers, press and sponsors; and that’s without working to everyone’s differing timescales…

How about the new rollover jig?

Being built as we speak – but it’s new, experimental and needs not only careful development but also the evolution of safe handling practices to avoid injury or material damage when we actually try to use it.

Simply getting a coat of paint onto the frame and placing it in position for further work is going to prove a logistical nightmare.

Then there’s the sponson thing. We’re still undecided on whether to build a set of demo-only sponsons or design extra surfaces onto the original configuration so we’re working with boffins at the university and hydroplane designers alike to bottom the problem.

Then someone has to build them…

Engines.

Our new engine – bought in 2001 – is good to go but we’re also chasing two similar units so we’ll eventually need a dedicated engine shop in which to prepare K7’s new powerplant.

None of us have ever lit up a full size gas-turbine either so that’ll be a fun day at the workshop. It’ll certainly get the litter out of the yard!

Then we have all those good people out there who’ve bought stuff from us and are awaiting their goodies on any given day.

It all gets done but some of those spinning plates get very wobbly at times.

Still, the workshops are coming along nicely, no wobbly plates indoors.

We’re still on target for the mid-September return of K7’s frame and another of the jobs on our gradually shortening list was the construction of our new mezzanine floor as a storage area.

Rob and I built this on our own last Saturday – or should I say that I did all the hard work because Rob is only three feet tall but then I’m scared of ladders and heights so he got all the high-rise work later in the day when it came time to fix the deck up there.

Then he sparked-up his favourite machine…

…and listened to his team being slaughtered by some outfit from the twelfth-league who came runners-up in the Blind-Footballers-Association annual tournament last year.

Hoping for a feast as soon as they win something, Rob’s stalwarts had another go midweek and managed to reduce the number of goals by which they lost to a paltry two.

Another effort the following Saturday saw them lose by only one so they’re definitely improving…

Wishing to help our mate out, we’ve asked the Hapless Lottery Failure if they have a spare set of goalposts that they may be willing to donate to Rob’s team.

I mean, imagine it, those trying to beat Rob’s lot would hire some top strikist to kick the ball straight at the sticks only to watch them disapparate – Harry Potter fashion – and reappear on a completely different continent where no one would ever think to look for them.

HLF goalposts can do this as we’ve proven so many times though until now we’d not found a worthwhile application for their magic; unlike Chemetall-Trevor who seems to have effectively harnessed something similar and turned it into paint-stripper…

So it fell at a particularly opportune moment in Rob’s ball-chasing season that we became the proud owners of this new piece of equipment.

A gentleman by the name of David Chappell answered our plea for a better quality ‘wireless’ and so purchased for us this sparkling new radio that can even play those shiny beer mats that superseded Rob’s old 78 rpm records.

It has remote control too – the wonders of modern ‘wireless’– so we can drown out the ball-chasing at the push of a button.

Maybe we ought to give the remote to Rob…

Thanks, David, for donating such a priceless item.

While we’re on the subject of donations, our cartoonist, Mike Bull, sent us a big box of treasure; hauled from his Granddad’s spider-infested ‘shed of doom’ and decorated it with a cheerful sketch in the lid.

Old tools – we love ’em.

Anyone else got something useful they can send our way? A good recipe for tea and coffee might be an idea as Tony Dargavel was back on cook-house this week...

And we all worked frightfully hard on Saturday to load just about every moveable object onto our new mezzanine.

Notice Mike up there in his fluorescent, orange overalls. He made the near-fatal error (good job he has that clever pacemaker) of announcing that he likes painting. Guess where that’s going to get him… unsung hero status, methinks.

But he reluctantly put his brushes down for half an hour and joined us upstairs.

John-D came over earlier in the week too and we moved the racking from the assembly-shop to the upper level reducing us almost to tears of laughter in the process as we tried to figure out how to reassemble it.

The verticals have slots along their entire length, and on all four faces too, into which small brackets are latched to hold up the shelves.

But the brackets are handed, left and right, and it’s far from obvious which face of the vertical they’re supposed to fit into so you get something like seven out of eight chances to make a balls-up of every one and all bets are off when tackling the opposite end of the shelf.

We alternated between frustrated beyond belief to helpless with laughter as we got it hopelessly wrong time and again.

But not to be beaten… after four hours of swearing at the damn things and trading opposite-handed clips like gold bars our work was finished and effort began in earnest to fill all the newly available space with crap.

You can also see that we’ve now moved the metal-working machines, loaned to us by Will Grimes, into the new fabricating shop and that the upper level is piled high.

The old-man came over on Saturday again to drive his ‘pronglift’.

We’re just about done with his lifting and shifting expertise but the job would have been a nightmare without him. As usual, Mike captured the spirit of things.

So now the Chinese-torture-racking on our mezzanine holds all the panels still in-progress.

They’ll plop off the end of our production line and into the paint shop in due course.

And, lying on the upper-deck, far-right, you can just make out the open end of Bluebird’s aft planing wedge whilst on top of that is the wrecked end of her outer floor, which we’ve protected with 5mm plywood and fastened down because it spans the full width of the mezzanine and folk will have to move around up there.

In this pic’ we’re busy manhandling the main spar onto the new deck and what a jolly heavy b’stard it is too!

The big, white object behind Tony, by the way, has nothing to do with K7.

It’s a spare chassis for my RS200 (have a look at chassis number 139 on www.RS200.org if you’re interested), just in case I prang my favourite car and end up with another rebuild job).

You’ve probably noticed it wasting space in the Bluebird shop for ages but I’ve nowhere else to store it so for the time being it’s a piece of BBP inventory.

Behind it you can just make out the corners of the boat’s upper fairings patiently awaiting our attention.

Our assembly-shop is coming along nicely too. It’s accessed via ‘Rob’s Passage’, which now proudly exhibits the pictures drawn by his granddaughter, Zoë.

Now here’s another thing we’ve had in mind since starting to sort the workshops for the big push towards a reborn K7.

You know how the Hapless Lottery Failure ‘experts’ told us that anyone under forty was unlikely to be bothered about our big blue boat project…

Well we’ve discovered one or two exceptions and there are bound to be more out there if only we can find them.

Zoë is a perfect example and my two-year-old daughter, Lucy, is forever having me refresh the BBP page on my browser so she can watch Alain’s little animation skim by at high speed.

Young Greg comes over with his dad and sweeps the floor whenever they get the chance and don’t forget my niece, Sophie, who’s very proud of the new bit she made for the boat despite being over three decades short of the minimum age requirement for even basic interest.

So what we’d like to do is this…

Wherever you are, if your little-uns are interested in what we’re doing and want to draw us a picture, write us a letter or make a model Bluebird out of toilet roll tubes or whatever then please send it over and we’ll proudly display it in our workshop with a little placard declaring who, where and when.

Wouldn’t it be great to have stuff from kids all over the world on the BBP walls to prove that there’s actually a whole new generation who can be interested in jet-powered boats and the spirit of crazy endeavour…

Mail us – Team@BluebirdProject.com – and we’ll give you the address.

Only that scruffy, old engine messing up our operating theatre now – can’t wait to see a beautiful, big frame in there having its clothes put back on.

Almost time to shut up, and back tracking a little – have a look at this, Mike Bull’s promo video for the project.

He mailed me one day with an idea.

As YouTube is so popular these days oughtn’t we have a presence up there?

I agreed it was a good move so in what seemed only a few hours, Mike had created this and stuck it on the web. Hmmm, clever lad is our Mike.

Enjoy.

Right, finally and before we go, you’ll no doubt be glad to hear that the tin-bashing has recommenced. Yep, at last, no more ball-chasing because the hammers are out again.

The crumpled corner of Donald’s seat that came up with the F-15 bulkhead, recovered by getting it tangled around the front of the ROV, made for a gentle reintroduction to our favourite hobby.

And was soon conserveered back to this…

…which just needs to be welded back into position now.

We’ll tell you all about it next time.

18^th August 2007

We’re really cracking on still.

Muck and rubbish is launched into the skip while dreary breeze-blocks suddenly sparkle with a fresh coat of white paint and the crew become increasingly excited about what it’ll soon be like to work in spotless surroundings.

It’s home, after all, to our unlikely gathering of tin-bashers.

We’re like family returning to our kin for the weekend so we want our place looking nice.

But what a mission! (See if you can spot Alain in Mike’s cartoon, he was in the last one too…)

Work actually started on Friday evening in Rachel’s kitchen where the technology-twins, Dave and Alain, set up shop to work on some of the project’s peripheral issues.

Dave has produced a fantastic set of drawings for the second generation rollover jig so we spread them out, had a meeting on some of the finer points then he made a few tweaks there and then.

Alain, in the meantime, has built a website for our mates at Bettablast so we had a look through that too before he uploads it to the Interweb...

It looked great to me.

Saturday morning and I took the pair of them by surprise by being up and out of the house before either awoke – that’s never happened before and anyone who worked with us on the lift in 2001 will tell you that I’m hopeless at getting out of bed under any circumstances.

Never mind, job-one was to have some graphics applied to our shiny, white roller-shutters by Andy Kelly who generously offered to cut some vinyl then venture North to stick it on the doors for us.

But more of that in a mo’.

What happened next was sheer, bloody hard work as we completely emptied the new unit in order to get the paint on the walls that day and on the floor next week.

First to go was K7’s recovery cradle built from Ken’s drawings back in 2001 to get her out of the lake.

It was constructed about five feet shorter than Ken intended for obvious reasons but with K7’s nose reattached we’ll triumphantly build the remainder when she’s ready to go back onto it.

We picked it up bodily, because we had ten volunteers that day, and carried it into the yard to the distant knocking of Bill Smith Snr’s faithful old forklift engine echoing across the yard as it grumbled into life.

Then we all stared nervously skyward.

Is it a bird…a plane, perhaps… or a UFO?

Nope, none of the above – it’s the old-man shoving the cradle on top of the containers with his forklift.

Or perhaps ‘pronglift’ after John-D incorrectly described the two forward protuberances by which it moves heavy objects.

Next, the Bluebird-Project tug-o’-war team did a spot of training with Donald’s engine.

We fixed a strop to the engine cradle, arranged ourselves along its length, and pulled like mad things. It worked wonderfully.

Then the old-man picked it up with his ‘prongs’ and chugged away across the yard so we could stow it again in the other unit.

He actually bought that forklift brand-new along with two other identical machines in 1976.

I learned to drive it that same week then had the delightful (not) pleasure of rebuilding most of it a couple of years ago when Father neglected it until its engine filled with water over the winter and seized solid.

Since then he’s kept it in second-class, fully-certified, working order in case his boy ever has to declare life extinct in the old piece of junk!

Believe me – and I’m being serious without prior arrangement here – that forklift is in worse condition than K7, but at least it’s legal!

Never mind…

It took most of the morning to shift and secure everything then we sat down for a tea break.

Rob, somewhat suspiciously, seems to have taken tea-making classes or something because not only has his brewing ability improved out of sight but he’s also first on deck to clean the mugs and spoons.

He’s also given up dedicating one particular ‘wireless’ to ball-chasing; anything with a speaker will do now that the season has begun.

His team went ball-chasing last Wednesday, for some odd reason, as we tried to paint the door in the new unit but they’d not been running about the grass for more than five minutes before one of them kicked the ball past the wrong pair of sticks.

(I was informed firmly that there are actually three sticks, two verticals and a horizontal, so calling them a pair is footballingly-incorrect).

But then the bloke who used to play for Newcastle – ‘Chopsticks’, or something – despaired for but a moment before bailing the southerners out of immediate danger by launching one past the correct trio of sticks so he could then jog about unobtrusively until his wages arrived in the bank.

Afterwards, the rest of Rob’s favourites put up a singularly unimpressive performance by only getting one extra try each – or is that rugby-speak?

So in the end no one won but at least they didn’t look completely stupid.

The blokes from our side of the river, on the other hand, didn’t even put their boots on through the week - they get enough exercise depressing the clutch pedals in their Ferraris and leaping up and down on vacuum-headed blondes after the nightclubs close.

They did, however, have the common sense to reach an agreement before kick-off with the similarly hung-over boys they faced on Saturday so that each team cleverly chucked the ball past the sticks enough times to pacify the opposing tribes without anyone actually losing.

Sadly, Robs crew still imagine ball-chasing to be a sporting sort of endeavour where the best men win and not big business where fat men in Bentleys shaft the hard-up populace for restyled, forty-quid nylon shirts every five minutes… so they got wholly thrashed by some blokes from a town that only had six inhabitants last time I was there and whose team only get fed if they win.

But getting back to the Bluebird-Project (am I still writing football reports?) and with each of us holding a steaming teacup we took-five to talk business.

It’s always the same when Novie and I get together – we can never resist the old gone / going chestnut so it was dusted off and bashed about for the umpteenth time.

We’ve had this argument since Mr Whoppit was a cub.

I reckon that Donald’s last words from the cockpit were,

“I’m going!”

A perfectly logical thing to come out with (in my personal opinion) as your boat takes off with the possibility that it may just come back down again and he clearly speaks two syllables as it goes…

 Furthermore, when the recording was listened to by the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) guys at AAIB (Air Accidents Investigation Branch) they also agreed it was perfectly clear that Donald said ‘I’m going’.

But Novie insists it’s, ‘I’ve gone’.

Very past-tense for a man of Donald’s unbounded optimism… Again – only my personal opinion.

Tea break over – I went to buy extra paint and brushes for the crew and came back to this…

They’re all daft!

Then we spent the whole afternoon in hysterics over one thing or another.

Master Evans suggested we produce a calendar to raise funds with photos of the team in drag so we offered him the January slot and to see how it went from there – it was that sort of day.

Our second tea break was made interesting by Andy-K pulling a beautiful model of K7 from the back of his car and firing up a tiny jet engine that you could hold in the palm of your hand.

But bugger-me did it go!

It was absolutely deafening and all I could think about was that we have a similar power-plant that’s eleven feet long!

What’s that going to sound like?

Thanks to Andy Robinson for the video clip

We returned to the task at hand with ringing ears until, at last, with the inside of the workshop thoroughly coated in white paint, we set up a camera on the step-ladders, started its timer, and grabbed a team shot.

Dave tried to do likewise but his camera fired when he was less than a metre away from it and hurrying so as to be included in the pic’ – we fell about laughing once again.

That door looks a bit special with Andy’s graphic and we’re most grateful to him for donating not only the vinyl but also the time and expertise to stick it to a roller shutter!

From left to right – Rob, Andy Kelly (with a paint roller in his right ear), Novie Dzanorak, The Fat Contortionist, Greg Dzanorak, John-D, Andy Robinson, Mark Evans, The Rivet and Alain.

One or two other things… you’ve not met this bloke yet.

This is Mark Guinan who came onto the scene as yet another stranger wishing to call in and have a nose about.

They’re a proper nuisance so most strangers have to be fairly persistent to get past the door and Mark proved himself just that. He then turned up in the depths of winter having earned his invitation bearing a food parcel containing coffee, tea and chocolate.

He bribed us with a modest donation too and so having won us over we showed him around the place and the work we were doing.

With the tour over we shook hands and as he prepared to depart, Mark asked whether he could have some floor sweepings as we were busy clearing up after the frame had left.

A spoonful of muck seemed like a fair exchange so off went Mark with a small bag of debris.

Little did we know that he’d transform our humble gift into this something like this…

What you see here is a laser-cut profile of K7 set against an image of the lake. The two small buttons in the jetpipe are genuine rivets taken out during the strip down. There’s a pic’ of Donald top-left and the small aluminium pillar between the two is topped with two small paint flakes.

Along the bottom is a glass tube containing Coniston mud from within the hull, shards of drilled aluminium and still more tiny paint fragments.

What a fabulous way to utilise our floor-sweepings, all of which have been retained from day-one, by the way.

The better news is that Mark has created a dozen of these frames and donated them to the cause FOC. We’re including a certificate of authenticity so you can be sure of their provenance and we’re extremely grateful to Mark for his generosity.

They’ll become available next week and we’ll post a link to their whereabouts soon-as.

By the way – I was kidding about strangers being a nuisance. We love to show people around the project, which is one of the reasons we’re turning the workshop into something akin to an operating theatre where we can hang pictures on the wall and provide a little interpretation centre for visitors.

Returning to acts of extreme generosity – remember how Keith Hick donated a limited run of fifty of his stunning paintings and Chris at Metroimage offered to print them for us?

Well at long last we were finally able to get together with Gina and Keith to put the signatures on them so anyone who’s been waiting all this time – firstly, thanks for your patience and second, you’ll have your prints as quickly as we can wrap and dispatch them!

Thanks to Keith for painting them, Chris for printing them to a standard I didn’t think possible and to Gina for lending us her kitchen table on which to sign them.

Oh, and to Marshall for taking such a great pic’ with my crappy camera…

11^th August 2007

Not many weeks now until K7 returns.

I spoke with Gina a few days ago and as always I told her the latest news and that the front of the boat was reattached.

She asked me whether it looked ‘spooky’.

I considered a moment before delivering an emphatic ‘no’.

The boat always seemed very forlorn to me with her front missing and the cockpit wreckage was only so much sad junk.

But seeing the original structure brought back to full strength and serviceability gives the boat an aura of purposefulness even though she’s little more than a stripped frame at this stage.

And so, with this in mind, work to spring-clean her home continued with undimmed enthusiasm due to another good turn-out from the volunteer crew.

John wasn’t overly anxious to be photographed, paint-brush-in-hand, should his other-half read about it; whilst Alain went one better and submitted to the wife’s thumbprint on his forehead for the day rather than risk subsequent domestic compromise.

Rumours persist that he was later spotted in Ikea so his suffering clearly knew no bounds that day…

John also pointed out that this stage of the job is a great test of our determination to see this through. Having slaved away over the boat for almost a year we still return week-in, week-out to battle on even when there’s no boat!

Tony, John and Mark showed their solidarity, however, by throwing themselves into the task with great gusto though my suggestion to John that, should his missus try to corner him on the subject of decorating he ought to paint the house using the same splattering brush technique as he used in the workshop, was met only with a sarcastic glare.

Rob, in the meantime, cleverly positioned himself where he could work on the hatch for the compressor cave and listen to the ball-chasing on the radio.

John and I didn’t tumble to his strategy immediately despite having discovered a radio on our bench that morning bearing a neatly printed label that read, ‘Music Wireless’.

We were flummoxed. What could it mean?

The relevance didn’t concern us for long because its batteries soon expired and as the music wireless had no other power source we unlocked the main workshop and fired up the radio in there instead.

It wasn’t until we swept up later and made to leave that we spotted another radio next to where Rob had been working all day bearing the legend, ‘Ball-Chasing Wireless’ on a similarly neat label.

He’d told us earlier that our ‘wireless’ came from the charity shop for a quid but never mentioned that we actually have two.

One for music and another for football… good try, Rob, but he’ll never convert the tin-bashers because most of us seem to own a dog and get our fill of ball-chasing as part of our daily drudgery.

However, out of respect for our mate, a brief appraisal of Saturday’s ball-chasing seems in order.

So here goes…

The day ended with Rob’s preferred team, who I’m told were wearing red and white stripes, emerging victorious against another bunch who could only afford plain white shirts…

But all the action took place after they’d run themselves ragged for an hour and a half whereupon some bloke who used to play for Newcastle got fed up and kicked the ball between the sticks to avoid a boring lecture in the changing room later that would have otherwise encroached on his drinking time.

While all this was going on, the boys from our side of the river spent the first ten minutes utterly thrashing their opposition, two-hundred-to-nil, and then had a picnic on the grass until the whistle blew.

I can’t believe I’m writing a football report – please bring our boat home before I go mad!

Thankfully, work is continuing on the boat even in her absence.

Now that the main hull rebuild has a coherent plan and processes are in place we’re turning our attention to other areas that still remain a little grey.

Sponsons is a good one.

There’s nothing especially difficult about constructing them. They’re only aluminium and rivets, after all, but we don’t have Ken’s drawings to keep us right this time.

It’s a huge regret of mine that I never made it to Ken’s place to sift through his stuff.

Our lengthy Friday afternoon chats on the phone were great and being busy at this end I just never seemed able to find the time to dash south.

Perhaps if I’d taken a weekend out of my life and done what I should have done we’d have spotted the sponson drawing problem back then but even if I have to stand up in the high court and explain exactly why I burglarised a museum I’ll make it up to him.

You see, the drawings are in the hands of the museologists, as you might expect, and my efforts last week to access them was met with the same lavish, willingness to help that I’ve come to expect from the museological community.

Two of my mails were answered to the effect that there’s nothing they could do until after October and a third wasn’t answered at all. Nor were any of my phone calls returned.

Museums are for the public – yeah, right.

I’ll keep at them – I’m not nice when I keep at something.

And there’s more – you see if we’re to bring K7 back to full working condition there are one or two issues we must address in the interests of safety.

One is that she didn’t plane until she hit about 65mph and needed something like 2,500lbs of thrust to do it.

That’s a lot of stress, strain and heat for a knackered, old boat. It’s also enough engine power to hurtle her past 200mph when she finally unsticks!

At the very least it means unnecessary wear and tear on everything and at worst it offers an opportunity for something to go horribly wrong.

We need to meet our objectives with far less engine power…

Fortunately, because we’re building the sponsons from the ground up, we have some latitude to make beneficial changes as long as we don’t alter K7’s appearance.

So, what we’re planning is to either design some dismountable, additional surfaces for the planing shoes to provide the required lift for low-speed planing and the bonus of some previously unavailable directional stability, which can then be removed for display purposes. Or we build a second set of ‘running’ sponsons altogether.

Which route to take ought to become clear in the next few weeks as we’re in the early stages of forging a relationship with the mechanical engineering dept. at Newcastle University to help us properly design the modifications.

Speaking of sponsons, what do you think of our cartoon?

I think it’s fantastic and the good news is that there are lots more where it came from.

Those of you who have bought one of our snazzy, signed DVD cases from the shop will know what a professional job they are.

(Those who haven’t bought one yet – why not?)

The DVD’s success is largely thanks to the artistic ability of Mike Bull who designed the cover and also penned our cartoon.

Mike has also done a fabulous little comic strip about a girl-racer hydroplane called ‘Kay-Seven’ that with his kind permission we’re going to include in our under-forties section as soon as we think of a suitable name for it.

‘Bluebird-Brats’ was the best I came up with.

Any better suggestions?

Mike is a very talented guy.

He built a dalek too, of all things, and what a piece of work!

It’s called Rosco and this you just have to see!

http://www.richardwho.com/collectors/MikeBull/index.asp

So now we have a resident cartoonist we’ll include a few crumbs of his genius in the diary from time to time for your entertainment.

I spoke with John Getty this week too – we’re still on target for the mid-September homecoming of K7’s frame so as well as a freshly painted workshop we also need to think about a new jig on which to support the boat while we build her.

Our original rollover affair was only any good for two thirds of the frame and our cockpit-rebuild jig isn’t a lot of use either so last time Dave was over we had a meeting to decide how best to suspend our boat for the next stage in her rebirth.

Dave tells me that the drawings for our second generation rollover jig are coming along nicely so we’ll soon be building that.

Another thing we need to build is an extension for the oven at Bettablast.

You’ve all seen how the panels came on…

They were removed then stripped of all paint, blasted with fine ali-oxide, acid etched, primed with a two-pack, chromate etch-primer then given a polyester powder coat. They’ll last forever but powder coating involves charging the item to be painted with static electricity then wafting a cloud of fine powder over it.

The powder is then attracted in the same way as dust goes for your telly screen.

Next you bake it until it melts and flows into a smooth coat then wait for it to cool and harden.

What you get is an extremely tough finish that looks fantastic too.

…well wouldn’t it be nice if the whole frame could be finished to the same standard.

The trouble is that the frame won’t fit into the oven.

So we had a chat with Bill at Bettablast and offered to extend his oven – he didn’t seem to mind…

More soon.

4^th August 2007

This diary lark is getting harder… we love to display our metalworking ability but trying to impress anyone with pictures of shattered breeze-blocks is one hell of an uphill struggle.

As usual, we’ve worked our wedding-vegetables off in the workshop but it’s all sweeping, cleaning and forcibly ejecting a year’s worth of dust from the premises. We know, and we’re sure you understand, that if the frame comes home before we’re finished prepping the shop we’ll never get the decorating done but our resulting frantic activity leaves not a lot to write about.

The extremely exciting hole in the wall is finished though…

So we shoved Alain underground to bolt some steel into the floor.

You see, we know lots about metal but bugger-all about bricks.

Bill Smith Snr. whom you may have spotted driving the fork-lift last week with a scrap engine on the forks spent a hundred years or so as a construction consultant and by now would have happily filled the workshop with muck, dust, water and rigger-boot wearing men stinking of drink as concrete became the new aluminium.

But his boy knows only metal so instead we dispatched Alain armed only with a couple of lengths of forty-millimetre-square box-section, some Rawlbolts and a drill.

Hot on his heels followed the fat contortionist brandishing one of the many Bluebird-project welding torches.

They make me leave it behind when we go for a pint. How unfair is that?

Whilst all this was going on we laid out a parallel project on the workshop floor.

Floor space is carefully rationed on this job so this latest task is something that’s had to wait its turn.

We reckon that two weeks of menial drudgery and cruel suffering ought to have settled Andy’s mind as to whether he’s with us or not but just to be certain we had him sweep out the newly acquired (and extremely dusty) fabrication shop then gave him an acre of loose paint to scrape off.

The harsh reality here is that if we’re to save the underlying alloy skins we have to get all the paint off so the more we can put in a box and preserve the less we have to dissolve later with fancy chemicals and flush down the toilet.

As we’ve already discovered, bits of blue paint are something that many folk would like to own and it would be nice to be left with a sufficient quantity such that all who want some can have a piece eventually.

And so, Andy duly earned his place on the team…

And here’s a wonderful slice of irony for you.

The reason we laid the upper fairings out on the floor, and here you see the tail fairing and engine cover, is that we’ve long hoped the way forward was to offer their refurbishment as a sub-contract job to someone with more experience than us so here was an opportunity to photograph them then hawk our wares around the trade.

We’ve been saving frantically towards this objective and have almost enough dosh in the pot according to best estimates but what has taken forever us to realise is that we are actually the only people in the known universe who’ve ever tried their hands at conserveering such an iconic object, (so far as we can determine).

Sadly, no museum would ever consider taking an utterly wrought piece of aluminium with a corner missing, straighten it then make up a new corner – mainly because they’re wimps. What’s the American word for wimp?

Nor would the aircraft restorers do likewise because they have to work to extremely stringent rules, and quite understandably too.

So we seem to be raising the bar for the museologists with this one…

This began to sink in further when our mentor and the ‘grand-poobah of museology’, the inimitable, Chris Knapp, paid us a surprise visit on Saturday afternoon to see how his protégés were getting on.

It’s most important to appreciate that Chris had the wisdom both to realise that not only were we going to complete the Bluebird-project with or without any help from the UK museum fraternity but also that by not helping us they’d only be hindering museological advancement.

The rest of ‘em were too stupid to see it coming.

Chris also had the balls to back this maverick crew who threatened to take the world of museology by their scrawny, tweed-clad ankles and shake The Guardian out of their inverted pockets without bothering our consciences one jot.

Our ideas for straightening bent metal and welding everything back together popped onto the scene like a newly mutated virus and infected their ethics in a Chlamydia sort of way.

Chris was the only one to see this coming and develop effective tools quickly enough to rein-in our unbounded enthusiasm before we went too far.

‘Reality dictates,’ he offered fairly.

‘Justify it,’ he growled.

‘OK… it was bent so we straightened it… but first we photographed everything and wrote it up in the conservation log, Sir.’

Destroy history… I think not.

Lose original fabric… I’d buy a tweed suit first!

We showed Chris one of the new panels knocked together by our veteran tin-basher, Alan Dodds – he seemed to like it.

The green-painted doublers are within museological rules too as is welding in new pieces to save the wreckage of an original panel.

Phew – but it’s always a nerve-wracking exercise when Chris gets serious and demands justification for everything from cutting out a piece of corrosion to our preference for a particular type of blast media. We get away with nothing at the hands of our conservation director.

Having thus pacified the grand-poobah we then got stuck in with the next task – getting the compressor into the void between the walls whereupon a coven of wives parked themselves in the workshop so as to better enjoy the show and cynically assured us that the compressor would never fit.

Do they really believe we’ll fail before them or is this their subtle and clever way of ensuring that we succeed or die in the attempt?

Either way – it was a close-run thing.

We struggled our monster compressor from under the bench then up a set of rails temporarily welded to the steelwork built to support the new steps before turning and manhandling it in a vein-popping, blokey-grunting, sea of sweat into a slot not much wider than a letterbox.

There now – the noise will be properly contained between four walls.

It’s a great use for an otherwise useless space and it frees up the area under our tin-bashing bench.

But best of all, Alain is in charge of maintaining the compressed air system so if it goes wrong it’ll take a gynaecologist to put it right and Alain just isn’t your man… Expect a laugh or two from the compressor room in the days to come.

On a slightly different note, I had a meeting this week with a colleague of Chemetall-Trevor.

Alan Bell, he’s called, and he is to sealants and jointing compounds what Trevor is to the sort of chemicals you might use to dispose of a body.

Alan brought some seriously sticky-stuff to show me so that when we begin the reassembly proper we’ll understand what’s-what with the gloop that has to be applied between the riveted skins.

The ‘gold-medal-position’ to my uneducated brain (where aerospace sealants are concerned anyway) was something sticky in a tube that would protect against dissimilar metal corrosion, keep the water out and solidly glue everything together for a little extra strength.

The yellow, chromate jointing compound as used in K7’s original build only deals with the dissimilar metal trouble.

Take the rivets out and everything falls apart in your hands and the ‘Yak-SH-1T’ certainly didn’t keep the water out if the state of the frame was anything to go by.

I was promised two of the three with this modern stuff.

Yes, it’ll stop any corrosion dead in its tracks and, yes, it’ll keep the water out forever because it’s actually intended for Airbus fuel tanks and that means keeping kerosene in whilst hundreds of innocent travellers go on their holidays at five-hundred knots – but it’s not designed to be an adhesive.

Fair enough, thought I.

“But if you were to apply it then decide that something had to come apart again, how well stuck together would the panels be?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, you’d have to destroy everything to get them apart,” Alan told me nonchalantly.

That sounds more than sticky enough for our purposes and if we’ll settle for product a tiny bit beyond its aerospace-enforced shelf life we can do this by scrounging – going to have to be bloody careful that we don’t assemble something then have to dismantle it again though, aren’t we!

In the meantime, the steelwork was completed for the stairs…

…and Tony made a start on the rat’s-nest of wiring that’ll let us brick the compressor up alive between the walls and still be able to switch it on and off as desired or at least contain the fire when we get into the all-night sessions I feel are incoming.

Meanwhile, another of our recent volunteers, Mike Ramsey, popped in for the evening and was promptly handed a paint brush.

Mike told us when he first arrived and we asked him what he did for a living that he’d retired because his heart wasn’t all it used to be.

He then went on to proudly display the welds where the cardio-thoracic tin-bashers at our local flagship hospital, Newcastle General, had put him back together again after a spot of re-plumbing.

Couldn’t help wondering what sort of welding rods you use for a job like that...

“What’s the drill then,” I enquired concernedly, “if you keel-over in the workshop?”

I was just considering how we might get the oxygen from the oxy-acetylene kit down his throat in an emergency when he smugly informed us that he’s the proud recipient of a clever pacemaker that shocks him back to life if anything goes wrong so in effect he can’t die!

Now that’s intriguing…

“How do I get one of those?” Rob asked.

None of this seems to affect his ability with a tin of paint, however, and what a difference a coat of white made to that scruffy, old roller shutter.

Another interesting meeting this week took place with a third-year engineering student from Newcastle University regarding our low-speed planing problems – but more of that next time.

28^th July 2007

Almost back to normal now after holidays and such. Just as well as we have much to do while our frame is away being made whole again. The lull before the storm…

The frame is huge and will easily fill the present workshop so we now have to consider where to put our machinery, prep the engine without it getting full of dust and where we’re going to build the new sponsons.

We had no choice but to adopt the unit next door but we got it cheap.

This means we’ll now have a fabrication shop and an assembly hall.

We can set up our engine shop at the back of the new unit, install the metalworking machinery up front and put some extra benches in to give John-Dipsy more to tidy up. We can then get our current workshop spotless and painted as it should be for such a prestigious project.

For that reason I fired up Rob’s ‘anal intruder’ as we call his big drill – the name came from a film apparently though I’m not sure I’ve seen it – and smashed a hole through the wall.

Meanwhile, a second tunnelling crew, newly signed-off by the escape officer, then sallied forth from the other side only to discover a metre-wide void between the two buildings presenting us with not two walls to get through but four!

But cutting doorways is kid’s stuff for a team of our ingenuity and by mid afternoon we were through and the unexpected void between the buildings looks like the perfect cubby hole in which to stash our noisy compressor – worked out nicely, did that.

Work continued on the boat too.

We pulled the other spar onto the jig we made for the cockpit frame so we could clean and inspect it.

Andy made the trip again this week and immediately set-to cleaning out corrosion pits with a dentist’s scraper - one of those pointy jobs they use to ferret about between your molars.

Unfortunately it makes exactly the same torturous scratching sound on aluminium as it does on tooth enamel so we had to turn the radio up loud.

The rear spar didn’t fare so well as the front during its long submergence mainly because it remained within the steel frame and up in the water column rather than buried in a protective layer of anaerobic clay so dissimilar-metal corrosion has damaged it.

Interestingly, the rear face is immaculate – the only one to benefit from exposure to the magnesium engine casing and its sacrificial influence on the corrosion problem.

Having said that, the rear spar also had steel lifting brackets mounted at its ends so it got the treatment there too, it’s quite badly pitted at its extremities.

But that’s the bad news over with.

The good news is that it welds perfectly so we can fix the pitting where it’s severe and the better news is that the spar is so ridiculously over-engineered that there’s about 20mm of solid aluminium on each face at its outer ends and that’s only what we can see.

Big, chunky rivets on the faces tell us that there’s additional material buried within so it’s stupidly strong and therefore a bit of pitting amounts to nothing.

Thanks for that, Lew / Ken.

We had a visit from another veteran today too. Mark Evans finally rejoined the fold.

The son of Corporal Paul Evans who was, of course, Donald’s radio operator on the fatal 67 run and the last person ever to speak with him.

Mark spent a lot of time with us in the early days when we were slurping mud from the hull with the ‘Hoover From Hell’ but hasn’t been able to join us for a while due to work commitments.

He’s back now though so Dave gave him a crash course in drilling rivets – who better – then we left him to dismantle the last piece of seat structure from the front of bulkhead F-15.

Dave, in the meantime, seemed to be mixing business with pleasure by photographing the inside of the front spar with kit he usually uses in his day-job to diagnose termites munching at your ballroom floor.

One of Dave’s pic’s; this is the inside of the front spar, which apart from a bit of dust and debris is absolutely mint inside.

Looks like the moon, doesn’t it. The round things are the backs of the rivets and you can clearly see the alloy angle running lengthwise.

I must point out here that he couldn’t get a really clear shot because these images require a long exposure with zero movement but Andy wouldn’t stop raging away at everything in sight with his dentist’s pick making the whole spar rattle.

Other stuff – we have another sizeable box of panels ready for painting. It contains the remainder of the outriggers that require no fettling. There are about six that need some final sorting on the frame before painting but otherwise we’re through them. The bulkheads are next on the list, then the floors.

Dave and I spent some time designing the next generation rollover jig too. We reckon K7 will be way too long to sling from either end without sagging in the middle, and besides, hanging her from the nose would make it virtually impossible to build the new front end and that’s where most work needs to be done so we had think harder this time.

Dave is drawing up the new design and we’ll get it built at this end. Our old mate, Phil at Ivanhoe Forge is still aboard. ‘You draw it, I’ll build it,’ he said.

Isn’t this a great project…

25^th July 2007

Back again – sorry for the long delay – I took the family to Greece for a week before she moved out and the solicitor’s letters began to patter onto the doormat.

My lovely wife, Rachel, has been tolerant beyond belief since September 06 when we finally sacked the Hapless Lottery Failure and plunged into our tin-bashing jamboree.

Two nights a week plus every Saturday; (working on Bluebird, that is), then there’s all the website writing, replying to hundreds of mails and having only one topic of conversation…

We also have the little-un these days so holidays became a must and what a good time we had. I’m not relaxed in the slightest but the suntan looks OK.

Anyway, back to the big blue boat. We stayed faithfully with the plan by having the forward part of the frame ready for delivery to PDS by the 12^th as per our schedule.

It fitted nicely into the back of a Mercedes Sprinter kindly loaned to us by one of my long-term clients, Northgate Vehicle Rental Plc. They have something like 160,000 vans on-fleet so scrounging the occasional Sprinter isn’t a problem.

One of Dave’s pic’s, this one.

We lugged it inside – and thanks to John Getty at PDS for allowing us to use the following images.

The aft section was upside-down when we arrived so there followed a meeting to decide whether we ought to right the back end or invert the front. Common sense prevailed, as it usually does with this job, so we turned the much smaller front half the wrong way up.

We’d left the forward, inner floor in position for good reason. As already explained the frame was built half an inch wrong by ‘Shackles and Bollock’ in 50-sometime so the only way to build K7 straight is to build her wrong – something that a precision engineering outfit like PDS really don’t take to easily.

Poor John didn’t look convinced when we asked him to weld the frame together cock-eyed but he’s a perfectionist as we all are so if perfection means a half-inch misalignment then that’s what we’ll get and the floor provides the perfect datum to achieve this.

Also PDS have now repeatedly cut and shut the aft section thus releasing then taming again the frame’s residual tensions from way back when. We’ve been through the same torture with the front end so a degree of misalignment in the repaired halves was only to be expected.

But…

To our delight (and smug satisfaction) it didn’t just nearly fit, it slotted together like something Mercedes-Benz just built!

Did we mention that it’s been in a crash too?

There you have it, Donald’s boat back in one piece for the first time since 1967.

It still needs welding together but read back about what we’ve done so far and you’ll realise that sticking the halves to one another will be an afternoon’s work.

Loss of original fabric… not looking hopeful for the HLF ‘experts’ is it.

And so, with our workshop suddenly empty, the time came to move into the next phase of our blue boat adventure. We need her home properly sorted for when she returns.

Apart from short trips away for zinc-spraying and painting, when K7 comes home next time she’s on the jig until it’s time to take her back to the water, so now that all the muck and crap has been swept out of her, the last river drilled and all the water sent on its merry way we want a spotless workshop befitting the quality of our project.

Job-one, skip that bloody awful scrap engine!

Well actually, no. It’s a museum piece so we have to trip over it for a bit longer yet. The plan is to shove it in the museum who, incidentally, are doing fantastically well at banking the necessary funds to create the world-class attraction we offered to the Hapless Lottery Failure for a snip.

I enjoy watching in a wry sort of way those organisations who crapped themselves a year ago at the thought of our ambitious project making ripples in their parochial ponds suddenly realising that we’re doing this with or without them and that there may after all be some political capital to be ralised if only they can scramble back aboard quickly enough.

Did I mention that I was asked this week to make a presentation on ‘conserveering’ for a pack of senior museologists?

Where was I?

Ah, yes…

In 2001 we raised the front spar from the lake. It flew something like 130m from the sinking position, which we now know to be more like 200m from the point of impact. Only a few shards of sponson-top showed above the mud and it took two 90kg lift-bags and six people on a rope to get it free.

Then Beanie was almost killed that night – waking up the following Thursday in Barrow Infirmary intensive-care unit to our unimaginable relief.

Capt. Connacher and I returned to the lake in a daze next morning to recover all the hastily abandoned equipment and recover the spar before one of the steamers got caught in one of our ropes.

Since then it’s lain upstairs with all the other cockpit wreckage. It took four people to get it in there and it took four to get it back out again!

We had two new volunteers too. On the left is Andy Robinson. He mailed us with encouragement for ages but always complained that he lived too far away – somewhere down where ‘the rivet’ comes from – to which we responded by telling him to stop being so soft and jump in the car, which he did.

The other bloke is my oldest mate though he emigrated some years ago to a place called Sussex, which lied down by the equator so I don’t get to see him as often as I’d like. Paul Barnes, he’s called, or ‘Barnsey’ to his mates.

Our pair of new recruits spent the day with us stripping the spar back to bare metal…

 …then Rob finished the job to his usual high standard.

The spar is in such good condition that we’re not even going to repaint it. Astonishingly, it also appears that water never penetrated its interior. It’s certainly the only void we opened that wasn’t full to bursting and the best we can think of is that due to its weight it sank almost immediately into the fine clay at the bottom of the lake, which then effectively sealed its seams against water ingress.

There are a few sprung rivets and sheared bolts so we’ll ask very nicely for some NDT from Argos-Inspection just be sure it’s OK to go again but I’ll never forget Lew Norris inspecting it and remarking that, ‘perhaps we built that a little heavier than necessary…’

Next job is to push the rest of the outriggers through the paint shop and in the tin-bashing dept. I’m busy putting Donald’s seat back together. It got a bit squashed, as you might imagine, so Rob took it apart and dropped it in the stripping bath.

It’s a complicated thing that I’m not going to try to explain at this point but this is the outer skin of the right hand side of the seat pan. There’s a bit missing from the left hand end of it but we recovered that piece still riveted to the bulkhead that came up entangled with our ROV so it’ll weld back in.

As we’ve demonstrated before – miles to go but getting closer.

Straight again – sort of – with one of the straightened, internal stringers pinned back in position.

Much to do…

8^th July 2007

With work almost complete at PDS to refurbish the aft frame section we’re about to move into a new phase in the K7 rebuild.

In not too many weeks we’ll no longer be dealing with two separate halves of a boat. She’ll be whole again so we had to look at our end of things with an eye for this process.

For the past few weeks we’ve not done much to the frame in favour of conserveering the structural alloy panels back to life but this has left a mass of unfinished work on the frame. Welds that were painfully awkward to reach and gussets not yet made and installed.

This would all have to be done before the frame went off to be rejoined to the other half but we allowed ourselves a final bit of tin-bashing before all the skin pins came out and she became bare steelwork again.

Back in fifty-something when Alan Dodds was working on K7 by the side of Ullswater the front spar was drawn out of the frame, slapped on the top and secured with some pieces of angle-iron before covering the biggest bodge-job ever done on K7 with new bodywork.

Part of this process involved closing the resulting hole where the spar used to pass through but despite our best efforts we’ve found neither of these panels.

We did, however, recover enough pieces of the surrounding metalwork to gauge the bolt spacing that held them on and with the help of some archive piccies supplied by members of the Speed Record Group, http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Speedrecordgroup/

We were able to make them exact to the original design.

Take two slabs of 2mm H22, a straight edge and a scriber…

…chop and shape accordingly.

Run it through the English Wheel a few times to match the curves to the other skins – beginning to work out what this machine is all about having never used one before. It’s a clever piece of kit.

And voila!

John did the one for the other side so that’s another small piece of K7 ready for the big build.

But that was to be all for the moment – time to get back to some of the more boring work.

Another part of the plan is to have the workshop properly sorted for the actual build.

Since we started we’ve been working with mud, muck and rubbish but that’s all about to change so John spent a while tidying one of the benches and properly stowing the tools,

while Rob has been preparing the next batch of original panels for the paint shop. About half of the outriggers are now painted and the rest are almost ready to undergo the same process.

Here, Rob sands filler supplied by our mates at Indestructible Paints on one of K7’s bulkheads. Note the excellent overall condition of the panel.

Tony was to be found in his usual place watching his favourite show – aluminium oxide blast media hitting cruddy aluminium. He deserves a medal for almost single-handedly blasting K7 from stem to stern.

Alain and I then set about the steelwork. ‘The Rivet’ was expected but he has loads of kids with birthdays and such so we did loads of interesting things then sent him the pic’s later to rub it in.

Al took up grinder and hacksaw and made the last of the gussets for the forward frame.

Notice the pictures on the wall in the background. They were drawn by Rob’s granddaughter, Zoe, who is well under forty and therefore not interested in the least.

The leftmost one shows divers Sal Cartwright and Tim York though we’ve not been able to determine exactly what piece of diving equipment Sally is holding…

The middle one shows Predator and the right depicts a nasty accident involving our big blue boat.

We spent an afternoon welding in the last of the fiddly bits.

Here, most of the gusset has been welded into position and Alain is holding the last remaining face using a short section of TIG rod stuck to the outside.

We made these gussets in two halves partly because the piece of box-section used to fabricate the repair pieces is very slightly wider than the original and partly because we’re treating it like pure gold.

So far as we can determine, since Tyco Tubes stopped making this stuff, and they took over Accles and Pollock (or ‘Shackle and Bollocks’ as one veteran K7 engineer called them last week), T60 box section is no longer available anywhere in the world so we’re bloody lucky to have any to work with at all.

Anyway, this piece fitted nicely.

Only needs welding now. This gusset is at the F-20 upper crossmember where, although we’ve made a new crossmember because the original is still in the lake, the vertical tube was heavily damaged when it tore out so there’s not as much strength there as we’d prefer. We’ll paint it green in due course.

Meanwhile, yours-truly had to become a fat contortionist to weld it in – something I’d been avoiding for obvious reasons.

Then we stood the frame on end like a stripped Christmas tree, as Tony pointed out, to get at a few more tricky welds.

If you look carefully you can see the gussets at the F-17 bulkhead – that’s the one I’m sitting on – and the new watertight bulkhead at F-19 – the horizontal shiny bit I’m resting my elbow on. That’s pretty much it for non-original material in this shot.

We chopped the back out of part of the starboard spar box too where the bolts had torn through…

…and glued a new piece in.

It’ll be drilled and the holes sleeved as per Ken’s design in due course. We also finished sorting the pointy end once and for all. The flange plate on the right is new.

We may have to replace the other one but the next phase, after the frame has been glued back together, is to carefully build everything from the bow all the way back to F-13 to take in the full extent of the crash-damaged part of the boat. We’ll evaluate the state of every flange-plate during this process and replace / repair where necessary.

Remember also that the short crossmember is non-original.

Our intention when we wrote the plan back in 2001 was for Ken to design any such modifications into the frame that way ensuring that they were an evolution of the original design by the original designer but unfortunately that’s no longer possible. I just hope he’s looking down at us and nodding sagely.

Another veteran we’ll probably need here is Robbie. The amount of weight we’ve added up front isn’t great but it’s so far ahead of the C of G that we may require an extra lead ingot at the other end to balance things out. He may have to dig out that biscuit tin lid and make us another one.

We’re ready for the next chapter though.

We promised to find that missing piece of scrap and rebuild the genuine front end – not some replica or mock-up – and here it is. Even the museologists are beginning to sit up and take notice!

Last week I received a letter from a charming young lady studying for a degree in ‘interventive conservation’ or some similar discipline I'd never heard of and though she’d been warned that I wasn’t a big fan of the museum fraternity would it still be possible to tape an interview with me?

She’d been put in touch by yet more museologists from a flagship establishment in the UK so I had to take her seriously, but...

“Hmmm,” muttered I to myself. “Have we suddenly become newly interesting? Ground-breaking, perhaps… or are we about to be held up as a good example of a bad example?”

The answer came soon enough. Go on - guess.

Next step – stick K7 back together. Keep watching.

1^st July 2007

There’s lots of fettling going on at the moment in the BBP workshop because although we showed you the front end with its new skins last time they were only hung on with a few clamps. What we had to do next was make them fit properly.

First off we decided to drill the rivet holes. This is probably not the accepted way to do the job. I’d imagine you’re supposed to drill them in-situ but as we had a virgin stringer to mount them to we reckoned on being able to get the rivet pitch (inch and a quarter) perfect over the length of the panel then mount it up and drill the stringer last.

Rob holds the finished job up to the light to make sure we’ve not missed any holes.

There was also the small matter of the other spar-box to attend to. Most of it is missing so new parts were fabricated then added to what remains of the original. Tony left his blasting cabinet to do some tin-bashing.

Rob was on the hammers too. The vertical sides of the spar-box overlap the F-20 and F-21 outriggers so the plywood formers made to repair the outriggers were pressed into service one last time. The repair sections for the spar-boxes are made of 1mm, 5000 series alloy that Dean sent over from Thyssenkrupp.

We commented on this week on how gratifying it is that in a few short months we’ve taken two electricians, a warranty clerk, a postman, a surveyor and a fat, deskbound, retired diver and forged a tight little band of tin-bashers.

Rob finished the insert repair… an absolutely beautiful job.

And tried it in position.

Meanwhile, work on the skins continued with everyone trying to work on the same corner of the boat and getting in each other’s way.

It’s hilarious at times especially as John is forever tidying up and you put your clamps or ruler down only to discover they’ve been snaffled and hung on a hook somewhere.

Even getting a brew going – something that ought to be straightforward – can be a fraught event too.

You know how every once in a while you come across someone who just can’t make a decent cuppa… well we have two such persons on the team so you’re never quite sure what’s going to be served up…

Not to worry – the new skins went on by degrees while we checked and filed and strove for perfection.

Rob switched between skin and spar-box duty creating another insert for the front vertical face of the spar-box. Half of it remains missing but Rob’s repair soon sorted that out.

Then we stuck the new top in and did a spot of welding.

Next, John popped it out of there and gave it a good clean up. There’s lots of detail work still to do but it’s a spar box again and about forty-percent original. Best we could do with the materials available, I’m afraid.

Our new front skins were really coming together by this point too – literally.

We decided to recreate the pointy end in two halves. We don’t have enough of the original to say whether this is how it was done way back when though we suspect it was.

Making it from one sheet would have been a nightmare because we’re not that good, basically.

But this works. Now all we have to do is get the two panels to meet neatly in the middle then we can weld the halves together.

It took best part of the day and John remarked that we ought to have kept count of how many times the panels were on and off.

No! we agreed unanimously.

But patience is a virtue – or so I’m told.

We still need to trim and file the edges to get everything perfect and we’ll do the welding right at the last when everything else fits because the two halves will undoubtedly have to come off again and they’re easier to handle in their current configuration.

The two jobs then all came together at once with the spar-box getting some last tweaks.

This is definitely how it was done on the original. Someone had the job of chopping the tops out of the spar-boxes to allow the angle sections that mounted the raised spar to pass through to where they were bolted into the frame – so we did likewise.

There we are – two complete spar-boxes. They both need more work but the plan is to get everything built so we know it’s all there then go back through every component with a fine-tooth-comb fettling them rivet hole by rivet hole when the time comes.

There’s another panel that fits over the tops of all the outriggers that we haven’t built yet so we don’t know whether it’ll affect the newly constructed spar-box. Best wait to do the final finishing until we have everything in front of us.

Same goes for the front skins but as you can see, they look OK so far.