25^th November 2008

It’s started…

I recently attended a series of meetings with a view to obtaining permission to run Bluebird on Coniston Water above the 10mph speed limit.

The speed limit question has been hanging around ever since the water skiers and jet-ski nuts were banished from Windermere. Many of the protestors tried to recruit the BBP to their cause, one lot even going so far as to suggest we held K7 hostage unless the speed limit was lifted. My suggestion that they find a quaint fishing village and a suitable stretch of ocean somewhere on the British Isles’ eleven thousand miles of coastline on which to scream about without fear of reprisal seldom went down very well. Doubtless I’ll get that one back sooner or later now that the tables are turned and, you never know, we may yet end up scaring the crap out of a gannet colony as we streak up the Northumberland coast one still morning…

But hopes are high that we’ll be running on Coniston Water so now there’s a whole new set of issues. Gone are the sceptical looks as we explain that all there’s to be done is a spot of welding here and there to be replaced by lots of sensible and reasonable questions… How often will the boat run during our week-long proving trials? (Once a day if we’re lucky for about 10 min’s) How fast will she go? (Not very – she’s retired and only has to mildly show off). Will this disturb the timetable of the Gondola and the Coniston Launch? Both of which, in my opinion, deserve their corporate backsides kicking if they do any other than ferry executive parties of suitably fleeced, corporate sightseers a hundred yards off the beach to eat nibbles and sip something bubbly while watching two and a half tons of jet-powered tin thunder by.

But for every reasonable question there’s an equal and opposite. This one crops up with mind-numbing regularity and needs dealing with right now. It goes,

‘What will be the environmental impact of running Bluebird?’

What the flippety-blink does that mean? Stop reading for a minute and try to work out what that question actually seeks to elicit. Let me put it another way. If it’s blowing outside, Sir Francis Beaufort has provided a means to gauge whether your new wind turbine will turn a profit in the night. Or if one of the lads guzzles too much of your home-brewed ginger wine you can always experiment with his response to deep pain stimuli using the Glasgow Coma Scale; but ‘environmental impact’ is a non-quantifiable piece of jargon so far as I can tell.

I therefore propose the Bluebird Project Environmental Impact Scale. It begins at zero, which is all that’ll remain should the sun die unexpectedly and explode into a supernova of white-hot gas. Then there’s a massive meteorite strike and unbridled nuclear war a little further up the table. Nasties such as Ebola, HIV and losing our ozone layer to the third-world refrigeration industry continue this trend until you reach things like quad-bikes churning up bridle paths and cow flatulence. Oh, and will someone please explain the cause of the global warming that melted Cumbria’s glaciers twelve thousand years ago – still waiting for that one.

The scale finally tops-out at a value of twelve and five-sixteenths where absolutely nothing happens and the tree-huggers can party naked until dawn safe in the knowledge that the planet hasn’t suffered any ill effect.

You think I’ve lost the plot, don’t you. But there’s method in the usual madness. Allow me to explain. I take calls from the press every time there’s a slow news day. They say, ‘what’s the latest?’ and I say, ‘tell me what you last read on our website and I’ll fill in the blanks…’

I’m then told it’s bad journalism to read the website first, you’re supposed to get the info straight from the horse’s mouth, but if you call the horse on a Sunday afternoon – as they often do – you’re only going to get about half a minute so best to research some quality questions into your list, I say.

I had a recent audience with some important and influential men whom I’d not previously met so I spent an hour on the ’net ‘Googling’ them. It was a simple case of respect. I wanted to meet them on the level so I did my homework.

So the next time I walk into a meeting and some bearded greenie says ‘what’s the environmental impact, etc…’ I’m going to reply, ‘twelve and a quarter.’

That’s it. That’s the answer; and woe betide anyone who looks puzzled because they’ll have clearly failed in their due diligence and therefore be worthy of no respect whatsoever.

But some will take time to browse the web over a bowl of macrobiotic lentils so best to be forearmed. One or two moaners have told me authoritatively that it’s not ‘appropriate’ to burn jetfuel in the park.

First of all, go whinge at the MoD and see how far that gets you... Secondly, if you’ve ever travelled on a commercial airliner then you long since gave up the right to complain about burning jetfuel.

Here’s an interesting fact. I called a pal who flies tourists around Europe and he’s not just your average jet-jockey. This bloke is a training captain at the top of his game so he knows a thing or two about passenger planes. How much fuel, I asked him, is consumed to move a person to, for instance, Greece and back? Not counting shifting the crew, cargo or the aircraft itself… how many kilos of fuel does it actually take to move a bum on a seat?

The answer is quite surprising. After much research it transpires that the average figure, considering the aircraft types utilised in the role, is only 180-ish kg for an eight hour round trip. That’s about forty gallons. Quite extraordinary really… I mean, you’d never get that sort of efficiency out of your car, would you.

So if you’ve ever been to Greece and back with your partner you’re directly responsible for burning around 360kg of jetfuel and that’s enough for Bluebird to run the length of Coniston Water four times. Think very carefully about moaning at us because we’ll ask your mates where you went on your holidays and as the air in the park happens to be attached to the rest of the atmosphere it matters not where you burned yours…

Over the years our team has spent the equivalent of three solid months on that lake anchored smack in the middle in all weathers and the amount of fast, military traffic is a joy to behold. A Panavia Tornado runs a pair of super-fit Rolls-Royce RB199 engines while we have only one rather geriatric Bristol Orpheus that we have to nurture because they’re almost extinct and every minute ours turns is a minute deducted from its already limited lifespan. The noise argument collapses miserably at this point too because whereas we’ll be lucky to make two, five-minute runs in a day a dozen jets might streak overhead in the same timeframe and no one seems to mind those.

Here’s another stupid question…

‘What about the birds?’

Well, what about them? We might hit one and damage our boat – that’s a worry – but otherwise, what’s the problem?

We might scare them – so what? Being scared is a way of life for birds, that’s what keeps them alive so look upon our activities as an ornithological training course to sharpen their reflexes. Mr Fox might just have to work a bit harder for his lunch after we’ve polished up the duck’s evacuation drill for a week.

And in all my time on the lake I’ve not seen a single rare species out there where we might run it over and as I have a garden full of weird and wonderful wildfowl I know what I’m talking about. Besides, not ten miles away those toffs I was telling you about blast ducks out of the sky in wholesale lots.

But, just in case, I hereby offer to replace at my own expense any birds we break, seagulls included.

Want another daft question?

They come thick and fast and this one’s a corker.

‘What about the wake from the boat?’

OK – back to basics. Our crew have been out there when the surface was flat as a sheet of glass – the anchor rope hanging limply without even enough movement of wind and water to pull it tight. Then we’ve run for cover as a pair of 30kg clump weights sunk 3m into glutinous mud and tensioned astern on 100m ropes were simultaneously torn from the lakebed and our boat sent running before a sudden gale with waves crashing over the transom. We’ve also seen both conditions inside the same half hour which, incidentally, may well explain why Donald chose to hurry back on the 4^th Jan 67. So the lake shore has obviously evolved to cope with the sudden crashing of waves as if from nowhere. Now consider also that K7 has a total wetted area of approximately eight square inches when planing and penetrates the surface only a sixteenth of an inch; so apart from the spray blasted skywards by her engine she actually has very little effect on the water surface as can be seen from that second run on Jan 4^th. OK, it all went terribly wrong, but I defy anyone to say K7 created enough disturbance on her first run to wash Coniston Co-Op off the high street. You’d not think things like this would have to be pointed out, would you.

And finally, on the subject of the environmental impact etc, I’m yet to take a single question from any member of the save-the-ant brigade who’s yet realised I was once a green activist and probably would be to this day were the sharp end not such a young person’s game.

Not for me sitting at home in a jumper spun from free-range wool writing whingeing letters to my MP, oh no. I’ve had many an adventure rubbing (bony) shoulders with people who live on powdered whey protein and wear shoes of rubber impregnated paper to save some poor cow’s arse. I was even served vegan mayonnaise once and God alone knows what goes into that but these guys had one thing in common… Every last one of them was prepared to climb the anchor chains of a leaking oil tanker or the fractionating column of a wasteful chemical plant. They’d all fling themselves off an inflatable into the path of a mid-water trawler thought to be taking dolphins in its nets or storm a nuclear sub then willingly spend the night in a police cell for their trouble.

So don’t you bloody do-gooders bleat on at me about saving the planet unless you too have crawled down the outside of a chemical discharge pipe in Middlesbrough in zero visibility to collect a sample from the outfall then had the goo and condoms jet-washed off your head whilst standing in a paddling pool! Don’t moan unless you’ve sat in a briefing with lawyers telling you that if you’re caught on the next action you’ll be arrested and strip searched – good incentive to run like buggery when security arrives, that is..

There’s more. Greenpeace’s flagship is an ice-class-one, ex-Russian fire-tug called Esperanza.

She boasts, amongst a host of eco-friendly widgets, bilge water purifiers, ammonia refrigeration and chemical free toilets that flush with sea water so she’s as green as they can make her yet she still burns heavy oil.

She has a heli-deck on the back too from which ‘Tweety’, their little red Hughes helicopter, lands and takes off and guess what – it burns jetfuel in that horrid, inefficient way that only helicopters know how. Then look not ten metres left or right and you’ll find fast inflatables lashed to the decks awaiting the next action. Some burn diesel, others use petrol – not very green, eh? But those guys and girls don’t half know how to make a spectacle and get well and truly up the noses of those who ought to be paying attention. Burning a drop of the black stuff is a very small price to pay for the greater good.

So if you must grumble about running K7 be a little smarter and at least realise that whilst showcasing an area of unbounded opportunity, boosting the local economy and giving a village museum a world-class attraction, the Bluebird Project plans to burn less fuel than your average airliner uses to get from the gate to the beginning of its takeoff roll.

Was I ranting? Sorry…

*

On a more positive note, we reached another milestone on the 3^rd of December. Gina set the very first rivet in the final build of her dad’s boat.

Way back in 2001 we were sent in search of Donald’s remains and to save you trolling through seven years worth of diary what happened was that we consulted with the RAF pathology dept. and the air accidents guys at Farnborough. Air Commodore Dr Tony Cullen – or ‘Tony’ as he preferred – told us all about bodies hitting water at high speed whilst Steve Moss explained likewise about structures. Between the two they demonstrated an almost mystical knowledge of what to look for and where to find it. The result made history and part of the process involved recovering the smashed cockpit for Steve to do his air crash investigator thing and below is one of the first pieces to surface.

It’s the cockpit seat pan. You’re looking at the right hand side of it with the backrest to the left. If you look at the top of the pic you can just see the tap for the on-board breathing gas and from there you can follow the F-17 bulkhead, which spanned across the front of the seat and was shaped to fit around the steel crossmember running beneath Donald’s knees.

Below is its good side as-recovered and freed from the seat. It’s from the right hand side of the cockpit.

Once cleaned up and given some tweakery with a hammer it looked like this.

The picture is upside down for ease of interpretation and you can see too that the left hand side of the bulkhead is missing. That came up attached to the cockpit wall and was a smidge crumpled…

…but we soon had it sorted and ready for welding.

Then followed endless rounds of fettling as slowly but surely every rivet hole was aligned with the frame by either pushing the metal around or by welding and re-drilling the worst offending holes. It’s one of those parts we’ve had floating around the workshop in a partially finished condition for ages but John recently took it in hand and bashed some sense into it. Bettablast painted it then we popped it on the bench and had a long debate about how much chocolate sauce we’d best use to stick it back from whence it came. We reckoned it wouldn’t quite fit to the frame as neatly as Airbus fuel tanks go together so agreement having eventually been reached we slapped a liberal helping onto the relevant areas…

…then pinned it back to the crossmember.

Now the story goes like this, we’d not thus far used a single rivet in the course of the rebuild because we’ve always agreed that Gina ought to fix the first one. But there’d be little point in putting the first rivet right in the depths of the structure where it’d never be seen again, which is why we wanted F-17 back together. It’s one of the few pieces of tinwork still visible when the boat is complete so on the afternoon of the 3^rd after a swift lesson in rivetology and a single practice shot, Gina took up the rivet gun and did the necessary with Mr Whoppit in attendance.

Pic © Mike Bull 2008

Gina and I said a few words and thanked each other as well as the team and sponsors then she pulled the trigger and the gun fired with a satisfying ‘thunk’. At long last we’re putting rivets in instead of removing them.

Pic © Mike Bull 2008

There it is – the very first rivet; we were so chuffed we all had a go and it didn’t take long to have F-17 fully fastened. We went up a rivet size too because some of the holes were damaged so we took them from 4mm to 4.8mm thus rendering the assemblage stupidly bombproof. Nor have we tried to cover K7’s battle scars and if you look carefully there’s a bit of damage here and there but nothing that’ll compromise strength because F-17 essentially doesn’t do anything – all the strength is in the steelwork behind.

The yellow pins are where the seat pan attaches to the crossmember. They’re a different size and we can’t do anything with them until the seat formers are ready to go but otherwise F-17 is now in for good.

We’re most definitely playing for real now that each piece is being fettled on the basis that once ready it’ll be painted and riveted into the hole. Our skills are seriously polished these days too. Once upon a time if we wanted a patch making it was an all night job. These days I draw around a corrosion hole and it seems only a minute later that the part arrives back with a perfectly sculpted piece of new metal let into it and clamped in place ready for welding. There are other things too – like we’ve developed the ability to mate damaged old metal to new without a thought. This was brought home last week by a visitor who’s a professional aluminium fabricator and a brilliant welder; the gulf between what we’re up to and conventional wisdom soon became apparent. It came home a second time when we got back into the workshop this week and made a start on installing two of the cockpit bulkheads. Having sorted F-17 at the front, John tackled F-15 to the rear, which was mentioned a few weeks ago for coming out of the lake in the shape of a wok and fighting with us for weeks before giving in. Once given the Bettablast treatment we slotted it into the hole for a look-see.

Not bad, eh? And yet, it’s still not quite flat or as happy as we’d like it. Notice the three vertical lines of rivet holes. These are where it had vertical strengtheners attached to the rear and although we have them they’re not much better than the bulkhead itself so giving strength is beyond them these days. Having said that we’d very much like to put them back so what we did was build three new parts that will attach top and bottom to the steel frame tubes, unlike the originals, so for almost no increase in weight we have a massive increase in strength. They’ll then allow us to button the bulkhead up solidly plus they’ll eventually be hidden behind the original strengtheners once we’ve dinged them back to a semblance of their former selves. John expertly set everything up then drilled the holes.

We can drill all the holes we like in these two horizontal frame tubes because they’re new so the museological purists can jolly-well shut up before they start. Like the new vertical stiffeners the replacement frame crossmembers will also be painted green when we get around to it. This is to allow future students of K7 to differentiate between what’s new and what we’ve knocked together and is based on the fact that Donald hated the colour green with a passion. It may seem disrespectful, therefore, to paint pieces of his boat in such a vile colour but as the entire interior was coated in green chromate primer first time around and he lived with it then so we reckon he’ll let it go this time too.

John’s new stiffeners fitted as you’d expect.

Next we need to glue in the F-15 bulkhead.

In the meantime, Alain was caught on camera in a role that appeared both useful and more energetic than we’re used to seeing him. Those of you who’ve been reading for a while may remember the new F-20 bulkhead that Doddy and I built from scratch one Saturday afternoon.

The Royal Navy divers pulled a gnarled piece of cockpit wreckage from the lake in 67 that included K7’s steering box and column, the right-hand cockpit rail and bulkheads F-18 and F-20.

Discovering that these parts were long gone was like having your neighbour from hell die his bed. Oh what a terrible shame – but one can’t be too upset for too long, can one – time to get on with life… The new F-20 was finished in a day.

Alain then laid it out on the bench and drilled the zillion rivet holes needed to put all the pieces together. Yes, it’s the same horrid green.

Like I said – we’re playing for real now. And there’s so much going on it’s bewildering. Rob, for example, is busy dismantling the cockpit floor, which, as you might imagine, is in need of some mild remedial attention.

We’ll soon have that straightened out and back in the hole. The floors are simple in that they’re either flat or corrugated so at least it’s easy to work out exactly where to push the metal even if it’s often reluctant to play.

And here’s a chunk of mashed metal the navy divers left behind on the day it came out of the lake in 2001. It’s the forward floor with the so-called ‘dragon’s teeth’ still attached.

Recognise it? It’s from the underside of the bow and it survived very well all things considered. There’s a piece missing from the pointy end and it was a bit bent but all perfectly mendable so we took it apart and cleaned it up…

We’ll get around to fixing it next time…

6^th November 2008

I’ve been away shooting for a few days. I go every year with my dad and his mates to visit death and destruction on the bird population of Cumbria.

Oooh! How horrid and cruel, I hear you say. Those poor birds…

But it’s not like that. I admit to liking ducks in all their guises – paddling on the pond, crispy and aromatic in the Chinese restaurant and winging past the end of my twelve-bore on a one way flight to duck-heaven. Pheasants too… They’re equally good sport once released from their centrally heated, fox proof, full-board lodgings and made to fly. But whereas the popularly held belief is that a single shotgun cartridge can fill the air with lethal lead from horizon to horizon the reality is that it’s actually quite difficult to connect a teaspoonful of shot with a fast moving target.

Add the shooting etiquette that frowns upon taking easy or low shots and the greatest glory clearly comes from downing an afterburning speck through a gap in the trees. The odds definitely favour the birds.

And there’s more… all those rich toffs tooling up in their Range-Rovers and M-Class Merc’s absolutely must stop at every outdoor shop en-route to outdo their mates in a spending competition on executive wellies and jackets with random suede patches and strange pockets. After that, the gas-guzzling vehicles, having been removed from the urban traffic jams for a day or two, sit about silently and as green as everything else while the shooters slurp sloe gin and sail close to their first heart attack.

Out go the toffs in their new kit paying heavily through the nose to blaze away at high-flying targets. The dispatched birds – and no, birds shot with a shotgun are not full of little lead balls – ultimately end up on the tables of local restaurants where diners pay through the nose all over again for the pleasure of eating them. The whole shooting game amounts to an efficient money-pump that sucks cash from affluent city-types and pours it into rural communities.

Admittedly, it’s a bad day for the birds in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I only shoot (badly) once a year in the same coat I’ve owned for ten years so my contribution is minimal but as a whole the effect is highly beneficial to the local economies.

But here’s the bit that’s so rarely considered…

Were it not for the shooter’s desire to traipse through miles of prickly undergrowth and fall over hidden logs, loaded shotgun in hand, many shoots would long since have been cleared for the production of rape seed along with their natural inhabitants. Appreciable chunks of England’s green and pleasant land, therefore, get to remain exactly so in the name of wholesale murder rather than being turned into acres of yellow hayfever…

It’s swings and roundabouts and I often get the feeling that people say the strangest things without taking a beat to consider all the angles. Take, for example, the first piece of feedback on our new DVD.

“You were wearing scruffy shoes…”

I was wearing a smart shirt to do the presenting but the shoes weren’t up to scratch, apparently. Sure enough, captured forever in digital excellence are my scabby, old Nikes that went to that great running track in the sky some months ago. They’re in almost total darkness but if you look carefully and perhaps freeze a frame or two you can just make them out.

I had to laugh.

The workshop is a total sh*t-pit throughout, my gloves were falling apart and I could do with a new welding screen too but did anyone care? No, because my piece to camera was performed in tatty trainers.

What’s this preoccupation with shoes anyway? I can just about understand it where the girls are concerned because they can transform themselves into goddesses with the judicious application of only a leather beermat and a shoelace on each foot (well some of them can) but footwear that’ll turn me into Johnny Depp is yet to be designed, I’m afraid.

Then there was a recent motorway café acquaintance who spotted the project logo on my sweatshirt and wanted a detailed history of events to date. His physique suggested he’d not run a marathon of late and the whiff of partially-burned armchair – that trademark of smokers the world over – confirmed he’d lit a series of small fires to self-administer mind-bending chemicals whilst white-water-rafting down the M6 in his Vauxhall Vectra. Having then stopped in search of black coffee and a double-battered fat-burger he listened raptly to my tales of derring-do beneath a hundred and fifty feet of freezing water with two tons of jagged scrap for company without a murmur but on learning that the boat was being built to running order he asked cautiously,

“Won’t it be dangerous?”

Certainly not as dangerous as sucking nicotine in the fast lane of the M6, thought I.

But then I got to wondering just how people perceive this up and coming event. What do they imagine we’re going to do? A few lads, perhaps having quaffed a tin of lager or two, screaming up and down an otherwise peaceful stretch of water in Bluebird, laughing hysterically and weaving between canoes and sailing yachts? Perhaps we could perch our mates on the sponson tops and give everyone a laugh.

I think not…

As a model for what it’ll actually be like I compare it to a fascinating event I drove into accidentally one day on the way to the unfortunately named, Cockermouth; that’s where I enjoy the shooting.

There’s a section of road that runs parallel to the western shore of Bassenthwaite Lake and opposite is a small, craggy mountain, or a fell or whatever Cumbrian hills are called. In winter it’s just another section of road but last year I passed through in springtime and wondered if I’d stumbled into a paparazzi convention. For hundreds of yards on either side of the road cars were parked and binocular and camera-wielding pedestrians waited expectantly though none seemed to be looking in any particular direction. Being curious I stopped to find out what was going on and soon learned that a pair of Ospreys were nesting on the hillside and hunting in the lake. Sea Eagles… so that’s what all the fuss was about. http://www.ospreywatch.co.uk/images.htm

No one could go near the nest or say with absolute certainty when the eagles would put in an appearance though their behaviour could be plotted with acceptable accuracy by those in the ornithological-know. Nor could anyone predict what the fish might be up to and therefore whether the eagles would wheel around for half an hour with rumbling bellies or have their larder stocked in ten minutes. The birds might make a spectacular stoop right before the crowd or feed away in the distance but one constant ran through the drama. Those people were prepared to stand for hours waiting to see an Osprey take a fish and if they got to see it every living second was one well spent.

That’s more like what running K7 will be all about...  Lots of furious spannering and organising in our boat shed but unless you’re interested and go in search of the action it’ll all be lost in the peaceful tranquillity of wherever we happen to be – just like the Ospreys. But if you’re passionate and patient and events go according to plan you’ll be treated to an astonishing audiovisual event and earn a memory to cherish – then peace will descend once again.

It’s anything but peaceful in our workshop at the moment, however. We’re mending a shedload of transverse bulkheads…

What now? I hear you ask.

For reasons that remain unclear, those Norris boys augmented Bluebird’s structure with a set of bulkheads that span the hull, most of which do very little work but as they were there when we found her we’d best put ’em back.

Here’s one.

This was taken the day we stripped out the main spar, which can be seen at a strange angle on the left but look beneath the end of it and you can see a trashed bulkhead or two.

There’s this one…

OK – it’s a good example of a bad example because it’s about as knackered as the bulkheads get. The reason for its destruction whilst lying so deep within K7’s structure is long and complicated and I’ll write it all down one day but the good news is that the road to recovery was embarked upon long ago and even by the end of 2006 we’d brought it to here.

But this is as far as we took the repairs until recently. Now it’s welded back together and pinned in place. Soon it’ll be painted and ready to go back in the hole once and for all.

A couple of doublers, a fistful of rivets and some Airbus glue and it’ll be good as new but this example wasn’t too difficult to mend because the biggest piece of material is only about six inches across and it’s not rocket science to chase a stretch to the edge and get rid of it.

Not so with the F-15 bulkhead from the back of the cockpit. We discovered it sunk in the mud with only the left hand edge showing above the silt. The manipulator on our ROV wasn’t powerful enough to pull it free but a lucky entanglement eventually brought it to the surface and we watched the depth slowly unwind on the ROV display and the surrounding water become greener and greener as our prize neared the surface. About a dozen hands grasped it the second it came within reach but later on the jetty it was a sorry sight indeed.

The green stripe running across it in the foreground is where the left hand seat former was riveted and the hole halfway up the right hand edge is where you’d put your spanner through to tighten the upper seat belt anchor onto the frame tube. Take a moment to appreciate its condition. This is one of the long standing problems we’ve had to contend with on this project. Those who don’t know simply cannot comprehend how something can lie submerged for three and a half decades and yet still be good for its original job once recovered and straightened.

Think about it… constant temperature, considerably less oxygen than exists in the everyday air we breathe and no UV light. On balance the bottom of a freshwater lake isn’t the worst place to store something.

Nothing daunted, we set about getting it somewhere near for our dry build in order to reconstruct the original cockpit.

And so it was bashed and bullied into the hole so we could check that all was present and correct.

Here it is with one of the partially built seat formers – original, of course – but what you can’t see is that once released from its various clamps and pins it leapt out of there like a scalded cat and that’s no good on the finished job. Yes, it would clamp down with lots of rivets and glue but in so doing the part becomes riddled with residual stresses so it’s just waiting to crack and we can do without that.

To give you an example, I was once lucky enough to visit the assembly hall of the Typhoon Eurofighter and at one end lies a big heap of parts. Depending on how many you buy as a nation determines how many of the bits you get to make. We make the pointy end while the Germans knock the aft fuselage and reheat section together. Italy makes one wing while Spain makes the other so one end of the hangar is piled with parts sent from abroad. But the interesting thing is that there are no holes anywhere by which they may all be joined together. What happens is that a spectacular, hydraulic jig is loaded with a couple of wings and enough bits to make a fuselage and then smoothly slots everything together and holds it there while the fitters drill the necessary holes and bash the rivets in. You see, having to toggle a hole half a millimetre across to insert a rivet is potentially enough to introduce a stress that’ll lie there for years then cause the tail to flip off your plane just as you’re about to down the enemy in a dogfight and we can’t be done with that!

So even though we’re not striving for a constant nine-g-rated boat what we needed was a panel that wanted to be flat and that’s about the hardest shape in the world to tin-bash.

Many hours later we had this…

…which isn’t bad but again you can’t see the gotcha. Its problem now is that the bottom edge rivets to the floor of the boat so its position is crucial but it ended up half an inch adrift once the panel was pushed and pulled back to flatness. No problem, we chopped it in half…

…built an elaborate jig to get the bottom edge spot on…

…then welded it back together again after a few subtle adjustments.

John and Doddy spent ages setting it up.

And now it’s as good as new.

We’ve designed in some additional strength here and there too for a negligible weight penalty so, once again, part of the boat is completely original whilst being as strong if not stronger than ever it was.

Here’s another and this part represents the other type of problem we face. This is F-13-S (at the right of the shot), which although corroded due to its proximity to the steel, auxiliary fuel tank, has lost none of its shape due to crash damage.

And here it is today.

But as you can see, there are a large number of small corrosion holes and, worse still, they’re dotted all over the place making repairing them all virtually impossible without losing a big chunk of the panel. So we took a different approach. There’s more good material than bad so as long as we could pick up on that we reckon we’ll be OK. To that end our mate Mike Bull put down his cartooning pens and bashed some tin into these neat, little doublers complete with joggles to fit around the flange-plates on the frame tubes.

Once again – a liberal helping of rivets and glue and all will be well. Incidentally, this business of dismantling the boat again five hundred years from now if we stick it all together with Chemetall-Alan’s chocolate sauce has caused a certain amount of consternation and I wish I’d not mentioned its adhesive qualities now…  True to form, no one is impressed anymore that we can take a sliver of aluminium that was years old when it was blasted to smithereens and has corroded ever since and make it good as new – instead they’re all crapping themselves that future engineers won’t be able to unstick our glue!

What’s wrong with everyone?

At least that issue has been put to bed by none other than Chemetall’s other son… Trevor called the other day to say he has a pot of Naftosolve for us. It eats sulphur bonds or something so you daren’t get it on your rubber gloves, shoes or car tyres but it’ll sure as hell unglue our panels. Interestingly (if you’re an anorak like me) the stuff was developed for Airbus to get rid of surplus chocolate sauce that was gooing-up thousands of skin pins and costing them a fortune.

So there you have it – another happy ending.

Gina Campbell fixed the first ever rivet to begin the final build of Bluebird K7. (Some Hi Res shots for the Newsdesks Out there)

Part 2 (1^st November 2008)

It’s been a busy week or so… some of the family went visiting pals in Ulverston so the rest of us made a trip of it and met up in Coniston for a beer where I took the opportunity to have a look-see. The Conistonians were flooded out last week to the extent that you had to be there in 1954 to remember the lake ever being so high. A foot of water covered the workshop floor at the Coniston Boating Centre and the Bluebird Café became a small island as the lake rose dramatically.

But the new Bluebird Wing at the museum didn’t leak so much as a drop throughout and doesn’t it look fantastic?

Can you see the join? The extension looks like it’s been there since the last Cumbrian glacier was melted by the output from too many Smart Cars because someone has cleverly constructed it from reclaimed slate. Old material persuaded to perform to modern standards – what will they think of next?

The foreground is made of ‘grasscrete’, concrete blocks full of holes through which grass can grow so it looks like a lawn but doesn’t degenerate into a mud bath when you move your two-ton hydroplane around on it in the Coniston rain. The big, blue doors in the centre are to let the boat in and out and there’s a purpose-built driveway onto this turning area from the nearby road. The museum is ticking all the boxes and public interest is phenomenal. I masqueraded as a bored crag-rat for an hour on Sunday morning in the newly extended shop area listening to visitors asking how long it would be before the rebuilt boat came home and was it true that she’ really going to run again?  I couldn’t help comparing our boat to the building itself.

One issue not quite made watertight yet (pun fully intended) is that if we conserve all that cruddy, yesteryear aluminium and ask of it what we’d expect from tin straight off the shelf we can never be properly satisfied with our work until it’s had a thorough test, which in our case ought to be more like a forty-year event than the half-century job that soaked the Bluebird Wing roof yet failed to find a way in.

K7 will need a good set of shakedown tests – tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2010 – before she’s finally signed off as good to go and released into the new building. Such tests must go well beyond simply starting the engine in the car park or floating her peacefully alongside the jetty.

All her systems and structures need to be tested not only statically and in isolation but also under load and in harmony with one another before we can say, with good conscience, that she’s properly rebuilt and ready to be home-ported.

As the planned finale of a massive effort to bring our unique project to a conclusion first dreamt of in late 2001 we hope that with a little luck and support from all the important quarters we’ll be permitted to conduct our proving trials on Coniston Water.

We could, of course, stick with the River Tyne, which has a suitable, unrestricted stretch but I fear some of the romance would be lost. Still – any port in a storm… There are many practical advantaged to running the trials on our doorstep but for once practicality has to wait its turn.

Coniston Water is naturally our ‘gold medal position’ for the proving trials and excitement seems to be building at the prospect considering what I gleaned when asking about town. Just think about it – the whole valley turned into a giant, outdoor museum for a week providing endless opportunities for topping up the coffers of everyone in the village. I can see driveways rented out as executive parking places and all those spare rooms turned into B&B opportunities; and why not?

But there’s always going to be the occasional moaner and already hints of a complaint have emerged that the museum building sports a certain amount of blue paint on the exterior, of all the unholy things to use in the park!

Mr Moaner, may I respectfully offer, at my personal expense, the services of a skilled and experienced dominatrix of your choice with a view to boosting your imagination, sense of adventure and perspective on the likely impact of a pot of blue paint on the bigger picture?

But that’s the full extent of my interference in such matters. The museum doesn’t tell us which hammer to use any more than we tell them where to hang their lights, an arrangement that suits everyone. So thoughts quickly returned to where we’ve got to with the metalwork. 

Our next job once the frame had cooled was to get our boat strapped into the new jig and, needless to say, we treated the frame as though it were made of blown glass having brought it home aboard our Land-Rover anorak’s truck. Alain assumed forklift duty and we soon had everything back at ground level.

Pic © Louise Bainbridge Oct 2008

Then, as the sun set, we blocked the roads without police permission and escorted our favourite lady back to her workshop…

Pic © Louise Bainbridge Oct 2008

…where we all grinned like idiots with no idea of how tricky it would be to get K7 into her rollover jig without scratching the paint.

And so began a new set of problems mostly caused by me building the rollover jig wrong. The crossbar that supports the frame was designed to be easily dismountable so we could fit the spar-boxes later but due to some back to front setting up and fully welding its mounting brackets to the hoop without checking first it became almost impossible to remove instead. Oops – ‘dropped a bollock’ there as we say here in Geordieland.

The spar-boxes are simple, rectangular water baffles that fit around the roots of the main spar but they also pick up the side skins so they have to be there when we start putting K7’s clothes back on. Just as Bill and Debbie thought we’d left them in peace I dashed back with an urgent request for two silver-painted spar-boxes that the team spent Wednesday and Thursday preparing. No sooner said than done.

Then another step up the learning curve… we’d not yet tried any of Chemetall-Alan’s clever, Airbus fuel tank adhesive/sealant/dissimilar-metal-rot-stopper so this occasioned an hour of very carefully weighing out resin at the ratio of ten to one. To our consternation the stuff looked for all the world like chocolate sauce and had the ability to spread faster and further than small-person’s poo.

There were questions asked here and there about the ferocious sticking power of the chocolate sauce and what would happen in years to come should we ever need to dismantle parts of the boat. Would this not result in damaged original fabric when using the earlier mentioned hammers and chisels?

Well, please forgive that small piece of poetic license, because although that’s what was actually said when I asked about parting the stuff, the reality is that various chemicals are available that will dissolve it back out again or it can be decomposed with a hot air gun at the sort of temperatures that won’t even hurt the powder coat. We plastered the inside faces of the spar-boxes then stuck em ’on.

Then we fired in a fistful of skin-pins and bolts because those spar-boxes are not coming off again. That’s it – they’re on for good. It was an odd though gratifying feeling. We bolted the crossbar in too and that’s there until K7’s centre hull is complete and ready to go onto her transportation cradle – an integral part of her structure when she’s not supported by water.

We fitted the rear pickup next.

Then threw her onto the jig.

Just as mounting our boat to the MK I jig was an ordeal so was loading her onto the second one but it was effort well spent. We ran in the last of the bolts and stood back for a look.

The jig still rolled too…

Now we have to carefully design an erection sequence (some of the team made their own arrangements when they first saw our frame on the jig) for the panels, bulkheads and floor sections. As we’re working with Airbus sealant this time we don’t especially want to build something that has to come apart again so we hung those parts that are ready to go in position and they’ll soon be followed by many more. Once we’re one hundred percent happy with a section of the boat it’ll be assembled once and for all.

Pic © John-Tidy 2008

What a feeling – how long have we strived to get to here?

And to celebrate we’re releasing the first in a set of professionally produced DVDs chronicling the work so far.

With fifty minutes of previously unseen footage of our tin-bashing in the early days it’s a fascinating insight into the way we’ve often had to feel our way through the problems and you can now obtain a copy from our online shop.

100% of the proceeds to the rebuild effort, of course.

You can also view a trailer on YouTube courtesy of Mike at ‘Load of Bull Productions’, as he once called himself. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RB0_GKDqcZM&feature=related

And you’ll catch a snippet of a previously unheard track by Marillion too.

Back in 2001 we tried to have the band create the soundtrack for the BBC documentary and though ‘Los Marillios’ were willing the BBC were not so six instrumental tracks quietly went away – until now.

With the band’s continued support we currently have exclusive use of those lost tracks for our DVD’s and promo videos and Mike has cleverly woven a few bars through a batch of underwater footage from the wreck site and some black and white stills shot on the day of the lift by Steve Rothery, Marillion’s founder member and lead guitarist.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2DmVKiXzl_Y

Right – that’s all for now but we’re really bashing along again. It was all hands to the pumps at our last gathering…

…lots of transverse bulkheads needing minor repairs.

More soon.

10^th October 2008

Part 1

Morris was dead… I stared at his mutilated body in the horrified knowledge that his death was on my account even though I’d nurtured him since the day he was born. Reality rattled askew in its bearings for a moment before some self-righting instinct took over and I left him lying there and went in search of a cup of tea.

*

“Will you make a presentation for us on the Bluebird Project in July 2009?”

Not unreasonable, you’d suppose, but the bloke in question first asked me in 2001.

“Assuming I’m still alive, still involved and still interested I’ll see what I can do,” I told him. And so 2001 was disposed of. His 2002 request went the same way as did 03 but by 04 he wanted commitment so I told him I’d make a note as soon as my 2009 diary arrived. This got rid of 04 and 05 but in 06 he lost his patience and started moaning. You see, he was owed a favour and this was it and I wasn’t cooperating so far as he was concerned…

Having explained (yet again) that 2009 diaries couldn’t be bought at any price and that I’d see what could be done nearer the time he went quiet again until early 07 when he re-emerged to wear over the same old ground one more time.

So here we are – finally – when you can buy the appropriate diary and has he called me? Nope. Maybe he’s died, changed sex, been voted off whatever committee he was on or suffered any one of a million other scenarios that could’ve put a stop to his organising. Who knows?

But the point is who would ever try to plan an event and book a speaker best part of a decade ahead of time? Now that’s what I call self-belief.

It’s a rare occurrence that I accept a speaking engagement these days anyway (though I’m asked most days) simply because driving bloody miles to live out of a suitcase wore very thin long before I had a good reason to be home every night. Still, the odd one here and there can be fun.

I made a point of not living by a diary once I turned forty in 07 – I just don’t care anymore. Rachel tells me when I’m due on holiday or at the dentist’s so that’s the important stuff dealt with and anything else just has to take its chances. It drives the bank manager/lawyer/accountant, etc absolutely crackers. The conversation with their secretaries usually goes something like…

“Can we make an appointment to come and see you?”

“Of course.”

“When would be convenient?”

“Whenever you like, just call me half an hour earlier in case I’m not here.”

“How about Tuesday the 11^th at three?”

“Whatever – just don’t forget to call.”

“Are you writing this down?”

“No.”

Having said this I do at least two gigs every year for the National Trust aboard SY Gondola. ‘Special Interest Cruises’ they call them where a guest speaker comes aboard and innocent members of the public pay good money to listen to our ramblings. It helps keep Gondola going and I’d do it every week if they asked me. But the deal is twice a year and they ring a week beforehand to check whether I’m still up for it and work up a backup plan if I’m not. (I’ve missed three cruises in six years – working for Greenpeace, blown out by weather and Rachel birthing). I then blast over to my favourite Cumbrian village at tea time and do the talk for the price of a bottle of cheap plonk from Coniston Co-op that the crew present to me every time and I share with Rachel in front of the telly when I get home. It’s a delightful arrangement.

But I’m often asked to make presentations several cities away and agree occasionally but on explaining the rules more often than not I’m told that this is not how things work and unless I’m willing to sign in blood the gig can’t proceed and what basis is this on which to organise anything?

Seems to work for the National Trust…

Just as I was beginning to worry about how enslaved people seem to have become to their diaries a businessman pal of mine told how he’d blown out a million-dollar meeting with a team straight off the Tokyo flight because his kid was rushed to hospital with suspected appendicitis. That’s more like it.

And so as I stared grief-stricken at Morris’ murdered remains I thought, for goodness sake, if this is the worst thing that’s happened to you all day then stop moaning!

*

Morris’s story began one Sunday lunchtime as I tried to persuade my sister-in-law, Katie that what she needed for her kids was a chicken in the garden. They love our ‘chickies’ so one of their own seemed a great idea but their mum was dubious.

“Tell you what…” she said, “if you can hatch an egg from the supermarket I’ll have a chicken.”

No sooner said than done, so off I went to the local Morrisons and bought a half dozen of their super-duper, free range, organic, happy-hen eggs and slapped them into the incubator. Morris was born precisely twenty-one days later to everyone’s astonishment.

From that moment he became my only son. Fresh food and water four times a day and what a thrill when his first feathers came in... He grew into a fine young cockerel and once fully fledged he took up proud residency in his very own hen-house with a mesh enclosed veranda into which the local fox soon found its way and chopped him into bite-size pieces.

I was devastated – the entire family cried – why didn’t I fit heavier mesh knowing there were foxes about? And as I mourned what amounted to an advanced egg from the local supermarket I suddenly thought, what in the name of all that’s sensible are you fretting over?

OK – Morris’ passing was a minor disaster but in the grand scheme of things it’s no worse than your guest speaker catching a dose of the craps from a dodgy kebab and having to cancel an hour before your mates from the Rotary Club are pleased to be upstanding for the Queen.

*

Tonight one of the guys showed me a piece of Bluebird we repaired two years ago and asked why we’d not closed a small corrosion hole in it. As it happened the hole was so small we’d probably leave it alone even today but the real reason it remains is that we repaired that panel whilst still under the influence...

Back in the bad old days we were welcomed by the whole bureaucratic / museological system like a kid enjoys olives on his pizza; and, while we eventually turned our backs on the table with a bitter taste, they left a smell that lingered long after our project struck out on its own. We’d been portrayed as incompetent mavericks with no idea of what we were doing and most likely our departure was watched with a smugness shared by those who saw off the early explorers believing they were about to sail off the edge of the world.

But our plan was a winner from the start and we knew it; however, like the pioneers of rock-n-roll we had something subversive and dangerous so far as the establishment was concerned and their influence, though it has waned steadily, continued to linger until relatively recently.

At last, after so many years of damned hard work, we’re about to emerge from the club scene to play an open air festival with two fingers raised to the doubters. Corrosion holes – we’ll decide what’s to be treated and what’s not, thank you very much.

Let the build begin…

Did someone mention a dead chicken?

*

We’ve been painting K7’s frame – everyone knows this much – but it’s all too easy to see this as a simple process. Painting an eight-metre conglomeration of steel tubes half a century old that only spent twenty of those years even half dry – and that’s without all the oils and other nasties leeched into her fabric over time – is akin to having your ninety-year-old granny put under general anaesthetic for a new hip. There’s just so much that can go wrong.

But we went into this stage of the project with the unflinching support of our local paint-hospital, their surgeons, doctors and nursing staff and the paint suppliers too so we had to be in with a shout of getting the job right first time.

Modern surface treatments are designed to perform according to a set of known quantities where the substrate and processes are tightly controlled but in this case just about everything was a gamble.

We knew there’d been oil ingress into some of the frame tubes but had no idea of its extent or what it would do at the sort of temperatures we were expecting to reach. It only occurs in the lower tubes so it’s most likely lube-oil from the Beryl engine – now what in hell was that on a good day? So would it burn off through the rivet holes and discolour the paint or simply flash off without a fuss? This, in turn, affected our oven… if we needed an extra few hours at high temperatures to get rid of the contaminants would it cope? The Promat-supplied lining was never in doubt but our ability to adequately design its application was up for debate. We’d never built an oven before.

And even if our construction was perfect in every detail it was still an add-on and therefore bound to affect the original oven’s performance. What if we’d missed something relating to the system as a whole?

But that was all academic without the necessary coatings. K7’s frame was originally zinc-sprayed – basically a blast of molten zinc that enrobed the bare steel – then a topcoat of cellulose paint and this is what we wanted to replicate albeit using up to date materials and processes.

Initially we planned to clean the frame with abrasive blast media then apply a chromate, etch-primer but this was only to fix the bare surface because blasting the frame would take best part of a day and such completely bare metal left overnight would be red with rust by morning. Trying to blast then apply a zinc powder would have meant a twenty-four hour shift and that wasn’t an option either because we can do all-nighters but something invariably goes wrong as we descend into knackeredness.

Consider also that the oven is Bettablast’s livelihood. Take it out of service and they’re staring at total loss like maintenance time is to a commercial airliner.

The zinc powder coat is the modern equivalent of melting zinc wire in a hot flame and blowing it all over the bare steel as was done to K7’s frame back in fifty-whenever. It’s basically powdered, metallic zinc mixed with an equally powdered resin and applied using an electrostatic charge that makes it stick to anything and everything in its vicinity. (Including our camcorder, much to John’s horror, as it slowly turned from black to silver).

So with time a precious commodity and an option available that wouldn’t compromise quality we dropped the zinc powder idea in favour of its wet-paint equivalent. Wet paint is what we all know and understand. It’s not powder at all, it’s liquid and you spray it. You can still mix a ton of powdered zinc in there and fire it from a gun so in our case we could apply that in place of the proposed, chromate etch-primer. Exactly the same result and half a day saved. By the way, this whole zinc thing… here’s a suitable page from Wiki for the metal anoraks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrificial_anode.

Where many people go wrong with surface coating is in not realising that Paint / powder is wonderful stuff but you use it to cover and decorate the job after applying a suitable corrosion protection system.

Bettablast, of course, know this only too well and we’re incredibly fortunate to have them looking after us on this journey.

We loaded our beloved frame onto a truck borrowed from a mate down the road – he mends Land-Rovers on weekends and they’re made of steel and aluminium, need I say more – and hauled it over to Bill’s place. For those who don’t know this already, the bloke who runs Bettablast is also called Bill Smith – how confusing is that?

Pic © Paul the carpet cleaning bloke in unit seven.

Job-one was to shift all that Ardrox. A year ago we treated the newly blasted metal with Ardrox AV8 as supplied by Chemetall-Trevor. It’s an inhibiting compound that prevents surface corrosion and a year later it came off again having performed impeccably. But even shifting that was a trial. Bill’s blasting room isn’t quite long enough to take K7’s complete frame so acres of tarpaulin had to be hung to keep the grit out of everyone’s coffee, eyes, clothes…

That done, the frame was moved quickly into a spray booth where, Wayne skilfully sprayed a double dose of Interzinc 72 over the exposed surface.

And this proved a revelation. We’ve all had a go with a tin of spray-paint and seen blokes painting cars but watching a man applying a perfectly even coat of zinc primer to what must be one of the world’s best collections of nooks and crannies with a spray gun without leaving runs or missing any was to witness astonishing dexterity. Imagine a man in protective clothing break-dancing whilst wielding a spray gun like Clint Eastwood used his six-shooter in A Few Dollars More.

Painting at that level is like the difference between bimbling down the shops in your Renault Clio against strapping into a F1 car and that’s without the matter of how complicated paint becomes. We’re not talking a bargain pot of trade emulsion here.

Earlier in the week we’d spoken with the local guy from International Paints, a locally based, global supplier of surface treatments. http://www.internationalpaint.com

Garry Bell was soon on the case and like so many of our supporters he soon arranged a small (to a company the size of International Paints) though vital contribution to our effort. The Interzinc went on beautifully.

We also shot a mile of footage – spot the amateur cameraman in the left foreground – because we’re very close to releasing the first of a set of DVDs chronicling the rebuild from its very beginning. Thus far it’s all been shot by Keith the cameraman but he’s been coaching us to be artistes and luvvies so hopefully you’ll not spot the difference when our footage begins to be worked in around disc number five or thereabouts…

And so K7 got to spend the night in fresh, grey pyjamas.

But that was only the beginning and she was up early next morning just like the rest of us to be wheeled into Bettablast’s oven so we could erect our Promat-enhanced extension around her. Once in there, with the extension in place, the frame wouldn’t come out again due to space limitations.

We worked our whatnots off to get everything built…

…and were quietly pleased at how well it all docked with the mother-ship.

Our bit looked great and fitted perfectly but it was a fragile spacecraft designed as a single-use, throwaway item with one shot at transporting our frame through the powder coating process. The shape of the factory floor didn’t help either and we ended up with almost an inch gap under one corner that had to be closed with improvised baffles made of spare Promat board. Its next big trial was being heated to the target temperature of 200 degrees Celsius and held there until the frame came up to join it. We really didn’t know whether it would work and there was only one way to find out.

Bill fired the burners and we watched nervously. Creaking and cracking shook the oven and wisps of steam from the last of Coniston Water boiling out of the frame tubes emerged through cracks in our secondary insulation. And yet the inside temperature crept steadily upwards as we ran around feeling for leaks and methodically taping over any we found.

Everything seemed to stall at about 160 but it soon set off again into the upper reaches until…

…target temperature 180 degrees, 182 indicated and the oven appeared to be holding – for now.

But Bill wanted the frame to reach full heat to burn the gremlins out and his frequent trips into the superheated cavern with a laser pyrometer amazed our lot. How on earth he could repeatedly walk deep into an environment that would easily cook a pizza and return alive was a source of wonder to us. John tried and got about a foot inside before being beaten back. The heat belching out of its darkened maw was enough for me.

For the sake of a good final result we had to go through this process but burning out the gremlins took several hours and by then the oven was beginning to suffer. Make no mistake, the Promat board remained completely unaffected but due to the limitations of our design heat was finding ways to strike through small gaps and attack the secondary insulation.

We could smell the outer foam getting hot while the creaking and groaning moved things and opened new escape routes for our precious heat. We inspected everything and found to our great concern that the roof was beginning to buckle.

And then, mercifully, Bill declared himself satisfied with the gremlin-burning and threw the doors wide. While Alain, John and I fled the scorching tsunami, Bill and Wayne strolled casually into hell and wheeled our frame into the open. The air shimmered above it and the grey primer looked very dry indeed as the oven ticked angrily in contraction and smelled of burning insulation – but the worst still lay ahead.

No time to rest, the powder had to go on next and Bill took over where Wayne had left off. Applying powder is altogether different to spraying paint. It doesn’t spray so much as waft from the end of the gun and due to its electrostatic charge it has the most peculiar tendency to roll past the job then double back and stick as intended. Applying it is still an art though. Too much and it’ll sag and run and the consequences of missing any or putting it on too thin are obvious.

Bill got stuck in but it was a long job. Up and down the frame he worked steadily; painting first the underside then the inside walls of one side then the other. Next he tackled the outsides and tops of the frame tubes and went over every millimetre again and again for good measure. We were well into the evening by now but it meant nothing. The job would be right and Debbie – another motive force behind the Bettablast team – alternately tended Bill’s umbilical hoses and kept the kettle boiling as everyone mucked in doing whatever they could to be useful.

Eventually the frame was powdered end to end and a final inspection was carried out by torchlight.

The powder application was eventually signed off as the last stragglers on the trading estate locked up around us and went home for the evening. We wheeled the frame back into the oven and shut the doors for the grand finale. Bill hit the switch and the roar of the roar of the burners was soon joined by the groaning of our oven as the heat found its weak spots once again and exploited them mercilessly. We’d spotted its shortcomings after the first round but due to the risk of dropping inclusions into the freshly applied powder we’d not dared go in to make repairs or modifications. It would have to hang in there.

We paced the floor making whatever makeshift repairs we could for an hour as the red digits transfixed us with their climb towards the target temperature. Much of the tape we’d applied on the oven’s first run was lifting by now. Then – bad news – Bill made another of his ventures inside and returned to say that the back of the frame was hot enough but the front was hanging ten degrees low. The curing time for the powder was recalculated and extended by another hour we couldn’t afford.

What to do? We could ratchet the burners up to persuade things along but we were on limits already so best if we could tolerate an extra hour without the increased temperature. But the decision was taken to go for broke and Bill cranked up the gas while we stuffed rags under the doors and taped over every conceivable source of heat loss.

The Bluebird Project contingent worried and fretted but Bill only sipped his tea and looked at the clock about once every twenty of those special, long minutes normally only encountered towards the end of a long-haul flight. Meanwhile, I casually strolled up the step ladders several times to alleviate my boredom by confirming that our oven roof was OK – yeah, right.

Debbie had to bale out sometime around ten pm let her poor dog out before he had an accident and Alain couldn’t hang about any longer either. Wayne had left earlier so that left only John, Bill and I to stare at that accursed clock.

“I know this is a stupid question,” John said after yet another check on the oven’s integrity, “but is this the same two hundred degrees I use to cook a pizza?

Such was our disbelief that Bill could casually walk in there with his pyrometer and return minutes later still with skin on his face.

It was the same two hundred degrees.

“How do you know when it’s cooked?” we asked him next.

How it works is that you stick a coating of powder to your substrate – K7’s frame in this case – then cook it until the powder melts, flows then flashes off the resins that allowed it to go liquid in the first place. The skilled operator can therefore touch the cured powder with a knife blade and know exactly when the job is complete. All sorts of clever technology exists to do this digitally but there’s nothing like a craftsman.

The race between powder curing and significant oven failure was a close run thing but we won the day albeit somewhat nearer to midnight that we’d envisaged and the doors were finally opened to reveal a minor miracle. We’d done it.

Never again will I view painting as a simple process. It’s as complicated and scientific as anything you’re likely to encounter and what certainly came out of the evening is that we’re definitely in the right hands.

We returned next morning to tear down our oven. It was heart-breaking after all the work we’d put into it and having willed it to hang on the night before but we had to get Bettablast’s factory back into action so we cut it to pieces and threw it in the skip. Poor thing. We did, however, save enough of the precious Promat board to help out the local pizza shop so hopefully, by becoming an organ donor, parts of our creation will live on – and we’ll get some free pizza…

A final bit of scrounging and we had a team shot taken by the local Associated Press photographer who popped in to record the moment.

Pic © Owen Whassisname from the PA Oct 2008

Left to right – fat Geordie diver, Debbie, Bettablast-Bill and Wayne.

It is important to understand, however, that any shortcomings of our oven were entirely due to the compromises in its design and not related in any way to Promat’s products, which came through the ordeal without even breaking sweat. We’d had to design something simple to transport and quick to both assemble and disassemble to minimise our impact on Bettablast’s day to day business. Also, we’d no experience of building such things and had no means to test it first so an excellent result, all things considered.

And what can we say to Bill, Debbie and Wayne – the Bettablast crew? I could write another couple of thousand words on the far-reaching effect of their contribution but I’ll not. Instead I’ll speak on behalf of an awful lot of grateful people – thanks!