Strange but true, the job is quite stressful these days.

I don’t do stress at all. In fact my bank manager once came to see me because I’d forgotten to pay my mortgage for five months and another time the credit card company reduced my limit to £130 because I forgot them too. I stopped living by a diary when I turned forty and rarely get to my office before 10:00am unless a pretty girl from one of our suppliers is due to visit; but put me on a steep and greasy learning curve and you’d think I’d just developed barbed wire haemorrhoids.

Thankfully the build is looking fabulous but there’s still a catch. What I’d always imagined to be the easy bit, firing rivets like machine gun bullets into sparkling panels whilst final acceptance of our credibility greased the bureaucratic wheels, is actually worse than anything that’s gone before.

Our work simply has to be right at the first try and instead of, ‘it’ll fix’, I can these days, be heard muttering, ‘No deadline, no budget, we are the customer…’ No longer can we hang a piece of tin in place, contemplate it awhile, and then declare it near enough. Now it has to be perfect in every detail before the rivets go in. And they’re a pocket nightmare too. Many are in awkward positions so we’re making up tooling on a daily basis to get at them and some of the holes are damaged either from the crash, corrosion, or (dare I say it) the dismantling process. These must be drilled oversize and larger rivets fitted to ensure uncompromised strength. Then the choccie sauce must be both precisely mixed and then applied after every panel has been accurately set up to be sure that K7 ends up the right shape. John has become an expert at sighting in the outriggers with strips of aluminium clamped to the sides and can spot a half-millimetre deviation along a twenty-odd foot length of boat.

In a parallel universe our byelaw application has so far progressed with exceptional smoothness and now we await a decision from the park authority so we can decide what to do after our boat is finished. The plan has always been to leave K7 in full working order in the hope that getting her wet will become an annual or bi-annual event where the team can get back together, relive the excitement and top up the village coffers; but there’s always a chance that after her proving trials she’ll be home-ported and that’ll be that. It would be a crying shame to lose such an opportunity but ultimately it might come down to what the old girl has left after her next outing. Anyone who’s been involved in a project lasting several years will have experienced that awful feeling of emptiness when it’s finished. Unless you’ve been there it can’t be described. It’s not like football where they just do it year in, year out and you might win a cup sometime soon. These projects have an objective, and when it’s achieved you’ve done yourself out of a job, for ever. We’ve batted dozens of options around but we keep coming back to just going straight into another boat.

Let’s face it; we’ve got more than we need; a fully equipped workshop with an expert and enthusiastic team supported by our world-class sponsor base and a reputation for getting things done. We have all the data and engineering support we need to build a world beater plus time we’ve been offered in a virtual wind tunnel and the very latest CAD and simulation software and a training package to go with it. We’ve made so many contacts in the aviation game we have the pick of just about any engine ever built and imagine how rapidly we could throw something together from new material instead of having to mend everything first. I know where there’ll be a pair of sponsons built to full aerospace standards that we could borrow too. It’s certainly worth considering and we could entertain ourselves for years with our new toy. Then again, maybe I should consider going back to work…

In the short-term we settled for taking the plethora of clamps off the F-19 bulkhead. The choccie sauce is meant to harden to a stiff, rubber-like consistency in 24 hours but that’s 24 of Airbus’ temperature controlled hours so we allowed 72 of our slightly chilly March/April equivalents to be certain. It was how I imagine an orthopaedic surgeon must feel when the pins and stitches come out of a patient’s once broken limb and all is whole again.

There’s no describing just how utterly bombproof that bulkhead is now. Honestly, it’s immovable and once the excess sauce was cleaned off with a dab of Chemetall-Trevor’s solvent it also became apparent that the waterproofing is spot-on too. The chromate-primed and painted alloy skin is now bonded and riveted to the brand new steel bulkhead beyond, which will also pick up the floor sections either side when the time comes.

Speaking of floors…

This is the worst of the lot. The floors are divided along the boat’s length. There’s an especially strong, sloping section from the tip of the bow to F-19 and, apart from a chunk missing from its forward end, it popped off in one piece and sank and is now almost repaired. Same happened to the cockpit floor, different in that it has an inner skin presumably so Donald didn’t have to stand on the corrugations. It too is looking very good these days. That section extended aft from F-19 to F-15 and then there’s a short piece from F-15 to F-11 followed by two long sections that go all the way to the back of the boat. It’s that short piece, or the ‘middle floor’ as we call it, you can see above still attached to the frame as Rob wonders how to get it loose.

Stripped away and dismantled it was a sorry sight (below). Notice the flat panel at the top of the shot. That’s what the fuel tank sat on and it was originally riveted over the area where you see very little damage to the corrugations at the top of the pic. It’s an unremarkable piece of metal in isolation but take a closer look at the corrugations and you’ll see that where that flat piece was attached they’ve survived in good shape yet below it there’s an extensive failure.

We’ve seen many similar examples around the front end of the boat. All it took was a few extra rivets or an additional skin and rapidly propagating damage would set off in another direction in the face of resistance or simply stop dead at that point. What happened in this case is that the water blasted aft separating the inner and outer floor skins but was prevented from getting any further at this point for two reasons. One, it met the tray that held the fuel tank, which effectively doubled the material thickness making it much more difficult to peel the skins apart and, two, stronger rivets were used aft of this point due to a simple question of access when setting them. Thwarted in its attempt to strip the outer floor from the corrugations the water changed direction and cut upwards into the void beneath the main spar.

Closing the rear of this void is a steel bulkhead punctured only where control runs, pipes or cables pass through. Above is the main spar and a tougher piece of structure would be hard to find in K7, but in front lay the relatively flimsy F-15 bulkhead. Water exploded into the sealed box in a nanosecond compressing trapped air that blew F-15 out forwards like a bomb going off behind the pilot’s seat. Here’s F-15 on the day we got it back and consider that you’re looking at the cockpit side where the seat was once attached.

Now go back up to the pic of Rob looking at the floor and this time you’ll see exactly where the water cut through the corrugations. That floor has actually caused us problems from day one, here’s a quick sketch.

When we first lifted the forward end of the wreck (the yellow lines represent the lifting strops) the front came up easily because the boat had landed almost tail first, buried itself deeply at the stern and then flopped down onto its flat underbelly. But the floor (shown in red) was torn from the frame and bent downwards so that its lower extent remained deeply speared into the lakebed. Here it is the other way up on the day we tested the first rollover jig – see what I mean?

At the rear of the hull we’d shackled the lifting lines into the tethering points used for static engine testing. We already knew that anything preserved in mud remained pristine so they could be trusted. To these we attached a two-ton lift bag that could single handedly raise the wreck.

For peace of mind we fixed a second bag at the other end to strops wrapped around the root of the main spar but we knew the steelwork was threadbare there so its residual strength was an unknown. To counter this our intrepid commercial divers – there at the behest of the BBC who needed someone to carry the can in the event of an accident – decided what was needed was another strop under the hull at the front end. The problem was that it had to go through the tunnel formed by the underside of the hull and the torn floor. Rigging it in those circumstances represented a stupid and unnecessary risk so the BBP divers took a step back and the strop was fixed much later once the wreck was clear of the lakebed; the only purpose it ever served being to demonstrate its pointlessness by sliding along the hull one afternoon when we inflated the bags unevenly leaving the wreck wholly suspended by the forward bag.

And still that floor wasn’t finished with us. The downward curving piece next frustrated our efforts to get K7 onto her recovery cradle. The lakebed drops away very steeply once you get about twenty metres or so off the beach and we had doubts about being able to pull the trailer back out if we let it fall over the edge but the water wasn’t quite deep enough otherwise. We used ratchet straps, a chain-pull and a five pound lump hammer to mash the bent floor back up against the frame so we could get the boat out of the water. It’s amazingly resilient stuff, is that floor. The second we took the weight off the cradle years later the damn thing sprang back to exactly how we’d found it.

Yes, we’ve had fun with it, and then we had to seriously consider whether it was past redemption. Doddy checked out the inner corrugations when they came back from Bettablast,

and performed some sensitive disentanglement.

Pics © Alan (Doddy) Dodds, by the way.

But it’s corroded as well as squashed. Squashed we can handle and we can manage localised corrosion but an expanse of both is challenging to say the least. We had a go at it though. After all, we are the customer.

On a more positive note we’ve just about got the front spar boxes good to go. They’re another mini-project that keeps popping up. It’s a case of, what shall we do next? I know, the spar boxes, floors, cockpit rails, etc. Here’s Tony scrubbing the more intact, portside example.

They’re a throwback to the original 1954 design, water baffles to seal the root of the front spar that were skinned over and left forgotten in the structure when the spar was raised. We could have chucked them and no one would ever have known. We could have slung ’em in the museum and knocked new ones together in an afternoon but no. We cobbled and cut, welded and buggered about…

Most of this one came home on the missing chunk of frame in 07 and the rest turned up riveted variously to the flap tray or the F-20 and 21 outriggers. It was meticulously pieced back together and stuck with hot metal glue.

Finally we closed several hundred rivet holes with hard welding rods so the part is plenty strong when we re-drill it. Ready for the paint shop.

And you know what’s really annoying… It doesn’t contribute a damn thing to the strength or looks of the finished job. It’s completely redundant but we’ll know it’s in there so we’ll be able to bore the pants off museum visitors when old BBP team members are wheeled out to regale future generations with our stories of how we rebuilt K7.

The riveting is going splendidly too. Rob and Mike really have it sorted, which is only fair considering how many old rivets Mike salvaged from the floor sweepings after Rob had drilled them out.

It’s taken them a few weeks to hone their skills but in that short time I’ve gone from constantly fretting about quality control to occasionally asking the riveting department how it’s going to give the impression that I still worry about them. They’re doing a beautiful job.

Fewer skin pins every day.

It’s not all work, however, and we especially enjoy teatime. One of the neighbouring industrial units is home to a pizza delivery service and once in a while a hot snack turns up.

The banter is hilarious as is the practical joking. Mike, on the right, has learned tin bashing like wives learn PIN numbers so he made some snazzy, little brackets last week. They only measure a few inches square and needed a weld a couple of inches long. What this means is that the whole thing reaches a ridiculous temperature and becomes highly dangerous. With a large panel there’s always a ‘cold end’ by which it can usually be handled immediately but small pieces are burning hot all over so I warned Mike and plopped it onto the bench. Two minutes later he cursed and jumped when the edge of the piece branded an angry weal into his arm as he reached for something else. Having suffered a nasty burn and a bad case of ‘told you so’ the second bracket was placed well out of reach after welding and forgotten about. Half an hour later it was cold to the touch and as Mike was proud of his handiwork I passed it over saying something like, ‘nice job’. But as Mike’s fingers closed on the bare metal – presumably without noticing that my fingers were bare too – I said, “It’s hot, mind.”

Quarter of a second elapsed before, with a startled shriek, the bracket was flung skyward. As it arced gracefully, Mike realised it might be damaged if it clattered onto the concrete so he instinctively caught it in the other hand. Another quarter second, another yell, and the thing was airborne again this time crashing most satisfactorily onto the floor, thankfully without damage as Mike blew on his unscathed finger ends. Laugh – we nearly choked – while Mike glowered and muttered though he did see the funny side too.

Our workshop is a wonderful place where we use the good, earthy language that men so enjoy and laugh at the most atrocious, politically incorrect jokes but when it gets serious it gets serious. We went back to those floors.

First stop was another trip to Kirkdale 2000 who make rotational moulding tools and are the most amazing tin-bashers different from us in that they tend to use quarter-inch steel plate.

Boss-man, Drew West, kindly allowed us some time on his 80-ton hydraulic brake press to re-form the corrugations and brought his considerable expertise to the party though I can’t help feeling he’s slightly bemused by what we do. Unsurprisingly his press didn’t struggle at all with the 16 gauge aluminium and using a knife-sharp blade in a V-shaped tool those floors had their corrugations back in an hour.

Pushing the bends again put most of the strength back but didn’t solve the torn metal or corrosion troubles. That needed a different approach, one which we’ve developed and pretty much perfected of late. Corrugated patch repairs. What you do is cut a hole…

…shove in a piece of crinkly tin …

…firmly affix with hot metal glue, then repeat as necessary.

Quite a way to go but you can see where we’re headed. It’s incredibly time consuming though. Each of those patches is a ‘W’ shape and it takes hours and hours to fettle and weld just one of them into place as the panel fights for its right to stay trashed. In cross section they look like this.

You can see how laying them side by side and opposite ways up will build the corrugated profile needed to mend the inner floors. Several advantages lie in doing it this way. The patches can be kept small and localised to minimise the amount of original material sacrificed and it’s considerably easier setting up one corrugation at a time. But perhaps the biggest plus is that even a small patch like this has six bends. Assuming a typical tolerance of +/- 0.25mm per bend you’ve a chance to be 1.5mm adrift by the end of it and even without crash damage a similar tolerance is to be found in the floors. Statistically the tolerances should work with you… one bend may be 0.25mm long but the next ought to be short to cancel it out again. That’s great until you get what I call a ‘conspiracy of tolerances’ and they all run away with your carefully calculated dimensions leaving you 3mm you’ve not budgeted for; so small patches definitely work best. They’re also easier to abandon when they start to go wrong.

The downside of this, of course, is the weeks and months it adds to the build. Our original three year estimate excluded great tracts of the boat considered beyond repair at the time that would end its days as part of the museum display. Now our envisaged display piece is looking somewhat threadbare while more and more rebuilt panels join their former team mates back on the boat. But what can we do? We’ve developed the necessary skills to save original fabric so we can’t start binning it now just because we’ll miss our deadline. Things can’t progress any faster either because we’ve pioneered the processes and seem to be the only group doing this. Even if we had a massive budget these parts are still only big enough for one man to work on at any given moment so the world will just have to wait. At least the middle floors have their strength back demonstrated in this case by Mother Earth as she exerts considerable gravitational pull on a fat bloke.

Another few weeks and it’ll be good as new and what this means is that we’ve managed to save the inner floors from the entire length of the craft. Never imagined we’d be able to do that!

By the way – have a look at the corrugated strip of metal at the nearest end of the floor. Samlesbury made a bit of a mistook way back when and fudged a repair they likely imagined no one would ever see…It never did any harm and it’s interesting so we’ll give you a better look next time.

And finally, and at long last, DVD 2 is now officially available. Originally we’d hoped our pre-order period would be April but due to last minute tweaks and having to negotiate their manufacture we’ve moved it to May. The original deal stands though – every disc bought and paid for in May will arrive with a certificate numbered, signed by the team and including an original blue paint crumb from Bluebird K7. You can go to the shop and buy one starting now. The other thing is that our costs are increasing and though we’ve so far been able to operate on a shoestring budget we do now have to splash out on the occasional bag of expensive rivets or special tools so if you can spare any loose change…

Thanks.

For those without a credit/debit card Please send a cheque/postal order made payable to " Bluebird K7 Restoration Fund" at Bluebird K7 Restoration Fund 66 Hudson Street North Shields Tyne and Wear NE30 1DL UK

25^th May 2009

It was with absolute shock that I learned of the death of my good friend, Carl Spencer yesterday. Carl was diving the wreck of Titanic’s sister, Britannic when he got into difficulties. I dived Britannic with Carl in 2003 when he led a British expedition to penetrate the wreck and explore the minefield that sank it but we met in November 2000 on the Bluebird Project.

We were short of a diver as I was being hauled away for press interviews so I asked if anyone knew a good diver with a disposition that would fit the team. Carl was immediately put forward so leaving word that he should be invited I went off to do more interviews. Next morning Carl arrived and within the hour he was on the Bluebird wreck. He said later it was a surreal experience and due to the birth of his son, Ben, only a few days earlier he commuted daily from Stafford to Coniston. We all liked him at once.

Carl was both the first and last diver to work on the recovery of Donald’s body in May 2001 demonstrating his immense skill under water; he was very methodical and completely natural in his element.

We next worked together in 2003 when Carl led an expedition to Greece to dive Britannic. I headed up his sonar team and it was a privilege and a pleasure to support such a gifted leader. (far right, below)

Since then we’ve worked on a joint project in Norway involving sonar work and diving in extreme conditions. The guys drove fifty-odd hours from Newcastle to the very top of the earth with a vanload of gear.

A strict teetotaller that’s the only time I ever saw alcohol pass Carl’s lips. We gave him a half of lager and he fell asleep.

He remained a staunch supporter of the Bluebird Project throughout and joined us again in early 2007 when we returned to the lake in search of a missing piece of frame. It was Carl who ultimately recovered it.

Our collaborations continued. Carl arrived in my office for a meeting one day but we’d run out of milk for the coffee. I was about to head off for the shop when he asked if I was taking the car. I explained that the shop was only a hundred yards away and I’d planned on walking. With that he threw his car keys at me and said, “Take mine…” I wasn’t expecting the brand, spanking new Aston Martin DB9 outside the office but I took it anyway.

Another time he texted to say he was overhead Leeds and could I call Newcastle air traffic control and organise for him to land in my garden. No sooner said than done.

 We had planned to visit Norway again later this year but, sadly, we’ll never get there. It is absolutely heartbreaking that such a gentleman should be so tragically lost and he’ll leave a huge hole in the lives of so many people. He also leaves a widow and two young children. Our thoughts and prayers are with them.

Bill Smith.

1^st June 2009

May started out so well, we worked incredibly hard on our application for the byelaw amendment then waited patiently and what a result. The Lake District National Park Authority said yes to Bluebird K7 breaking the 10mph speed limit on Coniston Water. As ever the press gave it a confusing slant – bless ’em – spreading the notion that Bluebird will be allowed only one run at 100mph. What we actually have is one set of proving trials that’ll involve as many runs as we can safely conduct as K7 is returned to fighting trim. Where the 100mph figure came from is anyone’s guess.

The meeting was an exciting mix of opinions; not all of which we grasped. For instance, someone thought we might test Bluebird to destruction, she’d fall apart and sink and then where would we be? The museum would have no boat and the whole effort would have been for nothing. Our lot were mystified. Had we missed something? Hadn’t Donald tested his boat to destruction in 1967 and been unable to finish her off way back then?

Then someone complained that whilst taking a peaceful walk once upon a time in1956 the tranquillity was unexpectedly shattered by Bluebird roaring over Ullswater. What a privilege to have witnessed such a piece of history but only the nuisance value seemed to have been retained and therefore the boat shouldn’t be allowed to run again lest someone else should suffer similar inconvenience. Get over it, for goodness sake!

The noise issue was beautifully countered by a wise and rather senior gentleman who pointed out – as we have many times – that the RAF often streak over the Lake District but he added to our amusement that all ought to be grateful that the planes bear roundels and not crosses. Good point well made...

Another was convinced that running the boat would somehow affect the bottom of the lake – how that was supposed to work we weren’t told – whilst someone else stressed the environmental unfriendliness, the noise and congestion but wouldn’t it all be bloody exciting!

On balance, apart from the occasional bit we couldn’t work out and the inevitable moaner here and there, the meeting was brilliantly conducted and when decision time arrived the majority placed their trust in us to carry things to the next stage.

Obviously we now have to demonstrate we can do this without trashing Coniston but the simple fact of the matter is that we have enough project and events management talent aboard now to put on a world-class show. I spoke last week with someone senior in assessing our proposals who told me that once you sort out the NIMBYs, (not in my back yard), the type 1 and 2 idiots all you need after that is common sense.

“Hang on a minute,” I said, “what’s the difference between type 1 and type 2 idiots?”

The explanation was a breath of fresh air… It seems type 1 idiots are just that – idiots – whereas type 2 idiots are ‘f***ing idiots’. We reckon we’ve also identified one or two type 3 idiots recognisable by an irrepressible urge to add to their CV in the most entertaining way at every opportunity.

As press officer for the project for almost a decade I’ve had to (or at least tried to) perfect the art of issuing a press release and it works to a reliable formula. A snappy headline so when it pops up on the screen in the forward planning dept. of Sky News or wherever they don’t instantly hit delete. Then you need lots of exciting, concentrated facts in a small paragraph because you’re up against everyone else who wants to be on telly or in the paper. The last part is a few lines of luxury items after which you write ‘Ends’ so they know you’ve shut up about the meaty bit and the next matter is ‘Notes to editors’.

Here you can put what you like because if you’ve kept them interested so far they’re going to read the rest so you include things like a potted history of Donald and his boat, times and places for press conferences and contacts for the important people involved.

The interested parties then phone you in plenty of time to have their crews in place, arrange interviews or request pictures after which the process usually stretches late into the day and later into the week than you’d planned but it’s all part of the job.

So – being a responsible project director and press officer – the following seems a worthwhile idea.

Notes for Type-3 Idiots.

Thank you for thus far reducing us to hysterics on many occasions whilst we offer condolences for your failure to achieve anything useful so far as your personal agenda is concerned. But don’t worry… we hereby offer you another roll of the dice. Our byelaw application must now be placed before DEFRA who will hear your objections confidentially (you hope) and may order a public enquiry. The professionals managing our application will then address any issues on an ongoing basis as taxpayer’s money is squandered with the worst case scenario being our cheerful departure for Dumbelyung. May we respectfully suggest, therefore, that you devote your efforts to feeding your families.

Ends.

The project is reaching critical mass now. It’s like a snowball we’ve been pushing uphill for years but with the latest announcement we’ve crested the rise to find a long, downward slope laid before us and our snowball is about to set off on its own.

A plague of TV production companies is chasing us for the documentary rights but we’re not fussed because we have footage accumulating week on week that we can make into DVDs to fund the project safe in the knowledge that we don’t need our mugs on TV ever again so they’re not doing very well. One broadcaster offered the use of their helicopter to get some aerial shots… We’ll bring our own helicopter and shoot our own footage, thank you very much, it’s been a while since I took the controls. Would-be sponsors are crawling from under rocks too. Where were they when we went knocking on doors in 2006?

I’m not sure whether it’s always been there – like if you buy a yellow car the roads suddenly seem full of yellow cars – or if it’s a new phenomenon. Perhaps I’ve just become especially attuned these days but there seems an awful lot of absurdity in the world for some reason.

Rachel and I had visitors recently who seemed almost frightened of the half dozen eggs freshly collected from the garden and proffered as a parting gift.

“But there’s no use-by date…”

With gritted teeth I explained that neither chickens nor ducks are born with an inkjet printer jammed up their oviduct and offered instead that if you crack an egg and it smells funny then don’t bloody-well eat it.

Most of those who help reduce our springtime egg mountain can work this out much as the team can tell when Thursday’s milk hasn’t made it to Saturday by taking the top off. Despite this we do get the occasional supermarket-subservient who panics without those little numbers to steer them from certain food poisoning.

Later, and still faintly despairing at what the do-gooders have done to our common sense, I went in search of sandwich materials only to be amazed by a pack of Tesco honey roast ham with, get this, ‘no added water’.

Of course there’s no added water, it’s a slab of pig’s arse for goodness sake. Were it a box of teabags I could see the point but as it was they may as well have added, ‘no shards of broken glass’, because you’d not expect that either.

Research amongst the yummy-mummies at the school next morning suggested that bulking up dead pigs with water was the norm until recently but now it seems Tesco has stopped ripping us off so they can crow about it on their packaging.

Then it happened again, this time in the pub toilets. Durex ‘easy-on’ of all things. Well they were easy-on before unless you were hung like a rhinoceros, very drunk or had the dexterity of a jellyfish. One hand in the dark – like unfastening a bra or unearthing the modern clitoris, essential life-skills for 21^st century man just as our ancestors had to perfect spearing a fleeing antelope.

Easy-on, I ask you… What, does it have handles you can pull it on with then fasten behind your back so it can’t fall off again?

What are they saying about their products? ‘They used to be crap but now they’re as good as what you thought you were buying in the first place…’

It’s everywhere, Johnson’s baby shampoo – ‘no more tears’ formula. Are they saying the previous mix seared a layer of cells off their infant corneas? Pedigree Chum dog food, ‘new improved recipe’, except they’ve improved it so many times it must’ve been so bloody awful to begin with we could’ve spooned it straight onto the lawn and left the dog out of the loop, the list is endless and for some reason I’d developed a minor obsession for such things by the time my phone beeped one morning to say our old friend Carl was dead. That final piece of nonsense floored me with disbelief but of course it was true.

Carl’s demise is the reason you’ve waited so long for an update and why the new DVD went out late but none of it seemed quite so important for a while yet he’d go crackers if he thought he’d stopped the job.

On Friday the 12^th June the old crowd assembled in Carl’s home town of Great Wyrley in the midlands to give him a good send-off. It was weird sitting with guys I’ve known and dived with since the nineties as though waiting for the dive conference to open or the expedition to begin expecting Carl to spring through the door full of his usual enthusiasm at any moment. Then we started swapping diving stories and having a good laugh. We poked fun at him during the service and told of the good times then off for a few drinks and some food at the wake. He had a great turnout and we saw him off in fine style with a genuine and heartfelt celebration of his life and achievements. He’ll be sadly missed and the world will never quite be the same for any of us but now it’s time to get back to the job at hand.

Progress on the boat is painfully slow at the moment and, yes, it’s those floors. We really had no intention of even attempting to mend the corrugations but once it became clear it was achievable we had to go for it. But look at the result.

This total mess…

…has become this.

It’s the same pair of floor panels (it splits down the centreline) with what feels like a million hours spent on each but they’re now only a few days away from the paint shop. The floor aft of this point is a slightly easier fix mainly because it never got squashed and ripped in half but there are still issues; see below, for instance.

This horrible, grotty hole down in the bilges is where the auxiliary fuel tank and battery boxes live. You can see the lower, aft end of the engine inlet trunk at the top of the shot. Below it is the aux’ fuel tank and bottom right you can see the corner of a battery still in its box. The problem was that all of these bits and bobs were made of steel and once submerged the steel munched holes in the aluminium like a hundred hungry caterpillars.

It’s the same two bays. And notice below how only these two are affected.

The three bays on the right are almost perfect and will be good as new with a few small patches but the two at far left needed a different solution. We could have lopped ’em off and made new ones but that would be cheating. Instead John made up a bunch of these things.

They’re clever little widgets that slot into the existing corrugations and do all the work for them. Their job is to anchor the outer floor skin to the frame but with a little compliance as per the Norris Bros. imaginative thinking.

The original floor is still in there in its untouched entirety but the two damaged bays have been retired by John’s longitudinal beams that’ll be firmly affixed to the frame and the outer floor. Yet another triumph for museology.

The entire floor from front to back is marching steadily towards the paint shop. Yes, it’s slow but consider this.

The next step is the outer skins and we’ve done those already – they just need final fettling and sticking on.

Having something to stick them to is another matter, however, and we’ve been working hard on K7’s pointy end. So far as the outriggers and bulkheads go the biggest problem lies at the front as you’d expect whilst the floors suffered most under the main spar where the boat snapped in two. It’s much the same fettling outriggers as it is fettling floors but the difference is that once you get bored with F-whatever you can hop onto F-somewhere-else and enjoy a change of scenery. Not so with the floors where day after day the same expanse of corrugated tin greets you. So we abandoned them completely for the sake of our collective sanity last weekend.

It was such a relief to be drilling, gluing and riveting again.

Here John works on the F-22 bulkhead, the furthest forward original bulkhead we’ve been fortunate enough to save. F-23 ahead of it is very green and new, the original is probably still in the lake. I say probably because the other green one to the right of the pic – F-21 – turned up recently along with its crossmember in a museum. We asked if we could have it back to reincorporate into the boat but the answer was no.

Here’s another interesting discovery about the pointy end. We actually spotted this a long time ago but it’s not been especially visible until we built the bow.

Starting at the front of the frame you can see a small tube welded into the curved frame member. This is where K7’s towing eye was attached in her 1954 evolution. Now look above it at the hole in the green, F-23 bulkhead. That’s where the pitot tube came through in the original design but notice how misaligned it is with both the hole in the F-22 bulkhead behind it and the towing eye mount in front. Now take a look at the vertical sides of F-23 relative to the frame and you’ll see much more green on the left then on the right. That’s how far adrift K7’s frame was built from new. The original bulkheads and floors are all offset to compensate for the frame being crooked but we’d built F-23 to the drawing before realising this and were only able to make it fit by offsetting it substantially. The shape is spot on too; no mean feat considering it’s had a bit of a ding. John did his usual thing with the longitudinal stringers just in case.

Another thing – if you look carefully at the pic above you’ll notice that Mike is fiddling with a green widget on the F-19 upper panel. There’s a pair of them and they look like this.

They’re a new addition. What happened was that when the front spar was lifted and the higher deck and cockpit rails added, K7 lost her foredeck and with it a lot of structure that used to pick up the original cockpit rails. This left them hanging in space at their forward ends with a whole heap of new tin riveted on above so for the sake of a couple of small doublers we’ve taken the liberty of putting the strength back by alternative means. These are the things that Mike thought he’d burned himself on a few weeks back. He’s good at doublers, here’s another.

Lurking down in the corner of F-2 and still awaiting its green paint this patch sorts out not only where the bulkhead tore when Robbie’s ingots obeyed Newton’s first law but also the resulting corrosion that set into the torn edges. It’ll be a nice repair when it’s done. We’re almost through with these small repairs and all but two of the transverse bulkheads are in. What’s stopping these is that they secure the floors so we have to do them at the same time. After that we need to fit the transom, which is now in a jig so it can be repaired without moving about when it’s welded. Alain built this thing – his welding is certainly improving.

Because someone chose stainless steel to mount the rubber water seal beneath the jetpipe it’s had the inevitable fight with the aluminium and you can guess what lost. We could mend it but it wouldn’t be the same shape after the welds contracted. This way it has no choice and even if it does move we can use the jig as a gauge to be sure it goes back to where it belongs before the rivets go in. We’ll be sure to let you know how it goes. After that we can stick the main flutes down the sides and build K7 as high as her deck as far forward as F-15. Can’t wait.

Other stuff… we have a spare engine incoming. We’ve been after this one for quite a while. It’s not quite as sparkly clean as the DeHavilland one so we’ll most likely try to get a tune out of this one first before chancing our arms on our good one. Looks like we’ll have to build our jet-powered Ford Transit rig again.

Let’s hope things get back to normal soon, eh…