Just look at this… F-15 (back of the cockpit) all the way forward to F-17 (the U-shaped crossmember foremost) including every shred of visible frame and most of the cockpit floor is recovered, repaired and put back. The green strip along the back of the cockpit ties the floor to the lower, F-15 crossmember and is our addition; and although there’s some evidence that it may have been done that way originally we certainly found no trace of the hardware if it was. The green seat formers we all know about so with them firmly affixed to everything in sight the time arrived at last to stick Donald’s seat back in the hole.

Much plenty choccie sauce… all it’s really doing here is making sure there’s nowhere for dust or moisture to accumulate whilst bringing its considerable adhesive qualities to the party. We’re not overly concerned with keeping the lake out or dissimilar metal rot issues where the seat is concerned. It fitted perfectly to the outside of the green former, which as we’ve previously mentioned, was made 2mm smaller everywhere so as to fit neatly within the original skins…

…followed by its inner companion.

There are hundreds of rivets keeping that thing in there and what a nightmare it was to nail down. This is what I mean about the devil in the detail.
Consider this. See above that inch-wide return at the base of the seat former that runs flat along the floor… It’s 22-gauge alloy. Now think of what’s beneath and what we had to fix it to.

See how the cockpit floor corrugations taper towards the bow, but the seat formers run parallel to the boat’s centerline. What this means is that drilling holes through the floor to fix the seat is fraught with danger. Sometimes you’re drilling through only the seat former (we closed most of the holes in the repair process to give ourselves a chance of satisfactorily sticking the thing down again) and the similarly thin inner floor skin. In this instance the rivets go into the void beneath the inner skin inside the corrugation – two thicknesses of material only. But where the tops of the corrugations meet the underside of the inner floor there’s three thicknesses to get through so it’s important to ensure the use of rivets with the correct grip length. Too short and they don’t get a secure hold – too long and much the same thing happens. That bit is easy. What’s tricky is avoiding drilling through the corner where the corrugations change direction because then you have a hole you can’t put any kind of a rivet into. The job isn’t too difficult so long as you keep your wits about you but it all takes time so the seat seemed to take forever to install and it’s not quite finished yet.

 

It looks nice though and in this shot you can certainly see how the boat’s shape is forming around the outer edges of the floors but a hundred widgets are yet to be designed, built, painted, glued and riveted before we sign off the seat structure as finished.
The floors are a done deal these days though. At bloody long last! They’ve cost us a third of a year on our build schedule and, though eventually they proved well worth the effort, their reconstruction did little for workshop morale at the time. The front ones because they were either mashed, corroded or both and the rear ones due to dissimilar metal rot. John’s ‘green beams’ provided the answer as proven when the first set went in for keeps.

This wonderful invention allows us to leave the main floors completely unmolested apart from a new coat of paint. Future museologists will be able to hang upside down in their tweeds and examine real K7 floor corrosion to their heart’s content while we can safely put her back on the water and cater for the public – for whom museums exist, lest we forget. The two longer beams near the bottom, by the way, pick up a slightly extended patch of corrosion in two of the corrugations. We didn’t just build them wrong.

Here’s how it looks when it’s built. We’ve popped some doublers over where the floor fixes to the frame because there’s a bit of corrosion against the steel but otherwise it’s as we found it and good to go again. The floors further aft weren’t so lucky because they lay beneath the jetpipe and that’s made of Nimonic stainless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimonic) so, as you’d expect, the alloy lost that old war of attrition where dissimilar metals are concerned.

And herein lies another trick detail. Imagine how careful the man with the blasting gun had to be to remove every last trace of paint, mud and yak-shit without blowing the underlying, paper-thin aluminium to smithereens… Bettablast-Bill had to work out the process for doing this and we’ve no idea how long it took him or how he did it. All we know is that we gave him cruddy aluminium corroded to the thickness of a Mr Kipling foil cake-cup and he blasted it clean without destroying it. Think about it…
And as Mr Kipling has never been noted for making exceedingly strong hydroplane floors our resident beam expert had to make up the deficit once again.

These are full length ‘green beams’ span 85 inches overall to support the entire aft floor panels.
“But you’re adding weight,” said someone, and it’s a fair point but unknown at the time the real ‘Robbie’ Robinson solved the problem back in the day with his lead ingots bolted into the stern. A full set of ‘green beams’ weighs less than as a single ingot so all we have to do is leave one out to form the nub of an interactive museological display and the correctly balanced craft can then get her bottom wet once again without fear of sinking.

There’s another development due to the floor installation that had to emerge sooner or later and which actually turned up exactly when predicted. When we mounted the hull in the first rollover jig the boat was completely skinned and the only fixing we could find at the broken end was the hole in the frame where the main spar passes through. Our concern at the time was that the frame might deviate under its own weight as we took the skins off – sag in the middle, if you like – and make reassembly difficult due to the rivet holes not lining up. Thankfully our fears proved groundless so we knew we were safe supporting the frame from the same two places for the rebuild but another problem lurked in the dynamics of it all. When mounted to the first jig the boat had an alarming tendency to roll to her upright position because its metacentre is quite a way above the centerline of the jig. We managed during the stripdown by simply keeping the boat upright as much as possible or bolting the jig in any of the other positions we used. But then we would leave it fixed for days on end while we painstakingly teased away a single panel whereas nowadays we might have the boat at half a dozen different angles in a busy evening. Factor in that she’s now a third longer than last time with a disproportionate weight increase in the heavily built bow and it’s not difficult to appreciate that approximately a ton of metal on a rollover jig with an inbuilt desire to right itself is potentially dangerous.
With this possibility in mind we spent a few weeks planning the finer points of our second generation jig, one of the more important factors being Rob’s small stature. The aft frame attachment and its floor mounted stanchion is the one we designed way back when for the stripdown, albeit shortened in Rob’s honour this time around. Seeing as he’s removed more rivets than the rest of us added together then stuck around to put them all back in again it seemed reasonable to respect his requirements, which essentially determined the hoop diameter at the other end of the jig and therefore the height of the hull above the floor. With this vital dimension as a datum for our sketch we sallied forth. Next, the team discussed whether the hoop ought to be fixed and the mounting to the frame roll within it or whether the frame ought to be permanently mounted to the hoop, which would then roll on a pair of feet fixed to the floor. John settled that issue by pointing out that rolling the frame within a fixed hoop would provide greater opportunity for chopping off fingers whilst making the rolling operation more difficult because at least there’d plenty of leverage when turning the entire hoop; so that’s the way we went.
From there we had to plan how we’d get the frame in and out of its jig when necessary (because it must come out to fit the transom, amongst other operations) how it would fix to both frame and floor, and how to actually construct it. Our musings gradually evolved into a detailed proposal that eventually became a drawing and we watched the development and commissioning of our second jig with much satisfaction. It was innocuous enough initially with only a bare frame aboard but now it commands serious respect. There’s so much energy stored when the boat is in any position but upright that it’s now only moved according to a strict checklist that includes the removal of all air hoses, loose objects and non-essential personnel. Hopefully we have enough procedures in place that it’ll not bite us before we get to put the heavy old bitch on her launching cradle in preparation for her return to the water.
The floors still need a shedload of rivets but they’re pretty much complete now and that means we can start skinning the outside of the hull. It’s supremely annoying (though completely understandable) that this seems to be all people care about. Never mind that we’ve turned out a wonderfully rebuilt frame and inner structure from stem to stern despite the forward third being knocked off and scattered all over the bottom of Coniston Water… Oh no.
‘When are you going to put the outside on?’ they all want to know.
So, by popular demand… behold, some skins pinned for appraisal because, of course, we have to mend them before the rivet-twins can set about nailing them down.

One final floor related issue… back in the beginning we pledged that we would save as much as possible of the original material and this is why the bureaucrats went so wobbly because the museologists said it couldn’t be done – amateurs, the lot of them. So we mended those murdered floors and now it’s viewed as a triumph of conservation much like the piece of frame we put so much effort into finding rather than simply building a replacement. But all this originality has come at a price and now there’s an increasing chance that we’re going to miss the spring 2011 launch date. Not that we care two hoots because we’ve always said the boat will be finished when she’s finished and anyone who wants to see it done any sooner is welcome to come and help but I bet there’ll be a lot of griping and moaning if we push it back a year. We’ll see.
On a different note, we’ve been buggering about with an engine lately too. We now have the main hull construction in the capable hands of the team. Rob and Mick are expert riveters while the other Mike can fettle anything now that his material of choice has switched from MDF to aluminium and Tony is shot blasting ever smaller twiddly things as we raid the boxes of bits we packed away back in 2006 and clean them up as part of the final build. My role for so long has been chief fabricator and welder but there’s almost nothing left to weld and lots of other things need sorting if we’re ever to see two and a half tons of metal move under its own power.
Our engine story is long and involved.
Back in 2001 we asked Rolls-Royce for support and were received enthusiastically but told we needed an engine of known history before they could get behind us at corporate level. Much searching finally turned up a genuine Orph’ – at our local ATC squadron – but despite trying our best we never uncovered its life story. Rolls-Royce was understandably reluctant to get officially involved with a powerplant of unknown ancestry but still provided a wealth of technical literature and introduced us to some charming old Orpheus engineers who, having lived and breathed the engine for most of their working lives, gave it their all for such an appreciative audience so late in the day. Thus helped and encouraged we brought our ragged Orph’ to a reasonable standard by acquiring a second unit for spares – it was internally knackered but good for all the useful ancillaries. The finished job was battle ready but we never got around to starting it.

We’d agreed with Rolls that they’d still support us if we found the right engine so with ever an ear to the ground we plunged headlong into the Hapless Lottery Failure years as jet engines slipped reluctantly down our list.
Then, in 2007 came a phone call. Did we have any Orpheus combustion chambers that might be made available for a recently grounded though otherwise flightworthy aircraft? It was a fair request because we had seven of them, though we didn’t know what condition they were in, but if they could be used to get a plane back into the air we would gladly swap them for some slightly eroded examples for ground-running our boat. A man drove all the way from Bournemouth with a boroscope to sniff about inside our engine and our combustion cans proved healthy but in the meantime the aircraft was allowed back into the air without the costly stripdown so the problem went away. It was noted, however, that we’d tried to help so in exchange we were invited to swap our Orph’ for the display example in Bournemouth aviation museum, which was in first class order and ready to fly. Many thanks to DeHavilland Aviation for that opportunity…
That’s things sorted – you’d think.

Sadly, by the time we got just the engine we needed and went back to Rolls, all their old Orph’ guys had either died or retired so after so much effort they had to turn us down at the final hour – yet another stunning triumph for the Heritage Lottery Fund’s time wasting department.
The Bluebird Project, however, remains extremely grateful to the people at Rolls-Royce for the help they afforded us over the years.
We’ll not let you down.
So now we had a mint engine that none of us knew the first thing about and to make matters more complicated we also want to run many of K7’s original systems off it and that’s going to take a bit of getting right. What if we broke such a precious asset?
What we needed was another engine as a test bed and to the rescue this time came the 1454 (Harrow) Squadron Air Training Corps who happened to have an almost dead Orph’ lying about their yard.
Their ragged old engine turned up full of leaves and litter and very seized up.

But with a good working knowledge of how to pull one of these things down we set about it without delay. First thing – grab a team shot.

On the left is Trevor Thomas who kindly arranged for us to have this engine in the first place and far right is John Cross standing beside Peter Harrison – the man in the stripes. You know the rest of us. These guys drove all the way from London with our new lump of scrap. Cheers lads!
Next job… get the oil pump out. We got this wrong on our first engine. The oil pump is the Achilles heel of the unwanted Orph’.
Once the oil tank comes off – and it usually does – the open pump ports are left facing skywards so the magnesium casting quickly fills with water and destroys itself from within seizing the rotors solidly and furring up the gearbox oil galleries from one end to the other. These engines are designed so that should a pump or whatever seize in service there’ll not be an ‘uncontained failure’ or, put another way, an explosion of shrapnel all over the aircraft’s engine compartment with the attendant risk of fire, so all the accessory driveshafts have a waist machined into them where they’re designed to fail-safe if called upon. You guessed it – seize the pump then turn the engine… Off came the seized pump so we could rescue its intact drive.
 

Then there’s the turbine bearing. These tend to stick if the engine is left out in the weather so that came apart next. Sure enough, it wasn’t exactly running smoothly but it was in great condition despite the neglect and it didn’t take long to clean that up too. Having got the brute to spin we whizzed it up with a big electric drill to blow out all the crap before assessing it properly.
Unfortunately, it was worse than we first thought. A lot of water had seeped here and there and magnesium just loves to fizz into a rock-hard corrosion product that looks and feels like concrete. It’s incredible stuff – if you take metallic magnesium and keep it damp it forms magnesium hydroxide, which is basically a mineral. It literally turns into a chunk of rock that takes up considerably more space than the original metal. Allow this to take place in a confined space and it exerts an unholy force until something gives. Worse still, a single crumb of it could block any of the numberless oil jets in the gearbox. It’s an insidious problem because the engine wouldn’t show any outward signs of distress until the under-lubricated bearing or gear finally overheated and let go and by then it would be too late. We pulled the gearbox apart and scrubbed out the oilways.

But as fast as we solved one problem another emerged. We noticed that the tip clearance around the first-stage compressor blades varied by a few thousandths of an inch from one side to the other and suspected that more of that awful corrosion product had built up between where the compressor case meets the gearbox case. In this instance the front of our engine, and consequently the main bearings, could have been pushed slightly out of alignment. We made up a clever tool to get the mainshaft nut loose then heaved as though unsticking an undesirable youth from our daughters.

With the nut removed we pulled the front off the engine to reveal exactly what we’d suspected.

If you imagine this as a clock face you can see the corrosion product from about the six o’clock position around clockwise to ten-thirty-ish. Bettablast got rid of it for us and with a dollop of epoxy repair putty we soon had it good as new and ready to go back together. The gearbox takes a lot of setting up with dial gauges, feeler blades and foul language but it’s smooth as can be now.
Another slightly unhappy piece came out of the stores recently.

This is the LPC (low pressure fuel cock) handle from Donald’s cockpit. The black handle on the left was used to slide a length of link-rod through a spherical bearing mounted on the right hand side of F-17. This in turn worked another rod that runs aft through several stations then pushes on yet another linkage to open and close a quarter-turn valve on the outlet of the auxiliary fuel tank. We straightened and cleaned it a smidge.

Then we took a look at its bracket and pivoty thing…

Mike positioned it using a tiny shred of corroded aluminium bearing a single rivet hole that we were able to reconcile to the original F-17 bulkhead.

Then he made it all fit and work like new.

Clever, eh?
Then, whilst on a roll, we dragged this piece of scrap off the heap and had a go at it too.

Any idea what it is? We whacked it a time or two until it repented its sins and sat up straight…

Worked it out yet? OK – see if this helps.

It’s the bracket that mounted the HPC (high pressure fuel cock) – that black control box with ‘Bloctube’ on the top as seen in cockpit photos of K7 going all the way back to her launch. We got it out of the lake and put it back for an afternoon.

Now it’s all in context. OK so it’s crusty-looking at the moment but we could, if we so desired, mend it and put it back but that’s the source of a museological conundrum. You see, that lever was shoved forward by the man himself on the 4th January 67 and it’s not moved since. We could leave it there and put the control box in the museum and make a new one but it would then be a major, non-original component in an otherwise complete system except for a couple of joints and fiddly bits we never got out of the lake. On the other hand the unmoved lever would be quite evocative if properly displayed and interpreted – a direct link back to Donald’s fateful decisions that morning. We’ll ask the public then tell the museologists what’s required.
Another thing you may have noticed... because the seat has a new internal structure and much of its surrounding bulkheads either do very little work or have massive steel tubes behind them we've been fortunate in being able to leave many of K7's battle scars intact. There's genuine examples of crash damage and corrosion down there to help tell her story, which is good news considering that many structural components needed repairs that effectively wiped out much of the damage.
In the meantime we did feel confident enough to mend this bracket because new control box or old it has work to do.

But again we left some of the corrosion pits because it’s quite a sturdy piece of material anyway and once the control box is bolted to it it’s properly beefy.
The engine went back together presently and we gave it a good rub down with Scotch Brite and sprayed it a tasty shade of grey so it’ll wipe down with a cloth when the jetfuel starts splashing everywhere.

You can see the inlet nearing completion on the bench behind too. Now that the engine spins like a Swiss watch and the gearbox oilways and pumps are all spotless we’re getting onto the systems because this is to be a hybrid engine. That inlet is from K7 and it’s not quite the right one for the lump in the foreground but it can be made to fit. The air-starter is different too and its delivery pipes live inside that bullet so that all has to be made to fit too.

Two old friends dropped by and gave it a rub down with a few shreds of an old anorak they had lying about then Rob set about it for another session and polished it until it gleamed.

Then there’s the engine fuel system. One day sometime in the 34 years Bluebird was at the bottom of the lake the entire fuel system fell away from the corroding compressor housing and plopped into the half-metre of anaerobic mud that filled the inner hull. There it lay mostly protected by kerosene on the inside and mud on the outside until we pulled it out in 2001.

This scruffy looking conglomeration is the complete fuel system. The lump sticking out on the left is the main fuel pump, which was driven off the engine’s accessory gearbox. To its right and covered in white corrosion product is the fuel filter and the rusty pile on the far right is the CCU or combined control unit. It’s basically the carburetor, the part that throws the fuel in when you stand on the loud pedal. In the foreground is the PRL (pressure ratio limiter) and AFRC (air-fuel ratio controller) and together, these separate units are interconnected by a nest of hoses to control fuel delivery to the engine.
Now then, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all this mended so that next time K7 powers down the lake this most important part of her machinery is both present and fully functional… But what a monumental task that’s likely to be considering the outrageous mechanical complexity of these items coupled with the fact that all the tooling, expertise, spares and test facilities are pretty much extinct forty years on. Imagine if we applied for a grant to do this… they’d simply tell us it couldn’t be done.
The pump is almost finished.

But the problem is not rebuilding it – it’s getting it properly set up and calibrated. Nowadays multiple sensors would watch the engine parameters and let a computer figure it all out but this lot was built in an age before such luxuries. Hence it’s a nest of microscopic drillings, amplifier valves and diaphragms that push and pull, opening and closing ports and passageways to mechanically control fuel delivery. You may imagine how carefully such a system must be set up in order for it to work efficiently and to that end we’re talking to the handful of organizations who may still know how it should be done.
The rest of the boat is coming on in leaps and bounds too. The great thing about the team these days is that everyone knows exactly what they’re doing and work just breezes along.
Rob, for example, spent a Saturday setting up the remaining spar-box and drilling the hundreds of rivet holes needed to nail it down. It has to be within a millimetre because it picks up the outer skins and if it’s wrong, they will be too. Slapping a spar box into the gap between a pair of outriggers may not seem too much of a job but by the time it was accurately set up and checked in every way possible then the holes drilled and deburred finally followed by gluing and pinning a whole day had gone by.

Rob just soldiered on with quiet confidence while Mike set up and installed a replacement cockpit rail in similar fashion. Considering that it’s both curved and also had to be built wrong to get it right because of an error in the 1954 construction it was not a simple matter but it looks superb and is spot on in terms of fit and position.

John, meanwhile, has now completed the last of his ‘green beams’ so we can rivet the final floor section and get it finished.

That’s the lot. The ‘green beams’ have proven a huge success allowing us to keep the inner floors 100% original throughout the entire length of the boat. Bet you didn’t think that would happen... Again – John just gathered the tools he needed and without fuss or bother dropped a perfect set of beams on the ‘finished’ pile by tea time.

The sharp eyed will spot that there’s still a piece missing. That’s the bit John has just made the beams for. It’ll be on quick as you like.

Apart from three outriggers on this side that need a tweak because of where that big hole was bashed through the outer skin just aft of the spar the structure is complete. This side was by far the worst damaged. Because K7 rolled almost completely to the left before she crashed, the bodywork was flattened against the frame trapping the somewhat squashed outriggers behind the skins. On the other side, however, water blasted outwards and away from the frame shattering outriggers and skins alike and blowing them away into the lake where they remain to this day. That’s why you see so much green from F-15 forwards down the right hand side.

And virtually none on the left. The main hull is now a done deal and our engine is coming along nicely. We’ve high hopes of receiving official help from those aerospace companies who know how to mend K7’s original fuel system whilst in the meantime it’s not uncommon for me to go home covered in AVTUR. It’s not exactly romantic!

And finally – yes, it’s been a long while between updates this time. Hopefully it’ll not be so long next time but there is another option. We have a forum where you can ask all the questions you like and meet the team so why not join us there in the meantime?