Diary

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All text by Bill Smith (unless otherwise stated)

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March 2012

The carpark was full of cops when I arrived. I threw my backpack over my shoulder, grabbed my laptop and slammed the boot. The hotel reception was no different, it buzzed with excitement and police radios. Clearly something big was occurring yet there was nothing to see. One of the staff had written down a car number, an officer took it and ran past guests vying to tell of the stranger they’d glimpsed fleeing the scene. But no bloodied corpses nor bullet holes stitching the modern glass frontage were evident and yet there was certainly hell to pay over something.

“What’s happening here?” I asked, having confirmed my booking. The girl tried a nonplussed look in keeping with company policy. For professional purposes the riot squad in the hallway didn’t exist.

“You have wall to wall fitted cops…” I explained, stepping out of her line of sight in case she hadn’t noticed them.

“Oh, those.”

I waited patiently, not quite weighing over the credit card.

“There was a man,” she began hesitantly. “Outside the swimming pool looking through the glass with his phone, taking pictures, and a kiddies swimming lesson was going on, and he ran away.”

It all sounded rather sinister and now I could see why the cops were charging about despite there being no blood to slip in. It was only later in the evening that I discovered I’d actually witnessed the final straw in what was probably the worst day of some poor sod’s life.

You see, as the drama was buzzing around me, I’d heard a girl from the leisure club complaining that such events always happened on her shift and remember wondering at the time whether the bloke with the camera actually had a thing for cute blondes. Then, later on, she appeared behind the bar and as I was in need of a fresh pint I captured her and asked whether the child-raping paedophile had been caught and emasculated with a rusty hacksaw blade yet.

“It wasn’t how it seemed,” she said.

Well it never is, is it…

What really happened, it transpired, was that the poor bugger had reason to suppose that his girlfriend was sneaking about the hotel with another man. Now anyone with any sense would assume the missus and her new hero would enjoy a quick rumble in the bedroom followed by a post-coital sup of pinot in the bar so what you’d do is stick a baseball cap on your head, order a beer then sit by the door but not in full view so as to retain the element of surprise when they walked in – not peer through the swimming pool windows twiddling with your iPhone.

Anyway, that seems to be what he did so next thing is the cops have nabbed him and, for a moment at least, he’s right up there with Garry Glitter until, having suffered the indignity of having his phone thoroughly inspected inside and out, he was sent on his way with no more than a stern ticking off.

Now just how miserable would you feel later on picking at your takeaway with a fork knowing just what a crap day you’d had – especially if the girlfriend rocked up with an equally innocent explanation for why she’d been off the radar all afternoon? I had to howl with laughter yet ache with sorrow for the hapless individual.

It reminded me of the desperately unfortunate museologist who told me how K7’s accident was a snapshot in time witnessed by countless thousands and rebuilding it would destroy history – and the next day Cutty Sark burned to a crisp. Or that terminally stupid HLF officer who told me I couldn’t sack him unilaterally because I had to go consult all the other people who wanted to sack him too. I mean, who in their right mind would want to be sacked twice? It seems he did.

But that was then and this is now. So far as I know they’ve all moved into obscurity or been locked in secure units and I think we wrung as much beneficial change out of them as we were going to get some time ago so that’s that. The museologists seem to like us a little better these days and some of them are actually pretty cool but the HL-effers, pah!

And then a peculiar thing happened – I was invited to attend a HLF bash and hand out certificates to students who’d completed a course of some sort.

Who, me? The Yasser Arafat of the museum world…

In fact these days my chickens are growing fat from pecking over the patch in the garden where the hatchets are buried.

So with all this goodwill settling like snow and K7 being riveted back together at a rate of knots previously unseen, morale is at an all time high. We said a long time ago that one day everyone would be on the rivets and so it’s come to pass. What’s truly inspirational about our crew is that when it’s time to learn a new skill everyone simply picks up a new tool and cracks on to the usual standard without fuss or drama.

Something that happens often during all this assembly work is that you find yourself wrong way up in a confined space staring at a rivet wondering just how they managed to set it back in the fifties. It’s like crossing paths with the past and, having been working on the systems for a while now, there’s a question someone absolutely must have asked when faced with the new Orpheus.

“How are we going to start the damn thing?”

Those concerned with re-engining Bluebird for the 66 attempt had to contend with spannering a new lump into the space formerly occupied by the venerable Beryl but getting that going wasn’t a problem because it came with an electric starter and rowing alongside with a few batteries in the bilges and a set of jump leads was easy. But the Orph’ came with an air turbine starter that needed a great blast of air from a ground starting trolley and sticking one of those in a rowing boat was a different matter altogether. What to do?

As it happened there was one Orph’ powered machine with a self-contained air start system around at the same time, the Hunting 126 experimental aircraft. It used thrust ducted from the engine to blow high speed gas over the tops of the control surfaces giving it an extremely short takeoff run and exceptional low speed flight characteristics but this draining of thrust gave it poor performance when it was supposed to be going fast so it was not a great success generally to the extent that a second planned aircraft was never built so guess what… that left a spare set of start equipment on the shelf.

The kit was made by Lucas Rotax and in March 1966 the spare set was ‘borrowed’ by a certain Mr Campbell and never given back. Thirty-four years later we pulled the top off his dripping boat to get a look at what was left.

Not very good, is it. All that time at the bottom of the lake had completely knackered it.

(Pic by kind permission, W. Vanryn)

The entire start system hangs from the frame carrying those two spherical air flasks. It’s an elegant setup with so few moving parts you can count them on one hand, total self-containment and light enough that you can pick it up with the other, but there’s also a shocking amount of energy stored in those bottles that must be released in a controlled sort of way if you’re to avoid death or serious injury.

Fair enough, we were told that the fuel system might cause a small explosion, but at least we’d have a chance of running away, jumping in the lake or otherwise avoiding the imminent fireball if that lot went up but if a HP bottle exploded in your face it would be lights out without warning so we had to consider very carefully just what to do with such a badly corroded (to all appearances at least) bomb. Conserve or conserveer?

First thing’s first – take it apart to see what we were working with.

All the essentials are attached to the right-hand bottle by simply screwing them one onto the other like some weird, kid’s construction set but mending that lot was secondary to having somewhere to store the air in the first place so the bottles came under scrutiny first.

Outwardly they were in excellent condition and internal inspection with a boroscope revealed that the right-hand one was good inside too with no water ingress and only a light dusting of surface rust but the outside had pitted here and there. We sought the advice of a specialist who told us that carrying out hot work on the bottle was permissible so long as we used the correct TIG rods. The ones selected are for making welds on high pressure gas pipes so we had the bottle blasted, ground out the pits and filled them.

With that done we polished the surface.

And that was that bottle good to go – to the untrained eye at least – but that’s not the issue when dealing with HP air. Honestly, it’s lethal stuff so we took the repaired bottle to the local testing facility and had it blown to 3200psi, it’s old working pressure, not with air but with water.

Water is incompressible for our purposes so if the bottle fails you only get mildly splashed not blasted with shrapnel but the gauge stayed there quite happily for half the afternoon without losing any pressure or weeping a drop. We then imposed a new, max working pressure of 2000psi, which is more than enough for our purposes, then we went for a look at the other bottle.

It wasn’t good. The right-hand bottle carried the start equipment and the various valves did an excellent job of keeping it dry inside but the left was only for storage and the corroded fittings had let the lake in. Only to a depth of an inch or so but it was enough. The pitting on the outside was much deeper too so we did the only sensible thing and cut the bottle in half. It sounds drastic but it was made in two halves to begin with then welded together so all we did was take the weld off to reduce it to its component parts.

The damage didn’t cut deeply into the metal but it gave the inside surface a pitted finish and cracks like to grow from any sort of irregular surface. We ground the metal back a millimetre or so in one-inch squares then built it up again and polished the interior. It took an absolute age!

Every last blemish was ground out, repaired then polished inside and out and that is bloody hard steel!

Then the bottle was given a 45 degree weld-prep around both halves, tacked together and purged with pure argon before being welded in three, non-stop passes to put the root of the weld in, then to fill the weld-prep level with the outside of the bottle and finally to cap over the top for maximum strength.

That amounted to twelve feet of continuous weld and once complete the second bottle easily sailed through its hydraulic test and is arguably now the better of the two. So now we had reliable air storage – so far so good – next we needed something to hang it all from. At least that was easy because the frame that mounts the start system is a straightforward lump of fabricated steel with no moving parts or the possibility of exploding, melting, running away with itself or any of the other undesirable things that many of the parts dealt with recently may like to do. It wasn’t in the first flush off youth, however.

Cockney Chris soon had it fettled, though, with some patches and welding and grinding while the rest of the crew did some equally clever metal grafting with the spiders that hold the bottles to the frame. Being thin steel they didn’t come out of the whole crash, sink, fizz for thirty-odd years, thing very well.

But they fixed up nicely and we even saved the original rubber that protected the steel clamps from the steel bottle.

Believe it or not, the above is mostly original. As is this little lot.

That’s the bulk of the start system back together and it’s all the little awkward bits from here. The devil is in the detail, as they say, especially when you want the detail to safely handle HP air.

First of the downstream widgets is an air valve that basically opens the right-hand bottle to the outside world at the push of a button while the two bottles are equalised by a hose that runs under the engine inlet trunk.

The main valve has what’s known as a balanced piston inside. The piston has tank pressure either side of a seal midway along its length so there’s no tendency for the air pressure to push it one way or the other, then there’s a spring to hold it closed against a seat so no air can escape to the outside. But suddenly release the pressure from the back half of the piston and now you have tank pressure at the front versus only the spring at the back so the spring loses and the piston flies backwards allowing the air a bid for freedom. The nose of the piston is shaped such that aerodynamic forces keep it held firmly out of the way once the compressed air starts to move.

Restore tank pressure behind the piston and now the piston is balanced again leaving the spring in charge so the valve slams shut. As with the fuel pump, a simple concept that now only has to be made to work safely and reliably. Uh-huh… easy, is this conserveering.

The valve was very sorry for itself with extensive corrosion due to it being in the proximity of so many different metals and, indeed, being made of so many different metals itself. There was some hope, however because the upstream end of the piston was immaculate as it had kept the water out of the bottle all that time so maybe the rest of it had survived.

Unfortunately it took a hydraulic press to get it out and that says it all – shame.

Once stripped, the valve body was thoroughly blasted to see exactly what was left – not a lot, as it happened.

But notice that some of it has already been repaired because it welded nicely. Sometimes it was necessary to chase the corrosion down the grain of the metal. It shows in the weld pool as a black spot so what you do is stop and dig it out with a die-grinder then arc-up again until the spot reappears, or not, and you continue this process until nothing but a glistening pool of liquid aluminium appears at the bottom – then you fill it up again.

First it was given a lot of reconstructive surgery followed by as many hours of cosmetic work.

From there it went to the workshops of Algernon Precision Engineering here on Tyneside to have its guts made to work again. The piston was dead and the bore was corroded too so it was taken 0.5mm oversize and a new piston machined to suit.

Old piston top, new one beneath with both laid on the drawing so you can see where it goes. That got the bulk of the main valve back into operation because the spring was immaculate and was reused – what next?

Remember how the balanced piston thing worked, with air released from behind the o-ring seal that you can see halfway along the piston? That’s done by what was referred to back in the day as a ‘piggyback valve’.

Here it is and note the part number. M4901 EXP.1

This, I am told, refers to an experimental part so it was certainly worth trying to bring it back to life in the interests of originality. It works by means of a solenoid, beneath that black cap gripped by fingertips at the left, that pushes a stainless steel shuttle a tiny distance measured in thousandths of an inch to unseat one valve and firmly seat another. The shuttle has sealing faces along its length and when at rest it allows tank pressure to pass straight through to balance the pressure either side of the main piston. But push the start button and the shuttle closes off the space forward of the piston and vents the aft space to atmosphere. It’s a really close-tolerance part that we were told we’d never get going again.

Its internals seemed not too bad but the main casting had corrosion on the o-ring seats so we shelved it for the time being and went in search of a replacement on the basis that we had problems to solve on the main valve that might mask problems on the piggyback valve and vice-versa were we to try mending them simultaneously.

We knew that both evolved into the rapid start system on the V-Bomber force so a scratch around inside a Vulcan solved the problem…

There you go – a genuine M4901. A little grubby maybe but in full working order so we could use it to test the main valve when the time came but we had an outstanding issue with the main valve in that it contained a second, smaller valve designed to lift and at least warn anyone nearby to dive for cover should the pressure in the bottles go critical. To this day we’ve not fathomed out exactly why it’s designed as it is so all we could do was try to put it back as it was.

It’s a stack of tiny parts including needle valves and seats and springs and o-rings and something made of nylon that we melted whilst trying to get the thing apart and then had no hope of identifying – dammit!

Now around this time I received another of those mails from somewhere deep in the heart of a massive corporation from a man at his desk who wanted to help, one of those mails that suddenly changes the whole landscape. You see, ’til now, we’d had no real information about the parts of our system. Google, Lucas-Rotax and you’ll see what I mean, it just evaporated without a trace, but like the rest of British engineering it’s not gone far because it’d been absorbed by the mighty Goodrich Corporation and become part of Goodrich Power Systems.

Here, I was soon to discover, everything we could ever wish for was stashed away in their archives. Don’t you just love aerospace…

The problem was the lawyers. In principle the company was prepared to help but it took a while to get a disclaimer written up by the legal-eagles to the effect that if we exploded something they’d supplied drawings for we were firmly on our own. Being on our own is nothing new and being a diver I had a very healthy respect for the dangers of HP air so a deal was done and we presently acquired some archive info. An especially arduous task for the lady in the print room who uncomplainingly pulled dusty old drawings every time I asked then scanned and entered them into the modern system so they could be e-mailed. I sent her a nice bouquet of flowers to say thanks though I suspect a shiny, new car would possibly have been more apt. But could we work out what the nylon whatnot was that had melted over everything? Not a chance.

Around this time we also started swapping notes with Bill Vanryn.

Bill is a splendid gentleman of ninety-something who can quote part numbers, material spec’s, test procedures – you name it – and who also has a wealth of notes and data going back forty-odd years. His memory is incredible. That pic’ was taken in 2001, by the way. He’s also the engineer who was sent from Lucas-Rotax in 1966 to install and commission the air start system on K7.

Unfortunately, though, Bill couldn’t remember what had had nylon in it right at the bottom of the relief valve either. Barry and I had a crack at it next by laying out the parts and comparing them to the GA (general arrangement) drawing we had of the valve but its method of operation remained a mystery so we couldn’t second guess what might be at the bottom though Barry got the closest, as you might expect.

So we went back to Goodrich and slowly worked through drawing after drawing getting further and further into the sub-assemblies thanks to the dedication of the lady in the print room until weeks later when, at last, an innocuous little drawing turned up entitled ‘seat and cap assembly’. Eureka! We’d found it. It was a tiny nylon seat for a needle valve set in a stainless cup with an o-ring but without it we couldn’t keep the air in and without knowing what it was supposed to look like we couldn’t make a new one. I immediately mailed the info to Barry and Bill. Barry called to say he’d make one straight away. Bill suggested Barry didn’t bother because he had a couple in his tool box from 1966 that he’d pop in the post. Would you believe it!

And with that we completed the main valve or at least we had all of it in the same place but it wasn’t tested. We’d leave that until we’d connected up the other bottle as this meant a similar process and another, identical pressure relief valve. We stripped and cleaned the fitting from the other bottle.

You can see how the corrosion has struck along the grain of the casting and the sad fact is that the metal simply isn’t as good as what we’d expect today. It’s full of inclusions and impurities and the casting process just wasn’t up to scratch either so at least when we replace what’s been lost we know it’s quality material that’s taking its place. Once rebuilt and machined all it needed was the usual cosmetic fettling to make it look the part.

In actual fact this part failed its testing when a tiny leak appeared on its surface at 1500psi. Once the pressure was drained down and the fitting removed, fluorescent dye was applied to the outside followed by a black light shone into the interior to reveal where the dye had struck through a pore in the body of the casting. It was soon ground out and closed once and for all. We like to be thorough on this job…

Almost there, a little final finishing with needle files wouldn’t go amiss but mechanically it’s great. Notice the T-shaped handle sticking out to the left. That’s attached to the pressure relief valve. The valve will either lift if the pressure in the bottles rises too high or you can pull on the handle and let some air out to be sure everything is working.

So now we have safe air storage and a reliable means of letting it off the leash but how to get air into it in suitable quantities and at the right pressure?

The system is filled through a charging valve that came out of the lake as crusty as everything else.

Here’s the valve during the stripdown in December 2005 with the dust cap still in place and below, back to its component parts for cleaning.

Below is the complete charging system. From the charging valve compressed air travels up a small-bore brass pipe to that silver cylinder mounted to the frame alongside the bottle. That’s a sintered-metal particle filter into the top of which is screwed a small, non-return valve so once the bottles are charged you can remove the charging hose and send your boat away down the lake.

The new fitting for charging was made from scratch by Barry.

From the non-return valve the air is then taken over the top of the bottle through a (new) rubber hose to a T-piece that screws into the main air valve. All the brass pipes are original with new fittings.

Here we are – the complete system back together, (airtight to only 500psi at this stage) but it works.

It’s not really complete… in fact what is arguably the most important piece is still missing because there’s no use in blowing tank pressure into the start turbine – you’d either over-speed it or damage it or both so the output pressure must be regulated and this is the beastie that did the job.

The PRV (pressure reducing valve) is the shiny silver bit at the bottom, the upper item is a brass block used to connect the PRV to a flexi hose leading to the engine. The lump sticking out the left of the brass block is an over-pressure relief device called a bursting disc – basically a thin, domed disc made of nickel only four thousandths of an inch thick designed to burst if things get out of hand and release the air safely.

But getting back to the PRV, which was mint inside and came apart easily as it’s made of stainless and bronze…

The gubbins on the right fits inside that on the left. Top is a piston that runs in a ported sleeve and the output pressure is dependent on how high the piston rides within the sleeve and therefore how many ports it uncovers. Once again very simple in principle but then we hit another problem because the piston is controlled by a slave valve on the top that turned out to be completely and utterly FUBAR.

It doesn’t look too bad from here but unfortunately its tiny interior spaces had filled with corrosion product and jammed everything solidly with no hope of stripping it down. The big culprit was a hydroformed copper bellows with a convoluted outer surface that ended up thoroughly encapsulated in expanding oxides trapping behind it an arrangement of tiny parts that normally shuttle back and forth minuscule distances opening and closing valves to control the larger piston below. After all kinds of efforts we concluded that the only way to get in there was with a die-grinder.

That did the trick and you see it here with the corrosion product cleaned away; just imagine trying to draw that copper bellows out with what amounted to concrete cast around it. So from there it was a fairly simple job for our mates at Algernon Precision to reverse-engineer the casing and make us a new one.

Richie here is a bit of a whiz on his milling machine as you can see.

Once complete the whole system was given a thorough going over by Barry to sleeve an old thread here and there where doubt remained about the stresses involved and have a crack at getting the original Piggyback valve working. And get it working he did but it’s still throwing the occasional problem our way so it remains a work in progress – we’ll get it.

Not so the little contents gauge that allowed Donald and his team to get a look at how much air was aboard as they shivered and battled with a recalcitrant machine though the winter of 66. It’s almost entirely made of brass so Barry had no problems refurbishing it and making a new pointer. Good as new.

Bit by bit we assembled the refurbished parts then mounted the system to the engine in its correct relative position. It looks quite impressive and, if I may say so, very 1966.

If you look to the right you can see our HP compressor too. Considering the amount of careful testing necessary to bring this system back to safe working condition we could see no practical way of carrying enough air into the building already compressed in cylinders so we acquired a compressor to charge the start bottles on demand with breathing quality air. We also added a brand new precision regulator so there’s no chance of the pressure getting out of hand, and a tacho indicator to see how fast the engine is spinning – but one thing at a time.

First we had to calibrate the PRV so we had enough air to spin the start turbine without over-speeding so we machined up a test nozzle to the original Lucas-Rotax specifications and stuck it firmly on the end of six feet of one-inch bore hydraulic pipe as per the instructions.

The idea being that it accurately simulates the back-pressure exerted by the start turbine so if you get accurate data with the nozzle fitted your starter is going to work properly too.

Now then… the spec’ also calls for a 0-300psi pressure gauge but we reckoned we could do better than that and soon a bloke called Peter arrived with a high speed pressure transducer and a laptop.

It all looked very Formula-1 and we ran dozens of dead cranking cycles on the engine generating pretty graphs each time until it became apparent that we had two problems.

Fisrt – the tacho indicator wasn’t reading correctly, mainly because of the explosive nature of the engine start cycle. The gauge contains a small, three-phase motor that drags an induction cup around to move the needle and this motor is powered by a similarly small generator driven by the engine gearbox. The two are directly connected by a wire, the idea being that your RPM indication is completely independent of any other wiring in your plane. The problem is that for the indicator to properly represent engine RPM both motor and generator must be in phase with one another and that’s simple enough when you’re cruising about the sky gently spooling your engine up and down but with the air-start system it spools up so violently that it hits start speed in about four seconds then spools down again by which time the indicator hasn’t even begun to catch up. It’d be like Linford Christie racing Mother Theresa to the corner shop and back.

We got around this by mounting a laser tacho on a tripod and aiming it up the back end at a piece of reflective tape stuck to one of the turbine blades. It only gave an accurate reading if the laser was pointed at the strip when the go-button was pressed otherwise it counted every blade until the strip came around and gave a reading of a zillion revs per minute but once we’d sussed it, it gave very accurate, real-time readings. There was also a compatibility issue with this combination of engine and indicator that we had to fix but that’s another story.

The second major problem was that no matter what we tried we couldn’t get the system to deliver the required 250psi at the test nozzle. It was all out of ideas at only 150psi and, worse still, the pressure decayed over time so by the time the engine was going fast, the air was going slow – we’re talking in fractions of a second here, by the way. We fiddled with everything we could think of but nothing seemed to help so, assuming we’d done something wrong in the reverse-engineering of the PRV, we left the problem on the shelf for later and set about the difficulties of getting the system to actually spin the engine.

And herein lay yet another problem because the Orph’101 uses a different start turbine to the 701 where air is delivered 90 degrees away from where all our hardware wanted to send it. Looking at the front of the engine, the 701 starter takes in air at the 9.00 o’clock position whereas it’s only 6.00 o’clock for the 101 so Cockney Chris and I spent an entire Saturday making the most impossible piece of ductwork to not only deliver the air quarter of a circle away but also to fit inside the original inlet bullet, which is so snug you’ll find more spare space inside Wayne Sleep’s underwear.

Even with all our care and attention we still had problems here too. You see, apart from our new piece of ductwork, the plumbing is integral to the inlet bullet and O-rings kept blowing out where we couldn’t see them and we couldn’t work out why so we made up a few bits and bobs (namely that gubbins at the right-hand end of the pipe that turns everything through 45º) to allow us to operate the starter in an unclothed state. By the way, the above pic’ was taken with the engine upside down.

Many hours were spent chasing and eradicating air leaks until at last we could leave the system charged to 1500psi for days on end without the pressure dropping. Pretty impressive, eh.

But would it work?

Turn your speakers up LOUD

Oh it works all right! And that’s only with 150psi flowing through its veins and that’s something that continued to puzzle us. Why wouldn’t it crank up to the 250psi every piece of documentation we could find, including the Rolls-Royce manual for the Orph’ and bundles of Lucas-Rotax stuff, said we should be seeing?

The answer came from an unexpected angle. Remember that our valves and widgets eventually evolved into the V-bomber rapid start system? Well that was one lot of data we obtained relatively easily having ‘borrowed’ a few Vulcan bits and amongst the various drawings and notes was reference to an ‘ITP’ or ‘Inspection and Test Procedure’. It was written down as a document number with ITP as the prefix followed by the part number of the valve in question so I took a gamble and requested a document I wasn’t even sure existed with ITP at the start followed by the part number of our experimental valve.

They found it, only four pages long, but it was there and partway through it mentions a ‘metering orifice’. Now I’d long suspected that the PRV piston wasn’t floating high enough in its cylinder so not enough ports were being uncovered to allow the required airflow but I had no idea why this should be, but with those two words the answer landed like a fat lass falling off her ice skates.

The drawing was swiftly dug out.

Essentially what happens is that some of the air in that little slave valve with the copper bellows is bled to atmosphere through the metering orifice so the pressure it allows through the main valve is moved up a step in proportion to orifice size. Simple – and this also explains why the pressure in the system was decaying, because it was rapidly equalising across the piston in the slave valve and stopping it from working. With a constant, controlled leak on one side of the piston it can never equalise. Problem solved. Now all we had to do was drill a small hole in a blanking plug we’d assumed was solid, but wasn’t, and have another go. Unfortunately, though, by the time this discovery was made we’d flopped the engine the wrong way up to install the fuel system and all the air hoses were disconnected so we’re going to have to wait awhile for the next opportunity to blow ourselves to kingdom come… I’ll wager now that the fancy duct will not make it. It’ll explode in a shower of shrapnel or blow itself across the workshop in a horribly deformed mess but one thing seems fairly certain, it’ll not take an extra 100psi. Just as well then that Checkie has remoted the start switch (though I thought 125 metres was excessive even for what we’re working with) and we’ll be able to blow things up from the relative safety of the next room. That duct will most likely emerge rebuilt in stainless but we’ll see.

Then, just like the rest of this job, nothing about the fuel system gave in easily. The difficulty this time is that the 701 kit, as recovered from the lake and so meticulously rebuilt by Aero Engine Controls, was never meant to be bolted to a 101 Orph’ so the bloody thing doesn’t fit! It’s not even close.

Take the filter bowl, for example.

This is Donald’s original and it provides the foundation for the whole installation by bolting solidly to the underside of the compressor casing thereby providing a mounting for the other modules – except it won’t bolt to a 101.

The pump, on the other hand, spanners into place without fuss and was the first and last part to give in so easily.

To make the filter fit we had to lower the little turret on the casing as far as the Sharpie line then drill the hole a little deeper and fit a new helicoil so we could fasten down an adaptor plate.

Warning!

Those of an aerospace disposition should stop reading now.

There’s no arguing where the filter and pump go with relation to one another because the pipes that connect the two are solid, sealed with o-rings and must be properly aligned. The adaptor plate, seen below in its earliest guise, solved the problems of mounting the filter.

From there we were able to mount the CCU.

And here too, because this is a non-standard installation, we added some extra meat in the form of a stainless bracket to support the outer end of the unit using a redundant fixing on the CCU itself.

That’ll stop it falling off. From here all we had to do was mount up the AFRC, PRC and all those other acronyms so a smart, aluminium bracket was grown from a few scraps of 3mm H22…

…and the rest of the goodies were hung from the engine.

All that remains is to connect up all the hoses to make it work – there’s plenty of those – and in the meantime our chief in charge of electrickery, Checkie Rob, has made a panel for test running our various assorted engines. We’re ever mindful that we’re under the watchful eye of the aerospace community and we’re very respectful of their ways so we do everything by the book.

Another thing Checkie’s organised is a tri-axial accelerometer to measure vibration on the fuel system in three planes because it’s not mounted as intended and rather than assume it won’t drop into the bilges it would be more professional to have a bunch of data to prove the point.

Elsewhere on the machine we’ve been tin-bashing like crazy. The air intake is as good an example as any and I’m pleased to report that it’s finally nearing completion.

Note the shiny, thickened inlet lips. They were an absolute nightmare to get right. Making new ones would have taken all of an afternoon but instead we split the originals into pieces and carefully reworked the material back from whence it came – they’re a really nice job now. In actual fact, thickening the lips seems not to have been the aim at all. What they were really trying to do, so far as we can tell, was prevent the inner skin of the duct separating from the original lip by riveting a capping over the top.

Those lips are a perfect example of why we can never answer the ‘when will it be finished’ question. How were we to know they’d occupy us for four weeks? I say it again – do you want it now or do you want it right?

The plates pinned into the throats are a work in progress too. After much study of the blanks used to keep stuff out of the engine we reached the conclusion that they were actually made of two slabs of reasonably heavy tin with a foam filling squeezed out a couple of inches all the way around. This foam was clad with some sort of canvas, the plates fitted with a pair of cheap sash handles and the whole lot slapped with more yellow paint than Gauguin could get through in an afternoon. The set up also included the means to bolt them in securely for long periods of storage or transport or whatever so Mike has built those bits too. Unfortunately, though, once the new lips were fitted, historical pic’s show that Donald’s original blanks didn’t fit anymore so ours have been tweaked accordingly in case little oiks visiting the museum find those openings just too tempting when disposing of their sweetie wrappers. The new ones will be snug as can be and firmly fastened too.

As you might imagine, weight saving is everything once you get this far forward but strength is vital too and it seems the Norris Bro’s. sailed just a little too close to the wind with their original design. We’ve made a few changes based on the reasons for the earlier failures, all of which can be seen in the fixes applied to the original ductwork, so with a little luck ours won’t break so easily.

Things aren’t so critical at the other end, however, where much of our effort has been going lately. The tail cover lay about gently fizzing for a long time until we eventually got around to sorting it towards the end of last year. It was a messy thing to dismantle but nothing we’re not used to. Rob and the boys did a fine job of tearing it down.

Next it was meticulously stripped of every trace of paint and corrosion by Novie and the Coniston Connection before the whole crew threw themselves into putting it back together again.

First it was built on a tool so we could access every crevice to build the necessary doublers but the tool doesn’t properly represent the lower half of the boat so we’d have been daft to not do a second round of fettling on the hull itself.

We were vindicated in doing this because the off-tool part simply didn’t fit anymore and we had to modify a number of new parts to get all the fixing bolts aligned and get it fastened down without building a world of residual stress into it.

I remember a story told to me by some of the engineers who’d worked on the first Panavia Tornados. They built the sections on the jigs and were all very pleased with the result but once released the parts sprung so badly that they needed hydraulics to get them back on again for the necessary mod’s.

With this heeded we elected to build the tail cover on the boat after Bettablast had painted everything to the usual standard and, though it’s tricky crawling about in there, at least we know it’s going to fit when we’re done.

Normal rules apply – green for new, silver for original and, as you can see, there’s not a lot of green in there and what there is weighs a scant six kilos so we can offset that by leaving out a single lead ingot should we need to but in reality this small addition so far aft will help rather than hinder.

With its fresh surface coating, new rivets and the astonishing adhesive properties of choccie sauce, not to mention the additional strength conferred by the new doublers, it’s well on the way to being stronger than it ever was and very proud of it we are too. It’s also been a great learning experience and the processes for drilling, deburring, removal for choccying then refitting ahead of a rivet team are slick as can be now so the logical progression was to erect the engine cover in the same way.

There’s more of it, certainly, but it’s just more of the same so anyone with a pressing desire to learn to be a riveter is more that welcome to give us a shout.

Next on the list, apart from the several thousands of rivets needed to hold things together, we have some bits to add to the intakes, namely the duct liners and the sealing rings around the back where it attaches to the engine so we’ll be on with those shortly. And we have the rest of the fuel system to plumb together and the air system to work up to its correct delivery pressure. We’re also in comm’s with several companies about producing our new planing wedges for the sponsons. They have to be just right or nothing will work when we get back to the water so there’s still plenty to go at. Hopefully we’ll get to do a few extra updates and pop out a DVD or two because it’s been a while so until next time, thanks for your ongoing support and don’t forget to keep watching.

Nov 2011

I asked a taxi driver the other night why the ball chasing fraternity wait for dark nights and crap weather to indulge their passion. I’ve been asking the same question for years without any satisfactory answer. It’s too hot in the summer, I’m often told, which begs the question why cricketists wear jumpers and long pants. It’s tradition, etc. etc. but not until now did anyone ever explain that chasing a ball in the summer would conflict with the International Champion’s World Cup Challenge League Cup or whatever it’s called and, though some Russian and Norwegian teams do wait for the snow to melt, it ruins their match-fitness at the start of the International Champion’s World Cup Challenge League Cup and, as the England team is made exclusively of English lads (how was I to know that?), it may actually be too hot for them after all.

The answer I’d sought for years, and there it was – brilliant! which just goes to show that if you keep asking you’ll get there in the end.

On Friday gone (18^th November 2011) the team finally raised a pint late in the evening and thought, that’s a job well done and everyone is happy. Continuing to ask and not taking ‘no’ for an answer figured highly in the reason why and at last the relaxation would come. But it didn’t, because a two-year project within a project may have finally been over with a fantastic result but the mental expenditure that evening was massive and coming down took a little longer. It was all to do with Bluebird’s fuel system.

What happened is this. The bit of the engine you see, that big tube with a fan up the middle, is the part that actually does the work but it’s a difficult thing to tame with the potential to spew oodles of heat and energy until it explodes or melts so control is everything. To keep it in check and place the pilot in charge there’s a complicated control system bolted to the underside that feeds the beast, or not, depending on what the pilot asks for.

So far as we can tell, Donald only ever had one such system despite having two engines so it was on the boat through the whole campaign of 66/67 and eventually landed on the lakebed with everything else. It was this system that acted on Donald’s command and poured kerosene into the Orph’ that fateful morning and we wanted it to do so again on the finished machine should British engineering still be capable of such a thing – a seriously ambitious ask.

On the one hand it was a complex piece of machinery that would not take well to neglect and water ingress but on the other its interior remained mostly full of pure jetfuel whilst the outside was smothered in anaerobic mud. Though badly wounded it wasn’t quite dead…

First thing was to find out just exactly what we had so the rebuild manual was acquired from Rolls-Royce who, of course, don’t support legacy engines in any way and could not help at all but if no one wanted these obsolete manuals they were destined for the skip… Reading it in bed was like propping a tombstone on my chest but night after night I waded through it until at last I’d worked out what all the bits did. Sort of.

Soon we knew two things. Firstly, the system breaks down into a number of discreet parts, each performing its own function not all of which are strictly necessary for ground-running so that was encouraging and, secondly, it was way too complicated for us to even think about mending in-house so outside help was needed if we were to stand an earthly chance.

Having reached some basic conclusions, early research said forget the big boys, they’ll not give you the time of day. Best speak with the industrial gas-turbine world who at least aren’t burdened with the paranoia that surrounds anything that has to fly. The reasoning was sound but no matter what we tried all roads led back to a tiny number of specialist facilities that handled these parts on behalf of the entire planet.

One I tried made interested noises as I reeled off the Donald Campbell, Bluebird spiel and I was quickly passed upwards through an increasingly enthusiastic hierarchy repeating my request as I climbed until, at last, I crested the summit to find it ruled by a jobsworth with whom the Donald Campbell story didn’t work at all and who told me that the antiquated junk I had to offer was no longer supported and therefore I hadn’t a hope. I must point out that he exhibited the professionalism that typifies the upper reaches of the aerospace industry; it’s just that duty he did very well but what was needed here was something way beyond the call.

At that point it would have been so easy to consign the fuel system to the museum and use another because we’ve oodles of pumps and other stuff. After all, we’ve been collecting spares since 2001 but that felt too much like giving up. Maybe we could rebuild it in-house after all… Out came the manuals again and, after a second round of study, the decision was taken to do some investigative surgery to assess the damage.

The filter bowl was easy.

It’s upside down here because it hangs off the underside of the engine normally. Fuel comes in through that severed hose upper-left and out again through the metal tube at the bottom having passed through a filter. There’s a LP warning switch sticking out lower-right with its electrical connector facing upwards. Inside, the filter was in a clean condition with only a small amount of water staining.

It all bode well for the components further upstream and the filter manufacturer still exists today though they don’t seem to list this precise element any more – bet they can make one though.

Next in line lies the fuel pump and we hoped the water hadn’t got that far. It turned smoothly and felt mechanically sound but it was not to be.

Despite the internals generally being in good condition the water had got in and the disaster was laid bare immediately the end casing came off.

The staining was only light but these machines are exceptionally intolerant of any imperfection so the game was over so far as running it again without a rebuild was concerned.

This is a spherically-ground bearing face on which seven small pistons ride round and round like a merry-go-round, or at least it used to be. It’s called a cam plate and the parts of the pistons that rub on the cam plate are called slippers and those circles on its face are where the slippers festered against the face for forty years. The cam plate rocks like a see-saw (lots of children’s play park analogies going on here) on those journals you see in the one o’clock and seven o’clock positions to increase or decrease the pump stroke and thereby govern the amount of fuel shifted but the face should be mirror smooth otherwise it will heat up and wear itself out along with the slippers in very short order. It’s all lubricated by the fuel that it pumps, you see, and it’s not a great lubricant; hence the mirror finish. The slippers look like this.

7

This is actually the complete pump rotor assembly and you can see the pistons below the slippers. There’s also a water damaged bearing band around the bottom that runs in a carbon bearing on a thin film of Avtur. That wouldn’t last five minutes either because the carbon bearing includes lead and other metals that heat up and melt rapidly if the bearing band isn’t perfect, then the whole thing fails in the most dramatic way. Inside each piston is a spring to force it up its bore against the cam plate as the rotor spins, drawing fuel through an open port beneath, syringe-like, after which it’s immediately pushed back down by the canted over cam plate forcing the fuel back out through a different port as it goes. It’s a brilliantly simple concept but the engineering to make it work reliably is somewhat more involved. Even the springs are an adventure – but more of those in a while.

The rest of the pump is devoted to controlling itself because otherwise it would enter a self-destructive spiral. With rotor speed being directly proportional to engine speed the faster the engine turned the more fuel it would pump into the combustors and you can guess how that would end. Therefore there’s another part of the pump that exists purely to govern itself. It generates its own pressure, servo pressure, which has only one purpose, to push on a piston that de-strokes the pump and accurately managing servo pressure is the Holy Grail of not blowing yourself up!  The way it works is that dumping servo pressure calms the engine down, the theory being that all your control system has to do is let the servo pressure go at the critical moment and you’ll not end up picking red hot fragments of engine casing out of your body..

This is the servo piston and rod and, as you may imagine, the lip seal around it isn’t available at your local Bristol Siddeley stockist. And that’s only a tiny part of the problem. Look to the right and you can see that something has gone rusty. That’s called an amplifier valve, or ‘amp-valve’ for short and it helps control the pressure either side of the piston. It’s a really trick design that uses what amounts to half a ball bearing with a ground, flat face swivelling in a hemispherical cup to press squarely over a small hole in a thing called an orifice plate to cut off the flow of kerosene from beneath. The cup is held in the grip of four tiny leaf springs to be sure it has no fulcrum position so the flat of the half-ball always lands flat against the orifice plate to form a good seal and when you read the book it soon becomes damned obvious that setting it up is well beyond what can be done on the average kitchen worktop.

From here things only get worse because the pump is relatively straightforward in what it does – making pump and servo pressure and that’s about it – but the CCU (Combined Control Unit), on the other hand, lies at the heart of the system and basically runs the show. It takes fuel from the pump and shares it out in two ways. Some is distributed to the burners at constant pressure to keep the fire going while a second circuit is controlled by a throttle valve so the engine can be made to spool up and down as required. Other modules in the control loop are also tapped into it as fuel pressure provides opposing forces to springs and diaphragms all over the place. Then there’s the barometric pressure control unit stuck to the CCU like a conjoined twin where, on an aircraft at least, it spends its time watching the compressor inlet pressure so it knows what it’s doing whilst messing with your servo pressure and the fuel delivery rate depending on how high your plane is. Flying shouldn’t be much of a concern in our case but the BPC still has to be calibrated if only to effectively remove it from the control loop and ensure it has no ill effects on the big picture.

There’s a thing down there called a pressure ratio limiter too… its job is to keep an eye on the pressure in the front of the engine because as your plane flies higher the air gets colder and thinner and the ram effect and high compressor speeds begin to upset the ratio between the pressure in the compressor and that in the hot end. It can get too high and heat up the compressor – something you don’t want if you don’t want your engine to give up prematurely. Or it can get too low and your engine can belch fire in the wrong direction. Either of the above might befall you if the PRL didn’t bleed away some more servo pressure at the crucial moment.

We’re not going flying but no matter, the pressures have to be right for ground running too so at least with the PRL working and calibrated we’re safe in knowing that we’re not going to have problems and another box is ticked. Sounds most awfully complicated, doesn’t it.

Well it is, because next you have the air/fuel ratio controller and the pressure ratio switch. The AFRC again watches the compressor pressures but this member of the ensemble is devoted to keeping things in check when you slam the throttle open. What you don’t want is to throw a big slug of fuel into the engine only to have it accelerate away like a runaway train and blow its own fire out so the AFRC fiddles with the servo pressure just like everything else to make the engine spin up without drama no matter how hard you hit the loud pedal. Of course, you really ought to have the PRL in the loop while all of this is going on if you’re to do the job properly. Oh, and let’s not forget the pressure ratio switch. OK, it’s another altitude compensating thingamabob but who knows what horrible effects it might have if not working properly on the ground. Essentially what it does is use a barometric capsule to close a valve and introduce a step in the control curve of the AFRC when a certain altitude and therefore engine intake pressure is reached so you still won’t blow the fire out even if you slam the throttle open at a zillion feet.

Right, there’ll be a test later so have you got all that?

OK – so now maybe you can appreciate that what you don’t do next is marinate the whole system in a mixture of mud, kerosene and fresh water for three and a half decades then drain and store in a dry place for another ten years before declaring,

‘It’ll fix’.

Rachel had a quick read of the above at this point and added the following.

*

(Any Bluebird widows, Rule 1: learn the jargon then repeat the three last words of every sentence and nod in appropriate places. It has worked for me for 11 or so years!)

*

Thank you for that – may we move on?

The system is an intricate hydro-mechanical computer that makes Babbage’s Difference Engine look like an abacus and has so many close tolerance and, let’s face it, obsolete parts that it really was going to take something special to get it going again but who to turn to? We thought we’d start small so as not to seem too frightening and the pump was chosen as a place to begin.

What happened once we’d abandoned the industrial gas turbine world and gone back to aviation is that we’d be told, go talk to such and such, with the rider that those recommended either wouldn’t touch it or it would cost the earth. In this instance I tended to say let me worry about that and so by this process we were relentlessly shepherded to the door of Goodrich in Birmingham. The word was that if mending our pump was possible only they could do it – but they never would…

Now then, companies of such stature rarely grant an audience to commoners like us because random members of the public do not, as a general rule, rock up with a heap of junk wanting it mended so a stranger on the phone who doesn’t speak fluent aerospace faces something of an uphill struggle.

Add to that the number of aeroplane nutters attempting to take to the skies in something quite rightly grounded at the end of the Cold War and the path to getting your pump mended becomes properly treacherous.

Having gained some understanding of the obstacles in our way a plan was needed and a multi-pronged one at that. First of all it seemed disrespectful to show up with a muddy box of broken engine parts asking for a fix so the very least we could do was get them clean. Over several weeks each module was prized apart, scrubbed and sizzled in the ultrasound bath, dried, then threads were lightly oiled and everything loosely reassembled. It still looked like something Granddad brought back from the war but at least it wasn’t going to vomit rusty, kerosene flavoured mud-water over the silk tie of some aerospace suit during its begrudged inspection.

Here’s a cleaned up rocker arm from the BPC with one of those half-ball things in it. First time one of those came apart and the half-ball skipped away under the bench such a panic ensued until it was recaptured and put back. We got wise to them after that, which of course was the second part of the plan. In the unlikely even of us being given the time of day by a pump-whisperer the outcome might depend on our being able to head off some of the objections at the pass so as each unit came apart it was compared to the rebuild manual and the names of all the parts learned along with their function – if we could work it out, which wasn’t always possible.

We took plenty of pic’s and made notes about which bits were good and what had gone rotten, how far the water had penetrated and where we had donor parts of a similar type. All this would stand us in good stead were the pump gurus to say, the cordwangle that acts against the bogling-fork is bound to be seized, to which we could reply that actually the cordwangle is perfect because the water didn’t get that far and there’s a good bogling-fork in this donor unit from our stores… Conversely, were they to make the point that it really was knackered at least we’d have a chance of understanding why and accepting their verdict, but this didn’t solve the problem of who to ask.

And then came the real breakthrough. You see, around this time various parts of the problem were being mentioned on the forum and in the diary and in due course we were quietly contacted by someone who actually worked in the piston pump rebuild game. Someone who preferred to remain nameless but who had access to drawings and repair schemes for the various knackered bits and when we saw how complex the engineering was we realised just how far we were out of our depth. Mending the likes of this needs a factory and people who do this every day because no matter how much info you have there’s always the human factor and inevitably the complex setting up of the worzel sprocket will fall to Old Bob in the corner because he’s been doing them for thirty years and has a real feel for what’s to be done.

Up to this point we were still considering reworking the pump in-house and, though the drawing didn’t come with the message spelt out, what it seemed to say was, don’t even think about it. But what was more important was that at last we discovered where both the engineering excellence and the willingness to make this happen was to be found.

Remember when you had to fix your old Mini or Ford Escort because the winter just killed it and the alternator or starter motor had ‘Lucas’ written on it? Well those parts were made on a huge site in Birmingham that once employed thousands of people. Sadly it’s a weed-strewn wasteland nowadays with only the remnants of the car park and heaps of crushed bricks testifying mutely to the vast industry that used to be, but alongside what was once its big brother remains a slender, slightly art-deco building where Joseph Lucas used to make gas turbine machinery. Once the poor relation, it’s now all that remains of an empire but inside persists a miracle.

Behind that ageing façade you will find ‘British engineering’. The real deal, the thing that people shake their heads at sadly and say is gone forever. Oh how wrong they are. Don’t ever mourn the passing of British engineering because not only has it gone precisely nowhere, (Doesn’t Red Bull Racing hail from Milton Keynes or somewhere equally nondescript?), British engineering is fitter and healthier than it ever was. Behind those walls are things that would astonish you but it’s a commercially sensitive site so that’s all you’re getting.

But how to get inside the fancy offices and in front of the decision makers?

It took a bit of telephoning but eventually we were granted an audience with two of the top engineers.

“You realise you’re asking us to hand you the opportunity to blow yourself up.” The first said concernedly during our first ever conversation.

That’s a tough one to talk your way out of but the meeting went ahead and we discussed the finer details of the pump. I explained that we were trying to use as much original as possible and at some point the piston springs were mentioned. Thinking a spring is pretty much a spring I suggested that ours seemed OK and might live to fight another day (I was actually trying to make their job easier, cheaper and hopefully more palatable).

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you.” The other engineer said with a grin that masked the tiniest hint of dismay.

What could I say? He was right, because it turns out the springs are made of wire that has already been shot-peened to form a pre-stressed skin on the metal so the resulting spring will perform beyond what the metal is theoretically capable of doing and they’re so highly stressed that they really ought to be replaced at overhaul. The big problem if one breaks is with those ports mentioned earlier through which fuel is sucked up into the space under the pistons.

This is the port plate and it doesn’t turn and lives at the base of the rotor which, of course spins at high speeds to open and close the inlet and outlet ports beneath each piston one after another. The bottom of the rotor looks like this.

Now think about what would happen if a spring broke and dropped down one of those holes to where the spinning rotor and the fixed port plate meet. Yep – you got it – sliced and diced then pumped around the entire engine by the six good pistons. We agreed that new springs were a good idea. By the way, you can also see the damaged bearing band around the base of the rotor.

A similar question arose over the elastomers – the diaphragms in the pump, all of which looked OK.

They had to be replaced too because, contrary to my naïve belief that failure of one would merely cause our engine to stop, it turns out that quite the opposite was far more likely with fuel pressure winning the fight over servo pressure and the engine running away with itself until it exploded. We decided new elastomers were also an excellent idea.

By now we’d been joined by some of the bosses and the big company politics began to kick in. New parts were going to have to be re-manufactured to the original drawings and a test rig snaffled to test things and this would impact on production at the other plant where spanners were wielded and which subsidiary would handle the complex machining work and how could it all be snuck beneath the bean-counters’ radar?

“What would you like us to do?” I was asked eventually after we’d batted the problems back and forth for an hour or so.

Three plastic boxes containing our precious fuel system stood stacked at the side while the ravaged fuel pump held centre stage like some forlorn paperweight. It was time for the big pitch; this would likely be our one big chance.

“In a perfect world…” I began, “we’d like you to take these parts and give us them back rebuilt and working.”

No harm in aiming high but they didn’t look too enthused so I hurried on.

“If that’s not possible maybe we could have some good, second-hand spares like the ones Kearsly Airways gave us to rebuild our second LP boost pump and we’ll have a crack at it ourselves.”

There still didn’t seem too much excitement so I offered third place then shut up.

“If we could only have access to the technical data…”

Contemplative silence hung for a beat during which glances shot this way and that and then, to my unspeakable joy, I was invited to hand over the boxes. We were on a roll.

That was two years ago and since then the entire system has undergone a rebuild in keeping with the standards usually applied to military and commercial aircraft but with conserveering in mind. Wherever an original part could be saved it was cleaned and put back but the process wasn’t without its difficulties. The pump – being the easy part (relatively speaking) was dealt with swiftly and enthusiastically.

Before we knew it, it was on the rig spinning madly and moving fuel again after over forty years.

But the CCU was a different matter.

If the pump is the highly strung chef of the system then the CCU is maître d and perfect waiter rolled into one. It doesn’t spin, nor does it make a noise. Its actions are measured and precise and in that sense it’s way more sophisticated than any pump. Ours didn’t look pretty when we found it but, like the pump, most of it could be reused and soon it lay on the bench in a million bits awaiting painstaking reassembly.

It went back together beautifully too…

Shortly afterwards it was plumbed up in a thousand ways with juice flowing through its veins again.

Those test cell doors are closed when there’s something violent going on. They’re tough and keep the racket inside… I was once in the building when a main fuel pump for a big Trent engine was being put through its paces. The high pressure hose feeding it convulsed angrily, the ground shook and it screamed as though in agony. I remember wondering whether those big engines run silently and the noise you hear when one flies overhead is in fact the pump.

No such drama with our little CCU though but the prognosis was bad. Even on shutdown the throttle valve was leaking four and a half gallons of fuel an hour and this, apparently, was a total disaster.

I immediately had one of those, ‘don’t know what you’re talking about’ moments because I really couldn’t see the problem but I wasn’t daft enough to say so this time. After all, the engine wouldn’t run on such a small amount of fuel and if it wouldn’t run the fire would go out and the pump would stop and then it wouldn’t leak anything at all. Simple.

I nonchalantly dropped the question into a conversation months later to find out what all the fuss had been about to be told that it was all to do with start-up because the leaky CCU would let fuel into the engine immediately it started cranking and this would cause hot starts and overspeeding of the turbine and all sorts of undesirable symptoms so a new throttle valve was needed.

This was what stopped the job.

Yep… those minuscule scars meant that the throttle valve was knackered. Where it got interesting is that no one really knew what difference it would make, if any, because in the aerospace world even the tiniest imperfection would have had that part flung skipwards without so much as a backwards glance but as we were trying to save as much as possible and, seeing as the valve lies at the heart of the CCU and is the very one that fuelled Donald’s last gallant effort, it was worth finding out if it would perform despite the damage. But no joy, I’m afraid – it was scrap.

Nor was the decision to retire it taken lightly because all sorts of options were explored first. Everything from grinding the sleeve oversize and making a new valve to electroplating and re-grinding both components but none were considered sufficiently reliable.

The problem is that the valve and sleeve are match-ground to 0.0001 of an inch. That’s one ten-thousandth of an inch and when you consider that a human hair works out about four thousandths thick you get the idea… The gap (or not) between the sleeve and valve is small enough to force a molecule of jetfuel to turn back.

The next part of the story, as I understand it, is that we were heading for the rocks here because having something like this manufactured is a serious business and beyond the usual scope of the corporate freebie department even if you do happen to be an aerospace giant. But by now that indomitable, British determination had taken hold and no one was going to be beaten so the drawing was pulled and to everyone’s amazement it turned out that it had last been visited and updated in 2007. This could only mean one thing… the valve and sleeve had been remanufactured recently and in this case it turned out to have been done for the Indian air force and, better still, the parts had been made by a company in Liverpool called Hartley Precision.

Result! But did they have a spare one?

Sadly, the answer was no, but they quickly came to our rescue by agreeing to make up a new valve free of charge. There’s just no way to put a value on this sort of support.

Here it is, you could hold these parts in the palm of your hand but if you wanted one, one of the few places on the planet you could try is Hartley Precision and, because of their selfless support, we now had a working CCU – or so we thought. The throttle valve had one more trick up its sleeve.

The rebuilt unit went back on test as soon as a rig came available and even that was a case of waiting for a legitimate window in the normal production of systems to keep the world’s air forces and airlines airborne; but to the engineers’ dismay its flow figures only matched the projected data over the first 30% of its travel. A new throttle valve remanufactured to the proper standard yet it wasn’t working, what had gone wrong?

Nothing, as it happened, because the gremlin was diagnosed as a numbers problem. The flow rates given in the test schedule were for a pump different to the one fitted to the rig and once this was realised and put right the valve performed faultlessly – phew!

In fact, K7’s original pump was fitted to the test rig following an archaeological dig though fifty years of adapter plates back to the one that mounted it and the two parts of the system once more sang in harmony.

That was the big bits dealt with and after that making the smaller modules work threw up no problems that I was ever told about. The AFRC…

…and PRS…

…were given the same treatment before being plumbed up and made to do goodness only knows what.

The pressure ratio limiter was another story though. The one we pulled out of the lake turned out to be a prototype. One of only two ever made and, though we were able to establish this much, no technical info survived so rebuilding it to the required standard would be guesswork at best. It threw up a museum conservation issue too. In this case, considering that we could make an extremely educated guess at what was inside and how it worked, it really would be a loss of originality if we pulled such a unique item apart so the decision was taken to conserve it and run with a later version.

Look at the plate and you’ll see that it says ‘built to lab report 4780/F’. It’s a unique piece of machinery that will end its days in the museum and in the meantime and in the interests of reliability and safety, its role has been assumed by a later version.

All these amazing components are now rescued from the brink of museological obscurity where’d they’d have most likely ended their days stuck in a cabinet bearing a label reading, ‘Fuel System From Bluebird K7 – Conserved’.

Museum people – take note!

Beware any one of you who ever again tries to sell me the old loss of originality or destroying history bullshit because in completing this exercise we have unearthed a treasure trove of history and returned an unprecedented amount of working originality to the finished object. History that you lot would have gladly locked away forever had we heeded your so-called ‘expert’ advice. Ahhh – got that off my chest.

It’s impossible to convey just how extraordinary and humbling an experience it became as a pair of massive corporations moved heaven and earth to rebuild Donald’s fuel system. The emails swapped, favours called in and politics carefully juggled reached impressive proportions so simply calling into their office, collecting the finished goods, and leaving with only a ‘thank you and see you around’ would have been an anticlimax thoroughly unbefitting the journey we’d all just travelled.

What was needed was a proper bash to say thanks and show our appreciation but that meant corporate entertainment and though I’ve been on the receiving end more times than I care to remember I never enjoyed the same old stale and orchestrated way of such events. Nor did we have any budget, or experience of hosting anything like it.

Having said that, we’d never built a jet hydroplane before either but that seemed to be going not too badly so we began organising our knees-up with the usual enthusiasm and team spirit. We chose the Village Hotel in Solihull – my usual sleepover when I go visit Barry – where we hired a small conference room, ordered a few bottles of house white and organised a basic buffet in accordance with our scanty budget. We topped off the catering with an extra case of identical wine bought cheaply over the Internet, which Youth was tasked with sneaking into the room unseen, and a flight case identical to that containing our camera gear stuffed with M&S scrummy tuck with which to augment the buffet.

Then we pleaded with Barry to bring one of his engines and at the last moment, bless his cotton socks, he agreed while at our end we ransacked the workshop for pretty trinkets to liven up the venue. We’d recently mounted K7’s fin on a stand adapted from the wall hanger we used in the museum so we could prop it on the bench without risk of it crashing over sideways and mend the bashed bits so that was promptly bolted solidly into the back of our minibus once we’d removed the last row of seat. It would make a fabulous, joint centrepiece with Barry’s baby Merlin.

Next we mounted both new and old Bloctube boxes on display stands knocked up from bits of scrap and borrowed the banner from the workshop wall before shaping a course for South with the BBP team in high spirits early one Friday morning having used the bus to first drop everyone’s kids at school.

It was late in the afternoon when we arrived so, leaving Girl to sort the accommodation and most of the boys to dress the meeting room, John, Rob and I dashed over to Barry’s to pick him up with his engine.

Our guests were due at 5.00pm and with a gaggle of traffic wombles fretting over a stray roadcone and reducing the motorway to a single lane we suffered the inevitable delay and returned with only a few minutes to get our kit on before important people began to land.

No sooner had we plonked (placed as though it was made of fine bone china) Barry’s Merlin on the table and my cheap, hotel iron made it to lukewarm, than Mike was texting to say our guests had started to arrive and I’d better get downstairs soon-as!

The shirt got a quick skate over with the iron and the pits a squirt of anti-stink and within minutes we were meeting, greeting and speechifying…

I went first with a presentation on the project because all our guests had really seen were bits of the engine then Barry gave a little talk on how to construct 1/5^th scale Merlin and Eagle engines. Apparently winding the 40,000 turns of 0.03mm wire onto each magneto in opposite directions so the sparks don’t cancel each other out was, “a bugger!” A masterful understatement that made everyone laugh.

And then we stopped for more wine and a bite to eat.

Now here we fell on our feet, because the hotel had a huge wedding going on that night with (to Youth’s obvious delight) more than the usual proportion of beautiful girls flitting about – oh, by the way, our Girl scrubs up OK too.

So rather than mess about with our pauper’s buffet they just dished up what everyone else was having so we ended up with curry, chilli, baked spuds, breads from around the world, hot and cold meats, tuna and mayo – you name it. Had we loaded what was left into the van and brought it home we’d not have got through it yet! We certainly impressed our guests with the lavish banquet we laid on but neither ordered nor paid for. Do you think we owned up? Then back to the job at hand. We were finally to be presented with our rebuilt fuel system – the result of two year’s work.

But it wasn’t a formal affair, oh no… We laughed and joked and took the water from one another so the handover was a well earned and happy go lucky counterpoint to the serious work everyone had done to bring us here.

Next it was our turn to bear gifts but our benefactors beat us to it. Id always assumed that the old throttle valve would either return in the box of LOOF or else it would end its days playing paperweights in Hartley’s canteen, but no.

Instead it came back beautifully mounted on a machined and anodised block of aluminium despite the engineer who mounted it openly admitting that he wanted to keep it – can’t say I blame him. It’s gorgeous and seeing as we weren’t expecting anything but our fuel system it was a lovely surprise.

In return we’d prevailed upon our merchandise sponsor to produce a limited run of Oxford shirts with the Bluebird Project logo on one breast pockets and the Aero Engine Controls logo on the other and each of our guests received one as a memento.

All except for one notable contributor… In recognition of their involvement we presented Hartley Precision with one of Keith Hick’s fabulous paintings, Campbell Across Coniston, signed by all the crew as well as Keith and Gina.

You can find this print in our shop, by the way.

We hope it’ll hang in their reception or boardroom and raise a contented smile here and there for a job well done even if I did explain that we Geordies invented engineering workshops where we built our steam trains and battleships so best advice was to hang it between the girlie calendar and the kettle… It was that sort of evening.

The final act before heading for the bar was to award what I referred to as the ‘Victoria Cross’ of the Bluebird Project. You’ll have no doubt seen the mounted paint flakes we sell occasionally on eBay when times are hard – well we gave away four of them that night and thoroughly well earned they were too. It’s a tricky business giving stuff to corporate types because there’s always some miffed boss or humourless bean-counter who’ll argue it’s a bribe but I defy any of them to put a value on a scabby piece of blue paint in a box.

The guys seemed well chuffed with their paint flakes too…And then, off the hook at last, we baled out to the bar…

We enjoyed a beer and a yarn with Barry before carefully placing his Merlin in a taxi where the wheelchair usually goes and packing them both off home.

The youngsters showed just how much their middle-aged mates have gone downhill in recent years…

…and the team shot was taken after we’d drank most of what’s on that table. Then, once suitably inebriated, Rob and I got stuck into the karaoke.

We all had a fabulous evening and were all shattered when we got home on Saturday evening but was it worth it?

Oh yes!

As a quick postscript, the rooms require that you open your door with a card that then slots into a device on the wall by the door to switch on the electricity and that’s OK when you arrive and want to unpack your bag and install your toothpaste in the bathroom but I’d done all that earlier. I’d actually flung my meagre belongings haphazardly around the place in the frenzy that preceded being summoned below ten minutes after my arrival, but what I’d not done was stow the hastily erected ironing board.

Well I reckon you can guess the rest. Staggering drunkenly into my room, uncaring of the pitch darkness behind the usual business-hotel blackout curtains, and bollocks to locating the slot that makes the lights come on – suffice to say that my quickstep with the man-trap that was the ironing board and resulting crash to the floor was bloody painful!

Oh, and one more thing. You know how the Aero Engine Controls logo you saw earlier says something about them being a Rolls-Royce and Goodrich Corporation joint venture… Well that part has been dropped now because, although the parent companies still own AEC, it is now recognised in its own right in the industry and has big investment in the pipeline...and all of this has been more or less achieved in the short time we’ve known them… What was I saying about British engineering?

Now then, all you readers, there’s just time to get some prezzies in if you’re quick as we’re skint again so dash off to our shop right now and buy something!

Thanks…

Aug 2011

I’ve just spent two weeks herding two, cat-like children from shady spot to beer-bar beneath the scorching Mediterranean sun but it made for a pleasant break and, as the dedicated follower of fashion that I most definitely am not, pretty much every garment I own is embroidered with the BBP logo nowadays. Consequently, its significance was questioned here and there and, as the world seems full of whingeing pains in the arse, I thought I was in for the usual treatment at the hands of one of those eco-do-good fools when someone mentioned that old chestnut – our up and coming ‘environmental impact’. But no! If the Type III idiot has an opposite I was pleasantly surprised to find I’d just met one.

Just imagine coming across someone who understands that having an electric motor in your Prius is a bit of a waste of time because what actually makes it go is the petrol you just burned to charge the batteries in the first place, and that’s before you find out just how horribly environmentally unfriendly it was to manufacture to begin with. Someone who knows without having to have it pointed out that Coniston’s glacier buggered off before the catalytic converter or that the constant alarmist cry that cutting down rain forests is killing the lungs of the world when in fact mature trees metabolise oxygen just the same as you and I and that the world’s O2 is actually produced by photosynthesising algae in the sunlit layers of the oceans. Oh what a joy to discover a vein of common sense when the world seems silted up with H&S and rampant political correctness. This bloke made many valid and equally irrefutable points but my favourite, which I’m sure anyone with a spoonful off common sense will gladly lap up for their own defence against the enviro-mentalists, concerns that dreaded scourge of our delicate planet - carbon dioxide.

He began with a lesson in biology – what are trees made of?

They’re made of carbon fibre, he explained, just like Formula 1 cars only it’s nature’s version, a bit like bamboo cane. That’s carbon fibre too because what photosynthesis does is snaffle CO2 from the atmosphere and use the sun’s energy to fix it into organic compounds. The big trees in the park are built of gas and water and they’re bloody strong.

But way back when, the vegetation got a bit out of hand, fell over and got buried for a zillion years until mankind discovered you could hack it out of the ground in the form of coal or oil and keep warm in winter by setting fire to it thus releasing all the energy the sun poured into it in the first place and the trapped CO2 along with it.

So here’s the point… Next time some macrobiotic vegan sets about you for trashing the planet with your car be sure to point out that the CO2 you’re spewing out actually came from the atmosphere in the first place. OK – it’s been out of circulation for a while, but even so, all you’re doing is putting it back from whence it came and, assuming some resultant global warming results from your efforts, the plants will soon go crazy and promptly lock it all away again.

Such arguments are always handy to have in your pocket and another that’s likely to crop up is the best month for running the big tin boat. It’s one of those politics-riddled issues where there’s an almost gravitational pull towards putting on the Bluebird show outside of the tourist season to boost visitor numbers. It makes sense on paper but there’s a good reason why there’s no visitors – the weather’s crap and this might possibly affect a craft designed for mirror-smooth water because it has a freeboard of only about two inches and the wash from a passing swan could easily sink it.

We wouldn’t even attempt to get her wet unless we had a good forecast so to that end we’ve had a word with the Met Office for a heap of data to see what is actually the best time of year based on hard facts and irrefutable data. We don’t know when that is yet but whenever it proves to be is when we’ll be going for it. I’ll not laugh much if twenty years worth of hard data points at July, and I really won’t laugh if it shoves us straight into January but fair is fair – we’ll roll the dice and go with what it says because ultimately that’s what’ll be best for the boat and the public’s chances of seeing it go.

It’s all somewhat academic without the tin machine though and we’ve taken a holiday recently from cruddy tin and corrosion and spent some time on new stuff. The last diary entry ended just as the engine cover was starting to go back together. It sits up top and only keeps the weather off and it’s a delicious, doubly curved shape too so we didn’t want the endless pain of inserting weld repairs and reworking the shrunken metal this time around so, once assembled, it became doubler-tastic.

We constructed a tool to hold it clear of the floor in the vertical position and the whole team set about closing every last corrosion hole and patching the skins. One area of particular interest was where those two little horns poke out of the top. Go check a few images of the boat before her mishap and you’ll find two of these things.

So far as we can tell all they did was blow a draught of air down into the bilges. On the inside they were attached to thin-wall tube that meandered its way to the lower recesses of the hull then pointed aft so that air shoved down the pipe by forward motion was blown the opposite way at the bottom. Presumably this was to waft nasty vapours overboard before the whole lot exploded but for now the problem is that the steel horns completely demolished the alloy skin into which they were fastened to the point where we had to completely double the first station of the engine cover on the inside then shape patches where the horns go. It proved a good fix…

There was a hell of a lot of dissimilar metal lurgy in there though. All it takes is a former to be a slightly different alloy to the outer skin, which is close but not quite the same as the rivets then simply add water and you have a battery that nicks your electrons and scatters them to the four winds.

Here’s the job part-done. The doubler with the row of swaged holes was immediately named a ‘cheese grater’, by the way. Girl worked out and perfected the process for making them so any cheese grater requirements are immediately sent her way. We put them over the worst affected formers. It took several weeks to fabricate all the doublers we needed but the end result is tremendous. 100% originality.

Another important job we did while the engine cover was being mended was to make sure the start system still squeezed underneath it. The bottles, being steel, had a good old munch at the surrounding aluminium when it was all wet so many of the original edges were long gone and as the inside of the engine cover was hacked away in 66 to make room for it in the first place we had to be sure that what we’d put back didn’t foul anything.

It took some getting back in the hole! The bottle frame has been welded as has K7’s main frame and between the two of them moving slightly as a result and various thicknesses of paint combined with the tightness of the installation meant we had a struggle, but it went.

And, of course, it fouled all sorts of things under the cover until we took some remedial action so the exercise was well worth the effort. We’ll not now be grinding the paint back off to get the lid down.

The final act was to pull it all down into a heap of scrap and deliver it to Bettablast for painting.

There was one last use for the engine cover before it went though and that was to align the aft edge of the air intake skins. They’re new-build and had to be trimmed to a nicety so we knocked that job off too, which enabled us to finish the detailing on the intake structure and there was no shortage of that!

Wheeling the skins didn’t take long at all and they looked smart with their little letterboxes down the lower edges…

There’s three skins covering the intakes. One down each side and a larger one over the top that’s a properly tricky shape though it doesn’t look like much. It’s flat at the front edge where the flip-up canopy used to hinge but rounded at the back where it meets the forward edge of the engine cover and for some reason we found it especially challenging.

We got it in the end though, and another irritation was that we didn’t have a big enough piece of tin from which to make it so look at the end that Girl is holding and you can see that we had to weld a strip on to get the size we needed – a 2x1m sheet just isn’t the same an a good, old-fashioned 8x4.

I always feel well chuffed when a piece of tin is made to fit, especially if it’s tricky, but when I see the work that then must be done to turn it into an historically perfect piece of Bluebird the simple act of pushing a shape pales to nothing. Take this for example…

This is one of the widgets that held the inboard end of the strut that supported the spray baffles seen here still attached to the original outer skin. You can see where the bolt has torn through as the spray baffle let go so that had to be fixed before the thing could be repositioned on the new skin.

Mended.

There’s actually a fair amount of work in this considering it’s the original. The other example was completely wrecked because that’s the side that hit the water first but we fixed it just the same.

Then there’s this…

At the front of the intakes directly above the headrest there’s a small tube about three inches long and an inch in diameter that passes from the inside to the outside. It’s either a vent of some description, though if so its design intent still eludes us, or a wiring conduit for antennae and the like, but it’s original so we popped it back in place.

It likely makes little sense in this shot so we added this piece next.

That grey piece of steel is the hinge from the flip-up canopy. Just look at the left-hand edge and you’ll see that it was once a hinge and our pipe passes straight through it. Then we made a little cover just like the one Donald used to have and popped it over the top…

Now you’ve seen it I bet you can find it on the pic’s of our boat at the time… It’s one of those things that tends to go unnoticed until it’s pointed out. Still don’t know what the pipe was for though.

Further down, the upperworks are connected to the rest of the boat below the waist with closing strips that, on paper at least, should be four inches high. It’s fun to measure the originals and poke fun at the Samlesbury workmanship as they wander between three and three-quarters to a smidge over four inches wide as the poor sod tasked with making them fit had to file them into some very wibbly-wobbly joggles in the panels above and below. At least ours had parallel edges.

All this stuff is now finished and away to the paint shop and that only leaves the tail cover to do. Despite it having a massive, steel saddle inside to support the fin and being positioned over the steel end of the engine it’s actually in better shape than the engine cover, this being mostly because we brushed and painted the inside shortly after it came off so the oxygen hasn’t been at it in the meantime.

We saw it starting to fizz and took the executive decision to conserve it with a coat of etch-primer. It was a completely reversible process in keeping with museum practice and we thought we were doing no wrong. But we were also in negotiations with the lottery fools at the time and thought we’d best alert them to this urgent conservation requirement but their reaction was to summarily ban any further interference with the wreck or they’d take their ball and go home – morons!

Another conservation need concerned the bluebird motifs on the flanks.

This is the starboard side one and it was intact when we found it but it suffered an unfortunate accident.

What happened is that we’d not really noticed them back when we started diving the wreck and it was while we were imbibing a beer or three in the Bull that someone spotted them in a pic above the fireplace.

Next morning we set about finding them with the ROV but we knew they were right down by the mud line so they might be buried. We flew up and down the port side without success – that side was completely buried – but had better luck on the starboard side where the mud wasn’t heaped so high.

There’s a gentle current running north to south down the lake and the wreck was facing roughly east/west so the sediment was piled a little higher down the weather side but the lee side gave us a glimpse of the top of the motif through weed and mud so we sat with the ROV lights shining on it. Big mistake… Divers, being what they are, one of them wandered over to see what we’d found and decided that what the motif really needed was a good shine up with a scratchy diving glove. That was the end of that one…

The other, we decided, would be preserved at all cost so the divers were briefed to avoid it and we successfully got it out of the water only to have some numpty reporter prod it as we reached the beach and smash the blistered centre into a million bits.

You may also notice that what remains of the motif has been varnished in the above pic’… well, not exactly, it’s been consolidated with Paraloid – a soluble, clear plastic that you dissolve in acetone then paint on. We just didn’t bother telling the lottery fools this time as they’d undoubtedly have dreamt up a way to cock that up too.

But what to do about these iconic pieces of artwork? We couldn’t exactly consign them to the stripping bath or blast-room but to properly fix the panels they simply had to go so in a move that would give a museum purist a coronary we took them out with a drill.

It reminds me of another argument we had with the museum lot. They told us we couldn’t rebuild Bluebird because every ding and dent was a snapshot in time and we’d destroy all that history. I argued that they had a hundred thousand snapshots and we only needed the hundred best ones to tell the story so we could use the rest to make a boat and end up with the best of both worlds. Naturally they didn’t buy into that but it worked and the motifs are no different. OK, so there’s now a hole in the panel that we have to mend but big deal… we still have all the history intact.

Next we threw it at Rob to pull it down.

Then we cleaned all the bits and started putting it all back together again…

Now here’s an interesting snippet. You know how the boat was once sunk at Lake Mead by the wash from spectator’s boats… Well she landed on her back end and smashed the jetpipe off but she also dinged the surrounding bodywork and spent her remaining years running about with this repair in the aftmost tail cover former.

The former is quite heavily built and a strong shape so there’s no way it would have simply dinged back into shape so it looks like they either took it out or at least released it partially from the outer skin and inserted a riveted patch repair.

It’s easier to see from the back…

And easier again when it was taken out to mend the rest of the former.

The cutout on the outside between the one and two o’clock positions is the bit we’re talking about. The cutout on the inside is what we took away in order to repair the bashed former. It wasn’t a big job though and it was soon back together.

Notice the little cluster of yellow pins on the aftmost former holding the repair section in… Then there’s the question of those two circular (roughly) holes in the flanks from where we nicked the motifs. Richie produced a very elegant fix for these.

Having never used an English wheel in his life, new boy, Richie, over the course of a few days, taught himself how it worked until he was able to wheel a couple of donor panels to exactly the same curvature of the original then cut them up to make perfect patches.

For having never worked sheet before this was an outstanding effort – well done, Richie.

Meanwhile – up at the pointy end…

Remember the big hoo-ha about the Bloctube control? The HP fuel cock lever down the right hand side of the cockpit?

This piece of kit was with K7 from her original build in 54 and partook in every record attempt successful or otherwise including the last when it went to the bottom with everything else and had to wait thirty-four years to see daylight again. It’s a bit crunched and rotted in this shot but essentially OK and could easily be mended and put back as a working piece of the machine. But… and it’s a big but this time. Notice that lever? Well it’s in the ‘ON’ position and guess who left it there in 1967. Suddenly we have a fabulous conservation conundrum. You see, we couldn’t mend the control box without taking it apart and as soon as we do that we move Donald’s lever and that’s classed as destroying history. Even we could see the logic this time (to a point) so we put it to a vote on the forum and polled our public with the unsurprising result that we should repair it like everything else and stop being so soppy and sentimental.

To that end we easily dragged the lever to the ‘OFF’ position, scrubbed it back to good metal, whacked it with a hammer ‘til it was straight again and put it to rights with a fresh coat of paint. Job done.

Looks OK, doesn’t it. But the question of the speedo box wasn’t answered so easily. Half the problem there is that we don’t have it. The instrument panel is still in the lake so far as we’re aware. There was a rumour that it came out but I tracked down John Futcher – commander of the Rosyth RN dive team back in 66, out in Australia where he now lives, and I have a natter with one of his trusted divers, George Porter, most Monday nights down the pub and both are adamant that the panel was never recovered – they’d have remembered. What seems more likely is that the fire panel was lifted – a wholly unremarkable little thing with a couple of switches and bulbs but enough to fuel a myth.

From a technical point of view we know how the instrument panel was fastened in and at what angle it departed. We know what shape it was and how much it weighed and how it would behave when landing in the soft mud on the bottom of the lake and the chances of it being anywhere near where the divers searched and visible above the mud are extremely slim indeed.

Best to build a new one until time allows us to go looking for the original so it’s been a work in progress for the past couple of years. Advancing slowly as this piece or that becomes available or a new picture shows us something we didn’t know.

It started life as a rectangle of 3mm thick ally with a few holes and has remained Mike’s baby ever since. To begin with it had no real shape because when it was cut we had no upperworks on the boat and therefore no means of trimming it to suit. The lower edge was simple enough because we had original scribe marks in the left-hand cockpit rail and rivet holes to position the angle bar that spans the cockpit and picks up both the instrument panel and the steering column.

With that in place, shortly followed by the top deck, it was then possible to trim in the other sides of the panel and fasten it in using eight, rubber shock-mounts just as it was back in the day. We know it was on shock-mounts because we found half of one of them still attached to the wreckage and, if you know what to look for, Paul Allonby’s famous cockpit shot gives it away too. Below is how our panel looked once we’d blended it into its surroundings.

And that’s where progress ended for a very long time. That’s as it was laid out when K7 arrived in Coniston in 1966 but by the end a couple of major changes had been made. The airspeed indicator was moved upwards and fitted into a box presumably to make it more readable and, because this appears still not to have solved all the problems, a small sun visor was added. Our difficulty was that virtually no photographic record exists of exactly how it was all fitted together. At least none with sufficient detail to allow us build with confidence – and this was the show-stopper. At least until recently when we finally found the last clues that tied together all the pieces of the puzzle.

The box was a no-brainer – easily scaled from the pics, Mike simply provided the sizes and the tin-bashery dept soon spat out a suitable receptacle and the bracket beneath it quite obviously covered what remained of the old hole for the ASI whilst attaching through its fixing holes. Another problem bottomed. It was the sun visor that baffled us but thankfully enough photographic reference was eventually found and another obstinate problem was made to go away.

And, yes, we know this ASI reads in knots and K7 had one in MPH but do you really want us to risk dropping the genuine MPH example that we sourced after a massive effort when the identical gauge in knots can be picked up on eBay for two bob a dozen?

That was about the last detail to square away with the instruments so with that, Mike gave it all a dry-build and for the first time in almost forty-five years Bluebird K7 had a full complement of instruments and controls back in her cockpit.

Below are a few details of note… The genuine Longines stopwatch is near as makes no difference to the one lost in the lake and the holder clamping it so firmly, as regular readers will know, was reproduced for us by Barry, but the rest of the shot may seem at a glance to be unremarkable. That is until we tell you that Barry also dismantled the EXH (jetpipe temperature) gauge and made a new placard for the centre – the bit that reads

ºC

x100

EXH

He made that and engraved it and fitted it to the face of the gauge because we’d not found one exactly as it should be then he included the red limit line on the inside of the glass for good measure.

We’re back on the systems side of things too because our fuel control system is all sorted and pretty-looking and, most importantly, it all works so we need to think about getting the rest of the engine gubbins up to speed. About the only thing outstanding is the air start. It consists of a main air valve that releases air in horrific quantities from a pair of eighteen litre bottles…

Got a telling off the other day, by the way. I went to talk to a compressor expert for some advice and, without thinking, I called the air receivers ‘bottles’ as we always used to refer to our diving kit.

“Coca-Cola comes in bottles, they’re cylinders.” I was told bluntly. Lesson learned.

 …and a pressure regulating valve, (PRV) to ensure that it gets into the start turbine at the correct rate and pressure. The system is triggered by a small, solenoid-operated ‘piggyback valve’ bolted to the side of the main air valve. We were told it couldn’t be mended because it was a super-duper close-tolerance part… yawn… yet for a while we thought this may actually prove true, but no, Barry got a tune out of it at the second attempt whereupon the main valve fired successfully at the push of a button with a blast of air so terrifyingly violent that it blew a box of spanners across the floor and my end of the workshop will never have to be swept again.

The only untested part now is the PRV as it needed a considerable amount of work to even get it back into one piece so we’ve not even begun to calibrate it yet. The problem has always been getting enough HP air to test the damn thing as the main valve lets all those hard-won, compressed molecules loose at an alarming rate and refilling the cylinders (even if they’re actually spheres) takes an age when decanting from dive bottles so to sort that little problem we procured our own HP compressor.

This means we can fill the cylinder-bottle-spheres quickly and easily and as many times as we like.

Another problem we have to sort is that our 101 Orph’ is now wearing the inlet bullet from Donald’s old 701 unit and it isn’t supposed to fit so we had to make up a new flange where it bolts to the front of the engine. Luckily the old one was more or less gone so we lost nothing in doing so and our engine thus became more original as well as looking the part but using the old inlet caused another problem because we’re using an up to date (relatively speaking, it’s from the seventies) start-turbine for the want of an older one and the two components don’t marry up very well. The start turbine is essentially an air driven starter motor whose job is to gulp down the HP air released from the spherical-cylinder-bottles (must ask the compressor man what he calls these) and spin a small turbine to horrifying speeds that then spools up the engine to the point where you can light the fire and it’ll go on its own.

The start-turbine lives inside that shiny, alloy bullet but Donald’s old start-turbine (now dissolved) had its inlet in the side whereas ours is fed from underneath so we’re going to have to make some very fancy ductwork to get the 330psi air in the side and around the corner but we’ll do it.

To be sure we’re ready to go when the ductwork’s built we made up some mounts to fit the entire system to the engine and I’m sure you’ll agree it looks hauntingly 1966.

There’s a whole diary to be written about the rebuild of the start system and it’s coming soon because our work is almost complete but, before I go, remember the mended Bloctube controller? Well I told a small fib earlier because, despite overwhelming encouragement to bash it back to life, we found we couldn’t in the end even though it remains debateable whether Donald actually left it in the ‘on’ position at all. It could have been knocked anywhere in that crash but just in case we decided to leave well alone and make a new one.

First things first… we scrounged a noggin of Iroko from the wood yard next door and made a tool.

Those Iroko trees are made of damned tough stuff and it’s as well considering what we were about to do with it. We set the tool up on top of a hydraulic bottle jack then strapped a piece of tin over the timber and clamped it with Mole grips, which we then pulled down using the reliable, old Spanish windlass arrangement – basically a bar of some kind with which you twist and tighten the rope then lock off to hold the tension. It was a raggedy assemblage but fine for the kind of one-shot deal we had in mind.

Then we used heat and hammers to literally push the tool through the tin thus forming the desired shape. Easy when you know how…

In truth we ought to have used different material because the marine grade alloy we used was a smidge tough to pull into this shape but it went after a lot of persuasion.

From there it needed much finishing and fettling until the two ‘pie tins’ were ready for the next stage.

The next stage involved handing the original, plus the new parts, to Barry who basically did everything else. Machined up new internals, engraved the maker’s plates, applied the crinkle finish and hard anodising, etc. You know, the stuff we can all do when we dig the gear out of the garage cupboards and put our minds to it. Yeah, right…

Stunning, isn’t it. And it has the most delicious action too, because of course it’s fully working, with a Mercedes-smooth detent action at either end of its travel. All that remained was for Mike to apply, in anally precise locations, the Dymo labels he made with Donald’s old Dymo machine using the last of Donald’s original 1966 roll of red tape and the job was, as the say, a good-un…

An outstanding job by all concerned but especially Barry whose genius seems to know no bounds. So now the original can finally be home-ported in the museum still in the ‘on’ position and the museum purists can breathe a sigh of relief and if anyone can spot a detail we have wrong please don’t be shy. Oh, and don’t ask when it’ll be finished either.

Do you want it now or do you want it right?

May 2011

At a kiddie’s party recently the missus asked if I’d like a drink and in a moment of nostalgia I asked for a can of Lilt, remembering the sweet pineapply taste I so enjoyed in my youth. But what arrived was not the Lilt of old. It was nasty, watered down waste that you and I might describe using a word beginning with the letter P or, to a medical professional, U. In 2003 with the help of their marketing gurus it seems the Lilt people successfully removed the sugar, grown from cane or beet then extracted at moderate cost, and replaced it with a few drops of a cheaply synthesised amino acid without actually letting on. Well that’s not strictly true. They do tell us that it was ‘reformulated’ to reduce its calorie content by 58% and go on to tell blatant, barefaced lies about it still having the same great taste it’s had since 1975. Of course, the economics of selling flavoured water with a toot of CO2 has nothing to do with this… quite clearly the product is better for you without the calorific disaster that is sugar.

And again, later that same day, by pure chance, I happened upon a tube of Primula cheese. That rich, creamy, flavoursome luxury we used to squeeze onto celery sticks as kids then smack our lips at its smoked ham, prawn or chive accents. Not nowadays… oh no. The modern day, translucent ooze I squeezed from the tube bore a sickening resemblance to gentleman’s fluid, but look on the bright side; they’ve stripped it of all fat, cholesterol and anything else that might ultimately kill those of a sedentary persuasion. Your cleverly packaged tube of half cheese, half emulsified slop has been defused, you’re safe again.

 And that’s without mention of the cracker I chose to spread it on, which once upon a time would have been one of those deliciously sharp, salty jobs with ‘Ritz’ on the box but salt is now as much an enemy as sugar so they may as well cookie-cut their product from discarded beermats for all the taste they have nowadays… On the plus side I did buy some extra thick double cream this week to make Roquefort sauce for my steak and each and every calorie was present. The downside is that they stole it off the top of my milk in the first place then sold it back to me, but never mind.

Despite this anomaly the modern way seems to be flogging less for more then dressing it up in clever marketing as the populace becomes increasingly besotted with what they read on their computer screens or soak up through TV advertising.

And, in a similar vein, our project is being noticed more and more by organisations that smell a great opportunity as it nears but completely failed to pick up its faint scent ten years ago and now imagine they can buy in at the last by offering bugger-all in exchange for rather a lot. They’ve mostly missed the boat, literally, and we turn down various offers of so-called help most weeks. We just don’t need the hassle because after ten years of quietly beavering away we’re self-sufficient and being beholden to someone we don’t need would be utter madness.

For example, we had an erstwhile sponsor make a pitch lately to throw in a few quid but with a completely unworkable string attached; a finish date. This, as you may imagine, was an absolute must were they to do us the huge favour of shamelessly exploiting the last five minutes (historically speaking) of our project for their own commercial ends in exchange for what amounted to pocket money when compared to the value of work done without thought of reward by more understanding partners.

No can do, I explained to this quaint little outfit, unless they could tell me how long it would take to calibrate the air system, stop the hydraulics from leaking or mend the tail cover. They tried a different tack. How much quicker would it be done if we took their pennies? Hang on a minute! We don’t get this from the big-boy, aerospace lot so why should we put up with it from what’s a cottage industry by comparison? Needless to say, I could only answer politely saying that it likely would make no difference because even when the boat is ready the deciding factor will likely be weather.

It wouldn’t matter how many new sponsors crowded aboard at this late stage because we couldn’t go any faster anyway. There’s nothing we could write a cheque for today that would be a showstopper later on. We’ve still enough of our unique work to do on the main hull that everything else can be acquired in plenty of time and paying for it up front would not alter the schedule.

Now that’s not to say we’d look a gift horse in the mouth, far from it, and having a few quid spare would certainly give us some latitude when the boat is finished and we find we suddenly need unforeseen tools or maybe an extra hire vehicle or hotel room, but for now the project runs sweet-as with only its light snowfall of donations and the steady exodus of our goodies. It seems more honest and pure that way anyway so we vowed to carry on as before and turned them down – a tiny blip on the screen compared to sacking the lottery fools.

There’s a more sinister aspect to this, of course… Just suppose we involved ourselves in such a scheme and signed away our lives to a timetable while their marketing and promotions lot went hell for leather gearing their richest clients for a thorough fleecing on the appointed day. And then we failed to deliver…

Sour relations, lawsuits, compensation and that’s without the stress in our camp... Best we pick and choose and don’t expose ourselves so stupidly, methinks. Or so the lawyers tell us…

But while we’re on the topic of lawyers – we have our very own bylaw. It’s official, we can go faster than 10mph on Coniston Water without getting arrested and having that in the bag is something of a coup. After years and years the waterlogged derelict that is bureaucracy has finally fetched up on a shoal of common sense and the yes/no conundrum regarding us using our lake of choice has been answered. Our byelaw application has been approved at long last by someone from the government, no less. Our history is sad catalogue of begrudging adoption of one backup plan after the next but here it looks like we’ll get the gold medal position for the first time. We’ve grown up at last. (Metaphorically speaking only, of course).

There’s too many people so richly deserving of praise and thanks in this process and I’m never sure who wants to be named anyway because so many pull strings or drop hints in the corridors of power because they believe in our madcap scheme but daren’t own up for fear of being cast into some committee-free wilderness for a slightly edgy view. Therefore all I can suggest is that you all know who you are and how hard you’ve worked so thanks… and thanks again.

The downside of all this is that our dedicated though small volunteer team is now centre-stage again with ever more people asking the dreaded ‘when’ question so it’s all hands to getting K7’s clothes back on. Building her structure offered little in the way of visual progress most days as the sprouting of an extra outrigger here and a doubler there was difficult to spot and not very exciting anyway but there’re big bits coming together now. Take the flutes, for example.

Having been to Bettablast (http://www.bettablast.co.uk/bettablast/contact.html) for the standard issue chromate etch-prime and a coat of silver-grey polyester we brought the left hand example back and set about assembling it to the jointing strip that forms a lap joint between the flute and the panels above. Lashings of choccie sauce and hundreds of pins later and we were ready for the rivets.

It took the rivet twins only a few days to bash this little lot together but the end result was very satisfying. All panels below the horizontal deck are designated ‘KWO’ or ‘Keep the Water Out’ as are the joints between them and this one, as you can see by looking, passes muster first time.

Unfortunately, the panels higher up consumed a considerable amount of time that we hadn’t budgeted for. You see, had someone explained back in the day to those involved that should K7 spend thirty odd years under water then be rebuilt it would be bad practice to fasten steel and brass fittings through thin alloy skins because the dissimilar metal corrosion would turn out to be a proper nuisance, things may have turned out differently – but they didn’t.

It took much careful patching to get ahead of this little lot.

As ever, the big problem with inserting patch repairs is the shrinkage caused by welding and the ensuing difficulty in getting the shape back again. In this case we must work to a tolerance of 1/32^nd of an inch or 0.79mm because these panels are held on with 1/8^th diameter rivets, which is of course 4/32nds, and the next size up is 5/32nds, so if we can get within a 32nd we can upsize and put fresh rivets into lightly tickled-out holes making the boat stronger than ever she was without losing originality. It’s a fusion of heavy rock and microsurgery with hammers.

It took weeks to get them just how we wanted them but the result is excellent.

Every trace of corrosion has been excised, every hole lines up and the shape is precisely as nature (or rather Samlesbury Engineering) intended…

One positive to come out of this exercise is that, having cautiously crept up on the problems on this side and bottomed them by degrees, we can now bash seven bells out of the other side knowing precisely the consequence of every hammer blow so there’s much time to be recouped there.

It looks even better with its paint on awaiting final fixing. I’d also like to proudly point out that you’re looking at bare metal with no more than a thin film of polyester on top of a wash-coat of etch primer and not a hint of filler anywhere.

And it’s a far cry from the day it was stripped away back in 2006.

Apart from the tinwork we also have to think of K7’s systems because she obviously has to live and breathe. I remember a discussion with a lottery fool during which I was told it was poor value for their money to connect up the airspeed indicator or throttle pedal or, though the fool didn’t actually say so in as many words, anything else that might’ve made the boat work. It was their somewhat pathetic way of trying to ensure K7 remained properly dead. I just let them go then offered to recruit a volunteer team to rebuild the systems once they’d paid for the hull – you may imagine how that meeting ended. But now the systems are coming together rapidly with the most amazing help from volunteers and British industry.

The good people who are rebuilding our fuel system chose not to accept their share in the glory until they see if it all works, a stance that appeals to my wicked sense of humour no end, but their names would raise your eyebrows and, though I can’t shout their praises from the rooftops as I’d like to, this ought to give you an idea of how seriously everyone takes this work and the level of professionalism involved.

The CCU, or Combined Control Unit, by the way, is basically the engine’s fuel injection system. It meters and controls fuel delivery to the burners in the engine dependent on throttle position and inputs from other modules in the control loop. A very clever hydro-mechanical system from before the days of digital engine controls and its rebuild means that when K7 runs again it will be all the same systems making her move that Donald asked so much of back in 67.

Humbling, isn’t it, and I’d not really appreciated just how fortunate we are to have support at this level until recently, after a presentation I made, when a member of the audience came to see me once I’d shut up and asked how we’d done it as his project had unceremoniously bounced off the same set of sponsors.

Taken unawares, I had no answer… ‘Depends how you ask’, I answered somewhat lamely, though I suspect Donald’s legacy had a hand in our successful outcome...

Another aerospace monster, we were eventually to learn, swallowed up Lucas Rotax, the company that manufactured all the air-start gubbins and they happened to be sitting on all the drawings and tech data for the various valves and twiddly bits. The problem was the lawyers – no surprise there.

Quite rightly, in this day and age, were they to supply information pertaining to a HP air system and I made a hash of it and blew my left ear to kingdom-come this would all be all their fault and I’d be obliged to run crying to my lawyers, bloodied stump in hand… Erm… I think not.

I offered that I once crawled through fishing-net-festooned shipwrecks for fun with a HP air system keeping me alive so were I to blow off my ear it would likely be my own stupid doing and I’d be glad to sign anything to this effect. Having had this accepted and subsequently signed a disclaimer I was then given access to a treasure trove of drawings by a splendidly helpful individual who shall remain nameless for now and a long-suffering though equally helpful lady in the print room. The result is this beautiful example of engineering art…

Now I’ll not go too far into this at the moment because its resurrection is to be the subject of a special diary piece all on its own but basically what you see here is K7’s original, bespoke air-start system completely rebuilt, working and properly tested. It’s a monumental example of buggering about in a good cause but more of that later.

Back to the flutes… with one finished and painted the other rose to the top of the pile, this one by far the most badly damaged. The forward end was smashed to smithereens for starters. Because the boat crashed down on her left side and flipped over the right took a proper pounding on the first roll and the water punched straight through here.

Disentangling the shredded metal from around the frame tubes required hammers and crowbars and it wasn’t very healthy-looking once we got it free.

But we soon mended it with a new piece of tin. Ironically, we could have mended the original knowing what we know today but those were early days so instead we replaced the mashed part. The section we cut out has since gone on to become a training aid for the rivet team for setting rivets in awkward corners and at the end of that working life it will likely go back into the boat as something else. Waste not, want not…

The new section was pretty enough though. We welded it in for the dry build then didn’t go near again for years.

We got back to the serious stuff recently. It’s one thing to make these parts look OK but another entirely to make them watertight, capable of being fastened to the rest of the craft and reliable in service. John spent countless hours dressing back welds where once there were rivet holes or around patches where corrosion had threatened the integrity of the part.

Next he thoroughly crack-tested the whole thing from one end to the other with gallons of pink dye and shouted for a welder the moment a defect was located.

That took ages too but eventually the flute was ready to be put back and have new holes drilled. They’re 1/8^th diameter because the rivets are 5/32^nd at their finished size and we’ll drill to the final diameter when it’s time to stitch her together.

You may also notice that the foremost three outriggers are unpainted at this point. That’s because they were shattered in the back of that big hole and had to be repaired and set up at the same time as the flute was mended. The whole shebang was soon despatched to Bettablast and it wasn’t long before the last outriggers were up there with the rest awaiting the attention of the rivet twins.

Now, as everyone knows, this project is led and run entirely by volunteers and you’ve met most of them but here’s someone you’ve not come across yet.

Meet Barry…

The story goes like this.

Being interested in all things engineering I often wander off across the good old Interweb in search of intriguing things of that nature and one day I came across this.

http://modelenginenews.org/gallery/croft/eagle/index.html

Here’s another.

http://www.enginehistory.org/eagle_22.htm

Finding myself absolutely flabbergasted I looked further and found this.

http://www.enginehistory.org/merlin_xx.htm

And this…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xe1LL1IC7Y

Let me give you a few facts about those model engines… The magnetos actually work and deliver something like 24 sparks per revolution – Barry wound the coils using wire he unwound from mobile phone earpieces and the sparks go down little stainless braided leads to teeny-tiny spark plugs. Then there’s a set of fully functioning, 1/5^th scale instruments on the back so he can see what’s going on when things are running. The oil rings on the miniature Eagle engine each have eighty holes drilled through them and when I asked Barry how on earth he managed that he simply shrugged and said, ‘with a cobalt drill’ – the list goes on. I have since seen these engines for real and they are utterly mind boggling in their detail and precision so you may imagine that I could think of a few jobs that Barry may be able to help us with if only I could track him down.

This took a while but having proved marginally easier to locate than Osama Bin Laden, Barry eventually mailed me his phone number having been introduced by a mutual associate and after a bit of a chat he agreed to help. This was one of our early collaborations. See this crudded up lump of junk…

… it’s one of two igniters shot fed sparks into the Orph to get the fire going and after 34 years under water it was knackered.

The gubbins inside had gone properly crusty and wouldn’t work but Barry said he liked coils and had spent – or rather misspent – his youth learning to rewind them so he immediately set about the windings with a hammer and chisel until little remained and I stood aghast amidst miles of shredded, hair-like copper wire where a priceless museum exhibit once had been. What is it that Chris Knapp used to say? ‘Reality dictates...’

Barry assured me that making the coils work again was the easy part but what about repairing the cans in which they lived? This was going to be a problem, surely?

Now that didn’t bother me one bit so as Barry indulged himself in his garage, coming to the phone now and again covered in epoxy as he wound about 100,000 turns of wire around something or other, I set about the cases in a similar orgy of micro-fabrication.

Using 0.5mm MIG wire as filler, some tiny scraps of 16swg steel and a needle-sharp tungsten the steel cans were painstakingly pieced back together.

By the time Barry had finished gluing himself to the coils, the cans were glued back together too and ready to go to the electroplaters for a fresh coat of nickel.

As an added bonus, Barry took the original igniter cables, an example seen here with an igniter plug from the engine…

…and made up a complete set of new fittings for the ends. Clever or what?

And, as a final touch, because we’d struggled to locate the exact plug connectors for the cans despite having the part numbers, Barry made new ones from scratch

How about another?

Have a long stare at the lump of widgetry upper right that’s partially obscured by all that wiring and, while you’re about it, see if you can spot the igniter hiding in the background.

Found all the bits yet? Check out the thing with all the pipes coming and going. It’s the pressure regulator and non-return valves for the water brake system and appears to have been snaffled bodily from somewhere inside the donor Gnat along with about five times as many hoses as they actually needed. Stripped of muck and rust it looked like this.

But we couldn’t do much more than pull it down and give it a clean and even then some of it just wouldn’t come to pieces.

Over to Barry.

Yes… soon it was in a million bits with a host of new parts reverse-engineered from the originals.

And by the time it came back you could eat your dinner off it – or perhaps, with it.

What you can’t see so easily is that the fittings on the ends of the pipes were mostly rotted away and as we don’t want hosed down with hydraulic oil, Barry made up some tooling to un-swage the ends of the pipes so he could make up and install new fittings then re-swaged them thus saving the originals and the world of pain we’d have had getting new ones made up.

This valve, by the way, manages the hydraulic pressure by allowing it to build up to a pre-set level then venting excess pressure into an idle circuit until more is needed. It’s a close-tolerance part made by Lockheed and, although we’ve made it look pretty, getting it working within limits, considering the amount of refurbishment it’s undergone, is going to be challenging to say the least.

The entire hydraulic system is being built onto a test rig that replicates a section of K7’s frame so we can connect it all up and see if we can get the water brake to trundle up and down.

Then, of course, there’s this little beauty…

The genuine Longines stopwatch was bought from a dealer in Buenos Aires and shipped about 4000 miles in a Jiffy bag. The perfectly reproduced holder came out of Barry’s workshop. But be warned. We are extremely fortunate to have Barry bring his incredible talent to our project as he’s now a man of leisure who’s been there, seen and done all things engineering and made the well-earned T-shirt into a duster before most of us were born. So if you want to be next to coax him from retirement, take it from me, it’d better be good!

Back in our workshop we got the inlets to the point where we could unbolt them and stick them back on the tool. First though, ‘Checkie’ Rob – so called for his penchant for checkie shirts – spent a day modifying the tool to suit. The inlets were built in the upside down position so some changes to the tooling were required.

That done, the rivet twins soon got back to work.

The duct and its formers are really only the shell of the thing, all the trick bits go inside and then we have yet to mend the expanse of tin they clashed in there in 66 as a last-ditch effort to keep it all together after the inlets imploded so there’s still a heap of work to do on this component, but it’s looking OK so far.

We had to knuckle down and make some new outer body skins too. The left side of the cockpit survived in good shape because when the boat landed on her side the outer skin was crushed against the frame and, though it suffered a bit of hydroforming around the frame tubes, it was substantially present. But the other side didn’t fare so well. The water got in when the left hand cockpit wall snapped in two and literally blew the skins out of the opposite side. We didn’t get much of it back so the executive decision was taken to make up new skins and use the remains of the old ones to make formers for the upper sponson fairings. With that plan sorted it didn’t take long to spread a sheet of tin over the side and wheel a little shape into it.

Its forward end had to be welded on because back in the day they had 8x4ft sheets to play with but ours are only 2x1m so it was somewhat easier to glue an extra piece on than source a bigger sheet.

Next, with the panel more or less the right shape, we set it up on the bench and used it to set up the lower half of the next panel aft because the two joggle together in such a way as to present a smooth outer surface. You’re looking at the inside below, by the way, with the outrigger positions marked with a Sharpie so we know where to drill the holes.

Compared to reworking damaged and corroded tin this work is refreshingly quick and simple. It’s a joy after some of the torture we’ve put ourselves through. The only downside is that, due to company policy, we had to paint it that awful green colour but as you know it’s only temporary.

For those late arrivals who maybe don’t get the green thing it goes like this. We always wanted this rebuild to be sympathetic to museum conservation techniques and not one of those ‘data plate’ jobs that goes on with flying aircraft. There, of course, it’s a must because you can’t coast to a standstill so easily in your Spitfire but our boat is a different animal and we’ve been very inventive when it’s comes to saving original material whilst engineering in the strength and reliability needed for her return to the water, but here and there we must make new and this is where the green comes in.

I was told once of a student who wrote a lengthy thesis on the history of WWI aircraft and was surprised to discover just how much fibreglass (my spell checker keeps trying to spell that fiberglass! Damn you, Americans for messing with our beautiful language…) was used in their construction. Of course this was a falsehood perpetrated by a museum that hadn’t properly marked what was original and what was new so henceforward museums have been careful to make this clear and this is what the green is all about.

It’s well known that Donald loathed anything green so, all you future students of K7, if you find some on his boat, we did it.

But there’s way more to that slice of green tinwork than merely getting it to the right shape. It’s a recreated part of an historical artifact and has to withstand the closest of scrutiny so that’s why Mike spent days on what I called his ‘exercise in futility’ drilling and filling dozens of holes opened then closed again in the 1950s during many experimental attempts to make the boat plane.

Let me explain. Way back in fifty-something the Norris Bros. designed a boat that was then built by Samlesbury Engineering and taken to Ullswater to be driven by Donald that damn-well didn’t work. It just wouldn’t plane so they fastened temporary surfaces between the sponsons and the main hull to gain an understanding of the problem. Two things came out of this (and please, historians, correct me if I have this wrong) firstly, the front spar was lifted to keep it clear of the water as the boat accelerated and, secondly, the option to fit additional surfaces for low-speed, demonstration runs was retained and used occasionally. The result is dozens of unused holes in the sides of the cockpit closed either with 3/16^th rivets or 2BA screws in captive nuts. None of them serve any purpose whatsoever nowadays but in the interests of doing a proper job every last one had to be correctly located and drilled. Mike spent days with a chunk of original skin from the same side working out exactly what went were then built the new part just as it once was.

This is the inside because it’s easier to see the captive nuts than the screw heads on the outside. And notice below the diagonal line of captives there’s a horizontal line of empty holes. These were blanked with rivets and we’ll set these at the last before the blue paint goes on so the bodyshop can work unhindered on the flat outer face.

Here it is from the outside.

Lots to see here… For starters, notice that the skins around the pointy end are fully pinned awaiting only their rivets and, more importantly, they’re painted silver, which means you’re looking at original material. We got lucky here because this piece of tinwork flew off pretty much intact and lay about in anaerobic, mud-coated safety for thirty-odd years so all we had to do was straighten it and put it back.

We recovered neither of the oval closing plates that were fitted over the original spar boxes though one survives in a museum but the committee voted not to give it back despite the deal being a total no-brainer thus proving yet again that there are no brains in bureaucracy.

In business terms it would be like your local Merc’ dealership phoning to say they wanted your old car in exchange for a shiny, new Mercedes Benz topped to the brim with fuel and a free fuel card in case it used any. Servicing would be free as well as any tax or insurance and should you scratch it please feel free to use the bodyshop anytime you please. Being bureaucrats they held a committee meeting and opted to hang onto their communal, 1982 Honda Civic auto in sh*t brown…

We made some new closing plates and one can be seen fitted here in its final position.

But so what? It’s only an oval-shaped piece of tin, what’s the big deal? Well I suppose there isn’t one unless you appreciate all the work that’s gone into getting every last screw hole positioned as accurately as all the physical and photographic evidence will allow. We’re kind of proud of these simple items and, despite all that’s befallen our tin boat, there’s a fair chance that were we able to nip back to 66 to try them out our new closing plates would swap for the old ones and all the screws would go through the holes first time.

Another thing… look at the forward panel, the silver, triangular one with all the pins in it. See the diagonal row of rivets through the middle of it?

Those holes were also used to fix something that later went away but evidence suggests they had more 2BA screws through them as they’re slightly bigger than your 3/16^th rivet so when time came to make them go away again whoever got the job just cut some small squares of tin, popped a 3/16^th hole through the middle and banged a rivet through. The result looks like this from the inside.

The great thing about these little squares is that they’re completely unmolested. They were drilled loose in 2005, bagged, tagged and stored away then put back this week still bearing their original coat of silver paint.

The time has also come to take a look at the upper fairings and we recently dismantled the engine cover. As you move aft there’s less and less impact damage, the air intakes being by far the worst affected but the engine cover suffered its share nonetheless.

It’s the right side that took the batteringleaving thepanels rippled from one end to the other and then there’s the corrosion. The cover has five stations underneath it. Number one had the steel, air start kit underneath as well as two small, steel vents let into its upper surface so that area went rotten. Stations two, three and four were over the magnesium compressor so they got away with it, and five was over the stainless end of the engine so that’s knackered too.

There’s also this little box between formers four and five that, according to the drawings, was for a parachute. It had long since been sealed shut but on opening it we found a load of signatures written in pencil, one of them dated 1958 – but that’s another story too.

The great thing about the upper covers is that they’re only aerodynamic fairing so they don’t need the same meticulous repair as the bits that have to keep high speed water out. These only have to keep the weather out so we can crack on at a much faster pace and keep more originality too.

So while John set about resurrecting the parachute box, Girl made her ‘cheese graters’ to fit over the badly corroded formers at positions one and five.

They’re made of 1mm alloy with a series of swaged holes in the front face for strength and an inch wide border round the outside for a pitch of rivets that’ll doubtless be spaced and drilled by Mike then fired home by the twins. The rebuilt formers and parachute box not only look good and are now properly strong again, they’re also mostly original and the work took no time at all.

Apart from some mild straightening here and there all these parts only needed cleaning and painting to be ready to go back.

The outer skins went over to the museum to be cleaned by Novie and his team of volunteers there and came back gleaming so we could start the build for real.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of corrosion in the skins – nothing that won’t fix, mind you, but something that was largely avoidable.

You see, what happened is that way back in 2002-ish we noticed the panels consuming themselves on exposure to oxygen in the air. Corrosion can take many forms with aluminium and much of the electrolytic rot inflicted under water became differential aeration corrosion when it dried out. In this case pitted areas receive more oxygen because of their larger surface area than non-pitted regions and set up an electrical cell that just keeps the process munching onwards. To stop this in its tracks we started with the tail cover and carefully cleaned the metal with a stainless wire brush, ensured it was dry and free of grease then painted it with an etch prime to seal the surface, but we dropped a bollock – to use the Geordie vernacular. We told the lottery fools (thinking we were alerting them to an urgent conservation need) who immediately wet their knickers and ran bleating to their pet museologists who advised the fools that, unless we stopped destroying history forthwith, we’d be ineligible for a grant. In the longer term our faces didn’t fit sufficiently for a grant anyway so now the engine cover looks like granny’s lace curtains while the tail cover is as good as the day we recovered it.

Never mind, it’ll fix, as we say.

But the corrosion is only half of the problem, there’s also a measure of disruption at the forward end of the engine cover because the crash damage went a smidge aft of the air intakes.

This is the good side – take a few minutes to Google some images of K7 as she came out of the water and you’ll soon see how the left hand inlet was torn open as it got a big gulp of water and tripped the boat up. This slapped the hull down on its right flank squashing shut the inlet on the other side.

The right hand panels got it ten times worse than the left as a result…

As someone said during the course of our analysis of the impact, ‘the metal doesn’t lie’, and every last tweak, twist and split in K7’s fabric demonstrates with absolute certainty that her main hull came down on its side; and yet there’s still  a few who remain hard of understanding so the above is just one more example.

It took several daysto shrink that mess back to something we could work with.

What you see here is the result of careful heat shrinking and from there it wasn’t such a bad job to get the thing back into shape. The trick is to use heat, cold and other techniques to set up tensions in the metal that oppose the shape of the disrupted area then give it a gentle nudge with a rubber mallet whereupon it quietly goes back from whence it came – something Mike invariably refers to as witchcraft.

Once pinned to the formers and following a round of mild tin-bashery it wasn’t looking half bad. Just some nit picking to do and it’ll be good as new.

Many people think that all you have to do is whack such a dent back the other way and it’ll just go flat again, but it won’t. Stretch a bar of toffee then try to put it back as it was and you’ll see what I mean. The metal stretches just the same and suddenly there’s more of it than you started with and putting a big expanse of it like this back to rights is challenging to say the least. It’s easy to get it close enough then slap some filler in but that’s cheating… If it needs filler you’ve not finished working on it.

There is, however, one piece of crash damage that we’re preserving in the name of posterity.

See that small, well circumscribed dent out to the right that looks like someone stabbed a teaspoon through from the back… (The cheeky buggers in the workshop thought I’d slipped with my hammer – as if!).

Well here it is again, preserved for all time and for one very good reason.

You see, it’s not just some random dent caused by the thing crashing, it’s actually a witness mark where the panel was bashed in by the water and met the solenoid on the start valve coming the other way.

Here’s the solenoid valve, and notice the cylindrical can on the left that covers the solenoid itself – notice also that it’s split along its length.

Now see it in situ and you’ll get the idea.

OK, look just above and slightly left of the end of the red screwdriver lying on the deck and you’ll see the circular end of that can. Got it? When the boat slapped down on her right flank the outer skin of the engine cover was shoved inwards but it crashed into the start solenoid and was effectively hydroformed around it splitting the can in the process. See if you can spot it in this pic of the engine cover before we started working on it.

It would have been so easy to sanitise this skin by losing that little pimple but to what end? It’s doing no harm and it tells the story on behalf of all the ruination that befell the engine cover and has now been magicked away so it stays. Sufferers of OCD can go around the other side where everything is perfect.

And, by the way, that little window in the side that provides a view of the instruments inside is looking a whole lot better these days with its doublers and patches finished and just waiting for paint, choccie and rivets.

And we’ve moved on another vital item this week – our new planing wedges. They’re six foot long castings into which we’re going to incorporate every last crumb of unused material so there’ll be absolutely no LOOF at the end of the job. Scraps, rivet heads, swarf and filings will all be mixed back in to give the wedges an irrefutable whiff of originality. With a few original formers for the sponson fairings recovered from the lake and some new ones made of redundant skins from the right-hand side we’ll reconstruct as much of the sponson tops as possible including the piles of crumpled tin we have stored away that originally comprised them. There’s going to more genuine K7 in this machine that anyone ever dreamt possible.

February 2011.

“Look at our shed…” My mate’s kids gasped in awe at what was, so far as I could tell, ordinary B&Q output complete with patchy woodstain and a sun-wrinkled mantle of roofing felt. Nothing about it suggested majesty or opulence yet they seemed entranced.

“Erm…it’s a shed,” I said eventually, slightly nonplussed.

“But do you know who once owned it?” Their dad intoned slyly.

That got me going. I mean, perhaps Ernest Shackleton lost his historic race with Roald Amundsen through single-handedly lugging this very shed across Antarctica. Or maybe Sir Francis Chichester completed some little-publicised circumnavigation in it with a sail rigged on top.

Nope – it seemed the shed once belonged to (or rather the gardener of) the great Enrico Wankspanner, centre-fly-half-striker-defender for Tottenarse United. I couldn’t believe it. Before me were children brainwashed to worship a garden shed because some imported, ball-chasing numbskull bought somewhere to park his Ferraris and the gardener needed a bigger hut!

It’s one thing to be bedazzled by Enrico himself, but his garden shed?

People often assume I’m a Campbell aficionado then seem mildly put out when I point them at a more learned historian as though I must know everything but discussion is beneath me. Truth is I don’t have a clue about most of it though I do admire some folk. The Marillion chaps are pretty cool, for example, and Will from Virgin is the only bloke I know with his own space ship and ‘Planet Earth’ in his postal address but I’ve no idea where any of them store their lawnmowers!

I was therefore sort of chuffed later when I dropped the kids at home and my two-year-old asked as I turned to leave again,

“Daddy… you go fix Boobird?”

And go fix ‘Boobird’ Daddy did – safe in the knowledge that my kids will never find themselves overawed by a neat stack of tongue and grooved pine boards.

Another cool bloke is our good mate Chris who’s been back for a spot of tin-bashery and hot metal gluing. Regulars will recall that Chris works for a company called Proalloy…

http://proalloy.co.uk/

…in a place they call ‘South’. He’s a proper welder so he’s always welcome to pick up the torch.

It’s a hoot in the workshop too whenever he visits North with lots of welding and banter of the most splendidly politically-incorrect variety.

Chris’s mate, ‘Biff’, came up this time too. Biff is a name children are sometimes called in South and he and Novie hit it off immediately and spent the day scrubbing away at chunks of cruddy tin.

One of them went out to get those pink marigolds specially – though we’re not sure which one or, for that matter, why…

Chris, meanwhile, was giving Girl some one to one TIG tuition. Mick the Block has been on for what seems like years doggedly patching the last piece of K7’s floor – the piece that fits under the sloping forward end.

And at last it was all tacked together only awaiting the final welds when Chris turned up and this was especially appropriate because he actually started the work on it in 2008 and was slightly disappointed back then that he’d not get to finish it. Little did he know…

This was like finishing school for Girl who recently received her City & Guilds in aluminium TIG welding and, after a little persuasion, wrote down just what it’s like to become a girlie welder…

*

On arriving at the Bluebird Project workshop early last year, I was asked by Bill if I knew how to file my nails, to which I answered something like, I’m a Girl, of course I can! I was then handed a small file and asked to file down some welds on what later became known as ‘Lyndsey’s Bit’.

‘Lyndsey’s Bit’ is a piece that the canopy sits in.

[See the piece of angle at the back of the cockpit held with the big black pins ...]

It was not always ‘Lyndsey’s Bit’ though. Other names for it like ‘Lyndsey’s Hole’ [Edit: It was actually ‘Lyndsey’s Whole’, so named on the day we welded it back together. We’d cut it in half earlier in the week having discovered it was marginally too wide whereupon it became, ‘Lyndsey’s Bits’. And it’s not entirely our fault that it cracked.] and ‘Lyndsey’s Crack’ are two of the other names it was known by. I’m not saying another word on the matter but those lads at the workshop found it highly amusing.

[Edit: Oh, did we ever!]

After a couple of months “Lyndsey’s Bit” started looking as it should and I started wondering what I could do next. Looking around the workshop and watching the boys all doing their own thing…Rob ardroxing…Mike and his widgets, then Bill hidden away under his welding screen with an aluminium welding rod shooting in all directions poking peoples eyes out when they walked past. I started to wonder if I could have a try under a welding screen. So I asked Bill for a try to which I think he rolled his eyes in disbelief that me, a girl, would want to have a try at doing a mostly male orientated job. Oh would I shock them all later. I took to it straight away…the weld didn’t look like pigeon s**t, fair enough it wasn’t a perfect weld but hey, it was my first turn. I hadn’t mastered the art of an inclusion, where the tungsten gets stuck in the job or a touchdown where the tungsten touches the weld pool, or you fire a welding rod into the tungsten. It’s now such a part and parcel of welding that if either of these happen we will shout ‘touchdown’ and laugh lots at whoever it was that did it. Just one of the silly things that go on in the workshop. There's always lots of fun and banter, if there wasn’t I think we would all go totally mad. We’re all a little mad but then we have to be to be doing what we’re doing.

I was eventually left to do little pieces on the boat and really enjoyed it so I started thinking about taking it a step further so went ahead and started enquiring about going to college to learn the trade properly. The first few phone calls were a bit of a let down, either being told the course has started already for the year so it would be next year, (I’m not the most patient of souls) then told by a local college I was too old as they only took on school leavers (I’m no school leaver but I wouldn’t say I’m old either). So over the water I went to find myself in a college workshop in South Tyneside which was full of those young school leavers I told you about or a load of hairy arse welders. I think they were very shocked when I walked in with my baby steelies, Bluebird overalls, my own screen and gloves. I meant business and although probably whispered about behind welding bay screens I was quickly accepted and respected. They knew right away I wasn’t going to take any rubbish and that I’d give as good as I got were they to start. It was good fun and an experience in itself meeting people from different walks of life. None more different than my own, after all I’m a girl and a mum and I wanted to weld. What could they say? It was very funny the day I was told by one of them jokingly that the weld I’d done wasn’t going to pass the dye-pen test. For those of you who don’t know, a dye-pen test is it’s a 3 phase process for testing the quality of the weld. A red/pink dye is sprayed along the weld then left to penetrate for approximately half an hour then cleaned off with the cleaning solution and finally sprayed with a white talc based developer which pulls out any pink dye left in the not so good weld. The weld would then have to be ground out and done again, then re-tested which can be a very long process. Imagine how long it’s going to take to test our tin boat? We all put a piece in to see how the test was done. Guess what…I passed! He failed!! Haha who’s laughing now?

I seemed to fit in right away and quickly started putting test pieces together, one after the other. Pipe welds, butt welds and fillet welds.

I was beginning to understand the science in welding and to some people this stuff is boring but I enjoy learning so I was like a sponge, soaking the information up. Christmas came and went and I found myself only having 3 weeks left on the course so I stuck in and kept getting those test pieces in to my lecturer. Eventually I had done all the test paper requirements so started practicing other things like welding up holes (which has come in handy on the project) and welding large pieces of pipe.

The 26^th of January arrived and it was paper test day. I was panicking as the lecturer was about to ask me a series of questions about gases, welds, and safety issues, etc. and I didn’t think I had a clue. Then 45 minutes later I was done, I’d passed my City and Guilds Level 2 in T.I.G Aluminium Welding. What an achievement that was, I was so pleased with myself. My kids think it’s brilliant that Mummy is working on Bluebird and she can glue things back together. I’ve not felt such a sense of achievement and delight as when I came home to tell my babies, and they were so excited and pleased for me. I love what I’m doing and I love everyone on the Project for having faith in me and keeping me going. Thank guys, you’re all fantastic.

*

Didn’t she do well, as Brucie might have said…

Having worked in industry for many years and seen all kinds of welders I reckon it took real balls, which of course Girl doesn’t have, to get stuck in at the (slightly grotty) local college so she’s well deserving of her ticket.

So having slaved away over a hot welding torch all afternoon with our guests it would’ve been rude not to have had a party later with gallons of lager and a million screaming kids and the rest of BBP lot took no persuading though feeding a few of them anything but rubbish can be fraught. It’s one thing to try and advocate a more gracious living when we gather but, sadly, it’s like reading Shakespeare to the dog…

*

I Nose What I Like

By Mike Bull

On average we’re a poor bunch on the Bluebird Project when it comes to food, as most of us are fairly simple creatures that are quite happy to live on meat and two veg and pasties. (We’re not actually sure what Mick the Block lives on though, as he seems to like no food stuffs whatsoever- I suspect that most nights, he sits down to a plate of ‘Lightly grilled fresh air served on a bed of delicately par-boiled bugger all’)

So often when we socialise together we sit down somewhere posh and look at a menu that seems to be partly written in code; it superficially looks like English to start with, but upon closer inspection it reveals itself to be some kind of weird patois. (And I thought patois was that dog-foody stuff that posh folk spread on their crackers anyway?)

“What’s ‘moderately perturbed sea bass served with hand cut lightly roasted segments of best English potato and seasonal greens?” Rob (for example) would query, and someone else would eventually crack The Patois Code (by Dan Brown, 50p in all good charity shops) and translate that to “It means fish and chips mate”.

“Well why doesn’t it ‘kin say that then…”  

Once the whole menu has been translated accordingly, and fish and chips have been decided upon as being the safest option, said dish would be ordered and you sit and eagerly await your meal. A little while later, the food starts to arrive in scenes reminiscent of a 1950’s B movie, with huge flying saucers hovering over our heads. Seriously- these things are casting shadows that are wilting the decorative flowers on the table. But fear not, the aliens haven’t landed- that’ll just be the arrival of our two-foot diameter plates. “Great!” you think, “a huge plate- think of all the dinner I’m going to get!”

Once the saucers have landed however, you gaze down at this massive gleaming white expanse of plate to see, nestled somewhere there in the middle, a tiny cube of food about three inches square. Now, it obviously takes dedication and skill to arrange someone’s food in this way, but why? What exactly was Gordon Worrall-Pierre-White-Oliver hoping to achieve exactly? To create a good impression? Because the first impression I’ve got is that there’s bugger all on my plate…

So there you have it- a teensy piece of fish and three slightly posh-looking chips, and some token greenery. Yours for £17.95, sir.

Why? Why do we pay considerably more money, to be served much less food, in a fancy manner on a massive plate? Now, note that I’m not talking about pure nouvelle cuisine here, and nor am I wanting everywhere to be like a bargain basement chain pub- rather, I’m talking about those establishments that are hovering somewhere in between, serving what should be fairly ordinary everyday food in a manner which they think is clever, but which in fact is just ridiculous and over-priced.

A further example of culinary stupidity for you- at a recent lunch, our Girl ordered a cottage pie which arrived…wait for it…packed tightly into a little glass jar. Now if daft food usually arrives by flying saucer, I can only assume that on this occasion the food had travelled by TARDIS. The jar was one of those small chunky ones with the thick lid held by sprung clips that you’d use for pickling onions or the like and yes, said jar was sat looking sorry for itself in the middle of a massive plate. So not only did poor Girl have to take a lid off to get at her squashed food at all, she was also in need of one of those long knickerbocker glory spoons to be able to get it out.

So here’s a tip for the all the mid-range restaurants- leave the fancy stuff to the big boys, and stop fleecing me for a lot of nothing, especially just because I’m in some tourist trap village or other. We’re a nation that was brought up on meat and two veg and good old fashioned stodge, and while K7 runs of avtur, most of the lads rebuilding her run on pies; or, ‘Slow braised selected cuts of beef with lovingly grilled kidney with a distinctive jus served encased in a delicate golden short crust pastry’, if you prefer.

Talking of munched-up meat products, it’s said that nothing is wasted from a pig except the squeal, and likewise we’re getting better and better in the workshop at reusing all manner of scraps of original Bluebird fabric, and I’ll come to a good example of that in a minute.

Since the cockpit exterior was finished (I’m well proud of my riveting there, even if they are what Rob calls ‘numpty rivets’!) and the cockpit interior is very well advanced also, it was time for me to move on for a change of scenery and having looked and shuddered at what was going on aft of F15- namely, Bill’s months-long battle with the air intakes- rapidly heading in the opposite direction to work on the nose seemed like a good plan. A lot of what we’ve done was covered in the last diary but suffice to say, the nice new nose that was made a few years ago has been hacked about and had some big old warty lumps of original tin let into it and you know what? It’s bloody beautiful!

Bluebird’s nose is an extraordinary thing- you’d think it was a simple rounded snout but it really isn’t, it’s a nightmare of subtleties of shape and metal behaviour that never looks the same twice in the reference materials, and it’s taken a long time to arrive at something we can all sign-off on shape-wise. It’s probably indicative of the complexity of the thing that not one of the drawing suppliers or model kit manufacturers, in any scale, has ever got the nose right.

First we threw away another perfectly good new bit that had been made for the dry-build and instead reinstated this virtually whole original panel at the lower right side of the nose-

Though the nose was redesigned when the front spar was raised, this panel at the side was never altered and is part of the original 1954 build. Consequently it had a long life and as seen here it’s fresh out of the stores with nothing done to it yet, and just look at the myriad holes along it’s top edge; there’s holes where the original flat nose was riveted on, further holes to take stiffening plates, and finally even more holes to take the distinctive row of 2BA screws that run around the whole front of the boat, added when the raised nose was built. Here’s one for you- one future day when the boat is in the museum, take a look at the row of screws around her front. On the left side of the boat (as you sit in it) the screws will be evenly spaced and uniformly positioned- that’s because they’re all drilled into new material and I painstakingly positioned and drilled them. When you get around to the original ones on the right hand side, I had to find and reuse the original holes and they’re up and down and spread out all over the shop. Clearly I must learn to be more slapdash! ‘Advanced engineering, rocketry, what have you…’  

Another interesting feature on this side panel is what we take to be the charging point for the breathing air system. In the picture above, it fits into the larger hole towards the top left of the panel. Quite why it’s mounted on the opposite side of the boat and at the front a fair way from where the breathing air regulator lived we’ll never know, but the fitting was there on the right side of the nose for virtually the whole life of the boat- it appears very early on in the reference photos- so with a relatively simple clean up, it was put back where it had come from. Here it is as seen from the inside of the panel-

Aft of these panels live the closing plates that blank off the original spar boxes, left from when the boat was new and her spar was mounted lower down. A pair of these had been roughed out many moons ago for the dry build, but it was time to make a pair of new ones, as sadly one original example never came out of the lake and the other one is languishing in a glass case somewhere courtesy of some short-sighted committee or another.

Also in this shot you can see that the side panel has advanced somewhat- it’s been to Kirkdale for some treatment on the big Eckhold shrinking hammer, the holes have been welded up and dressed back, the joggles redefined and a small repair section has been grafted onto the front. The air charging point is pinned into place, and here’s an interesting one- see the row of four holes running diagonally across the panel? These are left over from early attempts to get the boat to plane, and were blanked off by rivets for most of the boat’s life. Reference shots show a corresponding row of holes on the other side as well, though of course in typical Bluebird fashion they are not symmetrical side for side. 

Now, going back to the nose and about those pig’s lips, eyelids and tails- as is sometimes the way when letting an original piece back in, I found myself with a few little scraps left over that had been trimmed from the edges of the main piece, but rather than dropping them into the increasingly abandoned LOOF box I got one of our welders (not the fully qualified one unfortunately, just Bill) to stitch the pieces together to make me another useable piece of tin which I then duly used to create the side of the nose immediately behind the front spar.

You’re looking at the piece behind the spar and below the silver skin pin. It’s still rough and in progress there, but nifty eh? There’s a new bit there too to complete the job but how’s that for recycling? Little off cuts of original nose material back in use, and absolutely nothing wasted – not even the squeal. Or to put it into menu-speak, ‘No loss of original fabric served with a two finger salute and a withering glance at the HL effers’.

*

Mike will be along next month to postulate that we don’t need a Large Hadron Collider to explore the Higgs-Boson particle when he can do a perfectly good job by chucking rocks in his back garden… But it’s always fun to have a rant and I’ve had some great feedback on the speed patronisation farce, and mostly from the cops, of all unlikely sources. It seems plods countrywide are equally unimpressed with wombles driving a wedge between cops and public when they’ve not even seen the sharp end of policing. Then the cops don’t have time to repair the damage because they’ve been forced off the streets to fill in endless paperwork where they’re more likely to contract smallpox than share a risqué joke. Pathetic, isn’t it, but it shows what a diverse audience we have in our little workshop and it’s amazing how often we’re struggling with a particular problem and someone from that exact field will appear on the guestbook or via email to say, I can help you with that. Such is the power of the Internet.

But no one could help with that God-forsaken inlet duct. What on earth was Ken thinking of, designing it like that? Who in their right mind would invent such a diabolical shape in welded slithers of paper thin V-bomber? Though I hugely admire the work of Ken and Lew I still maintain that the inlet duct was a disaster of design and execution and it’s little wonder it failed at every opportunity. We had to do better this time around because I reckon Ken would be well miffed if nothing was learned and no evolution took place.

For that reason the first thing we did was review the materials and choose something that was both less prone to cracking and better able to take a stronger rivet. That settled we set about knocking some shapes out of flat tin.

The original formers had already spent many weeks on specially made tooling bringing them back to shape then the whole lot was built onto another tool that holds them all in their correct relative positions but without the encumbrance of a big tin boat underneath to make the fabrication tricky. The new duct was laid up within it and welded together in sections but the unending problem with welded shapes is that every weld shrinks the material and pulls everything wonky. Now consider this… You weld two pieces of tin together and they pull closer along the line of the weld distorting the job so once it’s cooled you set about the welds with a hammer to stretch the metal back from whence it came. Trouble is, very often the shrink is heavily biased across the weld rather than along its length so, although your hammer work will easily stretch it flat across the weld again, the result is often that the job ends up stretched just as much the other way and it becomes too long along the weld as a result.

This is how it works. Weld the two pieces of tin from top to bottom and the extent of the shrinkage in the horizontal and vertical planes is represented by the size of the red arrows. But hit it with a hammer to stretch the welds and all bets are off because when stretching it again the arrows would all be the same size and now, suddenly, your job is too tall from top to bottom. Now trap the piece in the middle of a compound curve and the problem of maintaining shape as you build can be appreciated. It wasn’t easy, and soon this particular project outgrew the tooling and had to be firmly spannered to the boat to hold in check its more extreme wanderings as the shape developed.

Naturally you’d have to be pretty stupid to place any such structure ahead of a gas turbine without understanding it properly and, apart from the design revisions, this included a comprehensive programme of dye-penetration testing along the length and breadth of every weld…

There then followed many hours of tin-bashery, planishing, polishing, fettling, shrinking, swearing, starting again and a general loss of sanity…

…until, at last…

Thank f@*! for that! There’s still much to do before the Orph’ can suck air through it but that’s the vital part built. The rivet twins will have a field day once it comes back from the paint shop.

While we were about it we also stitched the fuel tank back together. It’s about the only piece of the boat where Ken must’ve said, ‘let’s just make this bit out of ordinary aluminium’ because it’s deliciously soft and can be pushed effortlessly where you want it to go. This, of course, is why it came up looking like a crushed Coke tin having sunk in 40m of water whilst full of air at 1 atmosphere but a bit of a ding with a hammer here and there and it really took shape.

Did we mention that we cut it into a dozen pieces first?

And one of the flutes has finally gone to BettaBlast too. It’s been a long time coming (or should that be going) but it finally went on the roof of the van and away for a coat of paint.

With the duct and the flute out of the way it was time for a little R&R and there’s always a mountain of small things to go at; little pieces that can be wrapped up in a single session unlike the epics that are ducts and flutes.

Below are the strips from under the spray baffles. Take a look at K7 in her final guise and you’ll see these pieces running along the lower edges of the Perspex baffles that kept water out of her engine.

Archive picture by kind permission of Neil Sheppard. http://www.bluebirdk7.com/

See those huge, triangular slabs of Perspex bolted to the sides of the cockpit? Now look at their bottom edge and the accompanying aluminium strips. They were there to contain rubber gaskets either side of the Perspex and stop water getting up into the engine through what would otherwise have been a gap. We got every one of them out of the lake, though they were a little crumply.

Perfect for a relaxing hour with the hammers… one of them needed a new end but that’s about as bad as it got.

A bit of a polish and some tweaking and they were good as new.

Likewise, these bits.

Again, take a look at K7 in her final form and you’ll see these small vents poking out of the top of her engine cover near its forward edge, providing you can drag your eyes away from the pink leopard-skin print, that is…

Archive picture by kind permission of Neil Sheppard. http://www.bluebirdk7.com/

The front of the boat is to the right in this shot so you can see how that little vent faced into the airflow and simply channelled a draught of outside air through bilges awash with kerosene and red hot ironmongery as either a makeshift, ram-air cooling system or ventilation or both. The reason for the pink leopard skin is that they’ve been lovingly cleaned and readied to go back on the boat by young Sophie…

Soph’ is, of course, waaaaay too young to remember Donald and so by the Hapless Lottery Failure’s reckoning she oughtn’t to be interested in what we’re doing so her life must be pretty dull to have her spending her Saturdays with us mending a tin boat.

But all these small widgets are merely a stop gap. Yes, they all have to be cleaned and stored away again for the day they’re needed but what we really want is the big bits going on and soon we’ll have a heap of parts for what we call a, ‘Big Build Saturday’ when much progress will be made and I’m hoping Rob of the rivet twins will keep us all up to speed. Unfortunately, this month’s report is a little Spartan but at least he’s taken the time to explain cricket for us.

Until next month…

*

It has been fairly quiet in the rivet department of late. This is because we are waiting or should I say, were waiting for panels to rivet to the old girl. The waiting is just about over and in the next few weeks Mike and I will be the busiest team in the workshops for many months to come.

Mind you, Mike and I have not stood idle. I have been keeping my de riveting eye in while at the same time getting a taster for what could well be our next project. The Fairey Barracuda. We have had five or six elevator bits delivered to the workshop which I have been stripping down,

To make one complete elevator we need at least nine feet of elevator rod. You have to remember that these parts have been lying in fields and on the sides of mountains getting on for sixty years so the weather has done them no favours. Its only when I get the skins off and asses the amount of corrosion in the rod can we see how much is likely to be saved and go back into the rebuild. Up till now I have managed to strip four sections down to the bare bones and have ended up with about six foot of original usable material, we may struggle unless more parts appear from somewhere. The panels and hinges however are a different story, with a bit of fettling we have enough already for what we need. People have asked me if we intend to fly it when it’s finished in the same way we intend to run the boat. My answer to them is, “The bugger couldn’t fly when it was new so what chance do we have?”

Meanwhile, Mike has been working on his favourite project, making patches for the front corrugated floor section. Bloody good job he has made of it too. Good news is that he has now had his last patch welded in and it is just about ready to go back on.

You may have spotted Bill, Mike and myself on pic of the day looking up at the pointy end. You will also notice the inner floor has a multitude of skin pins in it, The problem we have is if we remove those pins, which is a must to get the next skins on, would that hold to the frame despite having gallons of choccie sauce holding it?

Rather than take the chance we came up with a plan. Drill and countersink between the original rivet holes, Secure the panel with countersunk rivets then remove the skin pins. We still have the original rivet holes to attach Mike’s corrugation and the outer floor too without compromising the secure fixing of the inner floor.

While all of this was going on, Bill has also announced that the long awaited air intakes are just about right and Mike Bull has been busy this week drilling the holes for the starboard flute. I have been assured that a few tweaks on each of these, a quick trip to the paint shop, then these will be passed on to the rivet team for final fixing.

We apologise if things have seemed a bit slow of late but if all goes to plan there should be a lot more boat to talk about next diary.

And finally…

Aaaahh, the hot, sweaty atmosphere, the smell of linseed oil, the sound of willow hitting leather. Anyway enough of my rivet-mate Mike Ramsey’s private life I’m here to talk about cricket.

Yes it’s nearing that time of year when the sportsmen who wear shorts and T shirts and chase a ball through the winter months make way for the summer sportsmen clad in long trousers and thick woolly jumpers. That’s right, it’s the cricket season.

Where do we start?

If you happen to be an insomniac then try watching this game. Instant cure.

Of all the ball chasing sports this has to be the oddest, one game can last for days or even weeks. No matter, I will endeavour to explain the principles of the game to the less initiated.

As in football you have one team against another, that’s where the similarity ends.

You have one team that is in and the other team is out, the team that is out have to try and get the team that is in, out. This is where cricket sticks come in. there are two sets of three cricket sticks twenty two yards apart known as wickets or stumps each with two smaller sticks balanced on top known as bails. The man who is in has a cricket stick which is narrow at the top and broader at the bottom called a bat. One man with a bat stands in front of a set of three sticks each, while one of the men who is out throws a very hard ball at one of them very fast. His object is to hit the man’s middle stump and knock his bails off. I said bails, Mike, they wear a proper box to stop that happening, while the man with the bat has to hit the ball as far as he can.

Once the team who are out get the team that are in, out they then go in and the team who were in but are now out have to get the team that were out but are now in out, when they get the team who were out but are now in out they go in again, so the team that were out then went in but are now out again have to get the team that were in then went out but are now back in out again. Hope you are following so far. So we now have a team who have been in, out, and in again, and a team that has been out, in, and out again. (Even I am losing track and I’m the expert) The team that were out then went in but are now back out again have to get the team that were in then went out but are now back in again out so they can go back in. Zzzzzzzzzzzz. Sorry nodded off. Now the team that started off in went out then in and out again have to get the team that were out, went in, were out again but now are in out. That’s the end off the game.

FAQ

So how do you get out?

 If the man chucking the ball knocks your bails off you’re out.

If the ball hits your leg and the team who are out shouts HOWZAT very loudly you’re out.

If you manage to hit the ball and someone who is out catches it you’re out.

Or, if you’re halfway through changing ends with your mate and one of the out team knock your bails off, your out. This is known as ‘being stumped’

Now you might think that when one of the above happens you would have to go and join the out team. This is not the case because you’re technically still in. You merely retire to the pavilion for tea and cucumber sandwiches and only when ten of the in team are out are you officially out and the out team then goes in.

Do you score goals?

No, if the man with the bat hits the ball far enough he changes places with the man at the other end. This is called a run and whoever has changed places with his mate at the other end the most after what seems an eternity wins the match. The winners celebrate by having tea and cucumber sandwiches while the losers drown their sorrows in tea and cucumber sandwiches

Do they have Half time?

No. They stop for tea which consists of tea and cucumber sandwiches.

Can this sport be seen on television?

Yes but mainly if it is broadcast from overseas. If its being played in England you’re more likely to be greeted with an old episode of Randal And Hopkirk deceased as rain will have stopped play. Most people prefer to watch this anyway.

Have England got a good team?

Not really, got beat off Ireland who no one knew had a team till last week.

Have any old sayings originated from this game?

Good question and the answer is yes.

Posh people sometimes can be heard saying. “Oh I say old boy, that just isn’t cricket.

As cricket is only played by gentlemen this translates as ungentlemanly conduct.

Being stuck for an answer or ‘stumped’ comes from a cricketer being stumped out and wondering why he tried to make a run when he knew he hadn’t hit the ball hard enough.

On a sticky wicket. This is a fairly recent one which actually derives from my first wedding in 1973. We had booked the local cricket club for the reception and some people had far too much to drink so went outside on the grass to chuck up. Unfortunately this was the bit off grass where the wicket was to go for the following mornings game. The man that had to stand there was known as being on the “sicky” wicket. Over the years this was evolved into the word sticky wicket through translation. Now used worldwide, to be on a sticky wicket, or to be in an unpleasant or awkward position.

Well folks that’s cricket summed up, hope you all have a better understanding of the game now.

Join me next time when I will try and explain the purpose of another pointless sport.

January 2011

Back in the day, American Indians were recruited to work the high-rise steelwork of a burgeoning Manhattan because they had no innate fear of heights. A brilliantly similar choice was made when staffing one of those, Safe-Speed-For-Life-Because-Children-Die Every-Day-When-We're-Not-Here-To-Catch-Murdering-B'stards-Like-You, vans ensuring that the operator suffered no pangs of conscience in summarily dismissing me to one of those Speed Patronisation Courses for straying a few mph over the limit. His simple genius and low cunning had him lie in wait at the bottom of a hill a mile or so from the school and fill his boots.

Northumbria Police wants to educate not prosecute, or so they assured me. Do you feel persecuted? They asked. Well, as a matter if fact I did, because I don’t see a fleet of sneaky vans photographing irresponsible pedestrians daydreaming across the public highway then having them hauled away to be hit for sixty quid and four hours of the Green Cross Code. It’s us motorists getting the one-sided lumber.

Please don’t misunderstand me here… I don’t speed, at least not on purpose. Nor do I buy the ‘lapse of concentration’ bullshit, which seems to underpin their credo. Face facts, humans can’t concentrate to save our lives (literally, in many cases), we’re hopelessly bad at it. I read somewhere of NASA developing an optical switching system to overcome astronauts having to lift gloved hands against launch g-forces only to scrap it again because those highly focused and trained rocketmen let their eyes wander all over the overhead until Terry Wogan blared out of the speakers and the vacuum portaloo in the next compartment threatened to burst their eardrums.

Once seated comfortably the presiding traffic womble, or perhaps that should be womblette, admitted that humans can manage only ten to twenty minutes of decent concentration in every hour then tried to squirm out of the equal truth of degraded or none existent concentration for the other forty or fifty.

She hurried on… Did you know that in 2009 over two thousand people died on Britain’s roads? Enough to fill ten jumbo jets. Womblette demonstrably hadn’t a clue about how big a jumbo was. Poor research – my favourite.

 I whittled her apocalyptic tale down to four jumbos then shattered her retaliatory theory that even four crashed jumbos would keep passengers out of the air with Lockerbie, Japan Airlines, Air India and the Pan-Am / KLM altercation at Los Rodeos.

Having moved us swiftly on she then gravely (pun intended) stated that forty two people were killed on the roads in the Northumbria force area in 2009 with one in four being ‘speed-related’ but of this unfortunate dozen, Womblette couldn’t cite a single example of one flattened by the likes of those represented in the room – ‘marginal speeders’ as they call us. Ordinary people trying to offset what the law wants against getting through another day – people with perfectly legal radios, CD players and extra seats full of nattering distraction in their cars. People who, despite not meaning to speed and driving to the best of their abilities, occasionally glance at the speedo’ only to hastily lift off with all thoughts of the day’s tasks replaced by low-yield panic until the needle slides back to the 30 mark.

‘Human Limitations’

That was the title of a paper I had to pass before the CAA would give me a pilot’s license. It dealt with the deeper reasons why humans occasionally make a balls of things because in the aviation world it’s well understood that humans can only master a task to a certain standard beyond which improvement is an unreasonable expectation – truism that seems not to have reached the traffic wombles yet. Yes, it’s illegal to speed but it’s also illegal to die in the House of Commons, and it’s seriously bad practice to crash your airliner so why don’t pilots just concentrate more?

One by one, Womblette’s wretched victims vomited their guilt – not paying attention, in a hurry, etc, etc. No way was I about to abase myself before the altar of speed-related belittlement when the truth is I was driving as well as I could… Humans perform any task to a tolerance – plus or minus. Humans can no more drive at precisely 30mph than draw a perfect freehand circle as Pablo Picasso tried and failed to do… That’s all she got from me.

I asked what the typical tolerance might be - plus or minus ten mph… five, perhaps? But Womblette didn’t know. With no data or footing in scientific study she couldn’t say whether she had a collection of lawbreakers culled from the roads of Northumbria and fully deserving of a bollocking, or a representative cross section of above average drivers from whom she ought to try and learn something and not the other way around. She didn’t especially enjoy having that spelled out but it damn-well needed spelling out because it’s true.

Quickly shunning the horror in the second row with measured answers unlike anything her womble training course had told her to expect, we were then expected to buy into an accident scenario contrived to the point of perverseness to be sure the driver was hung drawn and quartered.

In short, a poor lad walking with his mates down the nearside path, made a most unfortunate decision to cross the road at a shallow angle as a car approached. Why he didn’t hear the car wasn’t pondered. Maybe he had his Podeye plugged into his ears or maybe the gently purring, modern engine and anti-lock brakes allowed the car to slither to a standstill in relative silence but whatever the truth the driver jumped on the brakes, according to the police chalk-lines all over the street, and veered right until he ran out of slightly soggy road. Problem was, the photo of the aftermath didn’t add up at all.

How far beyond the point of impact did the car stop? I asked. All the police cars and hi-vis-jacketed busybodies seemed to be surrounding the murder-death car. How fast was it traveling when it hit the lad and how much further did it go? Only a metre, it transpired, and it was barely moving at impact. This was clearly a freakish accident that could’ve happened in a supermarket car park. But the wombles’ argument lived by the fact that, according to the police boffins, the car was doing thirty-eight when the driver hit the brakes. ‘Speed-related’ is what mattered, you see, so its very freakishness was not about to be admitted if they could skirt around it.

It later emerged that what actually happened was that the lad tripped at the last and, so far as Womblette would have us believe, gently glanced his head off the plastic bumper of a Clio and succumbed to his injuries at the scene. The lack of any witness mark on the closely photographed and still grime covered bumper (and we’ve all had a startled pigeon imprinted on our windscreen at some point) and blood on the tarmac under the passenger door suggested a more sinister scenario but they weren’t going there. After all, fatally injuring someone at a snail’s pace wouldn’t sit well in a speed patronisation lesson.

It was a one-in-a-million and desperately unfortunate accident that must have been devastating for all involved but to twist it around and lay it firmly at the feet of the driver when so many factors conspired to produce the outcome was utterly disgusting.

Had the driver got his foot down the boy might have tripped into the spray thrown by the retreating vehicle. Or, had he set off across the road two seconds later, he may have been killed by a car traveling at the requisite 30mph – then who would they have blamed, I wonder…

What they didn’t seem to have was a straightforward case of some beleaguered motorist ‘marginally speeding’ and an equally distracted pedestrian getting whacked by a car because neither could get out of the way quickly enough. That ought to tell the wombles something.

In conclusion, while we were there having our evening wasted, the speeders who really did need an education were at home with their feet up bitching over their three points.

What a farce.

With a bit of effort the wombles could have left us breathless and wracked with guilt, convinced that higher minds were at work and that we should all strive for the rest of our lives to achieve speed limit obeying Nirvana… not make us sick of the sight of 30-limit signs.

I left the building deeply disappointed but the incident with the car reawakened another tragedy that, off and on, has haunted me for years.

When I was diving, a pretty girl from down the road also took up the sport with her dad who’d dived for years, though I didn’t know him personally. They went down to the sea and he taught her well but she was seventeen and wanted to dive with people, boys mostly, of her own age. But a dive went tragically wrong and she was drowned on the first trip she took without her dad. I spoke to the instructor who’d been with her when the underwater panic took hold and he couldn’t save her and I also interviewed the lad who found her lifeless body forty minutes later and blew her to the surface. There followed a desperate resuscitation attempt – as there always is no matter how futile – but the game was up on a diving accident, pure and simple.

I have two little girls and a love of diving, a sport I will no doubt return to in the fullness of time and they’ll want to come with their daddy to see what all the fuss is about…

Life can be such a lottery sometimes and another whose number came up recently was ‘Corporal’ Paul Evans – radio operator for the 66/67 attempt at Coniston, ‘Base’ as in, ‘Tango to Base…’ and the last person ever to speak to Donald.

Paul sadly passed away after a long illness and was another of the old guard who won’t make it to see Bluebird reborn. Back in 2002 when it became fact that K7 would be rebuilt to working condition I pleaded with the Hapless Lottery Failure to expedite our project so the likes of Paul, and Ken and Lew Norris could breathe old history into new in their twilight years, but the lottery-flops aren’t clever enough to understand something so historically significant and now we’ve lost all three and may lose others along the way.

On the other hand, I’m sure they’d all have been delighted with the cracking coverage we enjoyed over the holidays thanks to our mates at Sky News. I’ve no idea how many times the doco was aired but it was lots and our project positively lit up with thousands of new visitors and, more importantly, a welcome shot in the arm for our flagging coffers… Thanks to all you good people who dug deep in the skintest part of the year to buy something above and beyond the call of Christmas pressies.

The other tremendous event – and it went largely unnoticed – is that we completed the structure at long last and finally managed to clash some serious bodywork on the old tin girl with rivets and everything. She got her cockpit opening back, in case you missed it.

And now that’s all there is to do – stick bodywork on and spoon her internal organs back in. You’re about to see some dramatic visual progress from now on and speaking of dramatic, what about the Sky News animation, eh?

OK, the moaning minority picked fault and you’ll always get that amongst those who confuse computer games and movies with real life but there’s no denying that it’s the best effort yet and if only it were possible to properly explain what a lengthy and labour-intensive process it is to produce such a thing there’d be a few eyes opened to just what a grand piece of work it is. There was only one slight inaccuracy... I’ll be the first to admit that it is difficult to tell from the photographic and videographic evidence that the boat actually fell on her left-hand side, and the animation depicted it as a slow roll from the moment of takeoff. But that isn’t how it went. What actually happened is that the boat was falling but still facing along track with wings level until, at the last second, she yawed left and in so doing the wind got under the right-hand sponson and pitched it upwards. In the last fraction of a second a violent left-roll was initiated and, although the sponsons smashed down left side first and immediately righted themselves along with the front spar, there’s no way they had sufficient authority to stop the main hull from continuing its roll until it landed flat as a pancake on the forward half of the left-hand cockpit wall.

At such speeds the water simply couldn’t get out of the way and the frame flat-packed itself against a surface that may as well have been the car park at the boating centre for all its compliance. The first major failure was both longitudinal frame tubes at the left side of F-17, the bulkhead at the front of the cockpit seat.

This is the first piece we ever lifted, the left-hand cockpit wall from F-15 to F-17 where the frame snapped. Look in the middle and you’ll see the oval blister added to the side to accommodate the steering gear then notice that vertical crease running right through the middle of it. That’s where it’s been swaged around the F-17 vertical frame tube proving that the frame failed before the outer skin was wrapped around it. Notice also that the outer skin has been fairly evenly flattened against the underlying structure.

This is the front half of the left-hand cockpit wall, it looked as below when we found it…

…once again, the panels have been brutally hydroformed around the structure by a blow from the left, the important point being that they’re still there – squashed against the frame but still attached. Now compare this to the damage to the opposite side as-recovered and the difference is quite striking. Here’s the right-hand cockpit wall from F-15 to F- 23 (the point of the bow)

You’re looking at the inside face and the outer panels are gone, blown outwards from left to right.

Here it is again from the outside, the outer skin hung in its original position for illustrative purposes…

See what I mean? It’s the total opposite effect with the skin ripped outwards and mostly blown to kingdom come and below is the right-hand frame when stripped of its covering tinware before it was mended. In particular, look at the longitudinal frame tube at floor level and you can clearly see that it’s kinked to the right.

You can also see the separated forward half of the left-hand cockpit frame standing there all shiny and silver having just returned from BettaBlast because whereas most of the frame came up in 2001, it was another six years before that last piece was found.

Returning to the more intact right-hand side, it also failed at F-17 but, crucially, the failures in the upper and lower longitudinals were fore and aft of the F-17 vertical, which then acted as a torque tube preventing the halves from separating. F-17, by the way, is where that U-shaped crossmember spans the cockpit.

This is the fracture at F-17 being dressed back to clean metal prior to sleeving, pinning and welding. To the left of the die-grinder is the top of the F-17 crossmember. The fracture in the lower tube was the other side of this allowing the vertical to hold it all together.

The longitudinal tube was straight to within a few millimetres once we’d effected a  repair.

Now consider this, watching most video of the crash it’s fairly apparent that the boat yaws left just before impact but in that instance, had she landed level but facing left of track, she’d have been hit on the right side of her cockpit not the left and the damage would have been reversed.

Convinced yet? No? OK – here’s some more. Remember that the left-hand side of the cockpit broke away completely forward of F-17. Well it landed 140m to the north east of the impact site…

Think about this carefully… K7 was travelling north at the time of the accident so the front-left cockpit wall was facing north west, yet it departed to the north east, completely the other side to where it came from.

The reason is that as the boat impacted the cockpit failed at F-17 but the now separated section didn’t penetrate the surface. Instead it flipped beneath the rolling boat and shot out the other side like a skimming stone retaining its forward energy but with an easterly component added by the roll.

Still not convinced? Look at the fin.

Study the root of the leading edge and the fairing that replaced the rudder and what do you see? Both edges are beaten this way and that’s because the right-hand face of the fin smacked flatly onto the water on the first roll because the boat landed equally flatly on her left and the whole lot went up and over when she snapped at F-15. Got it yet?

Here’s another for the hard of understanding…

Notice those two arrows pointing left to right… It’s obvious that, as you look at the wrecked inlet mouths, the one on the right has been torn wide open whilst the other has been squished shut and this is why…

Having flat-packed the entire cockpit, the rest of the hull landed like an open cup and the left-hand throat (as you sit in the boat) got a great mouthful of water, ripped open then flung the hull over until it landed on the outer face of the other throat, which got squashed shut for its trouble.

And just in case you still haven’t got it here’s the video.

There you have it, proof positive. It’s plain as can be that K7 fell over yet strangely it’s not apparent, lost between frames or masked in the angles in all the other footage so we’re lucky we have that one good example.

Enough of that though… what’ve we been doing?

We had our annual team gathering in Coniston on the 8^th of January. We all made our way over there for an evening of beer, food and craziness with the kids and that in itself is especially significant. I know I enjoy the occasional pop at the Hapless Lottery Failure for their ‘anyone under the age of forty won’t be interested’ nonsense but they didn’t actually say that – they paid someone good money to come up with it on their behalf. Even then, not all of them were signed up to it but they still paid the bill and that’ll do for me, but what about it? I was talking to a member of a speed record enthusiasts group recently who told me their youngest member was in his thirties. Well that’s just wonderful for their long-term survivability. (Or ‘sustainability’ as the museum lot would say).

Our youngest member is currently two years old and comes to the phone at bed time on workshop nights to ask if Daddy is ‘fixing Bluebird’ before she’s tucked up in bed.

Our workshop is festooned with kids’ drawings and paintings and more than a few will remember or be reminded of their involvement when they grow up and that’s what it’s all about. Who knows who or what we may inspire.

Mind you, we’ll not be inspiring anyone until the bureaucratic system takes a few more arthritic steps towards signing off our simple byelaw amendment. It honestly staggers me that they ever get anything done, when they can waste years of our lives on a simple question like, can we please drive our boat at more than 10mph on a lake?

Then there’s the question of when… No doubt the political agenda will run aground on the reef of common sense, as usual. The idea of operating K7 at a time when there’s little tourism to give the place a boost makes sense on paper but there’s a good reason for the lack of tourists – the weather’s crap, and K7 doesn’t work in crap weather. She was once sunk, and I mean properly sunk, by the wash of pleasure craft vying for a good look so she’ll not stand much of a swell. But Campbell was running in January, I hear the cry. Yes, and he was sick of the weather keeping the attempt under canvas. Would you like to take time off work to go stand at the side of a desolate, windswept lake to see bugger-all? No more then we’d enjoy putting on the bugger-all show for you. Then there’s the kids’ holidays to consider… surely the bureaucrats wouldn’t entertain the thought of timing this event for when the future of our nation is cooped up in school all day.

But at least we only have the odd smattering of bureaucracy to frustrate us nowadays because it seems the idiot population has moved on. Never thought I’d say this but in a peculiar way I miss the amazement, incredulous disbelief and challenge of working against some of the most highly accomplished idiots this country has ever produced. I’d always just lumped idiots into a single category until we started looking into where to test our tin boat and I came face to face with a high up official in charge of water in its various forms – rivers, lakes, reservoirs – that sort of thing. This bloke had obviously come across a few special cases and had a system of classification that intrigued me and went as far as the Type II idiot. Since then we have clearly identified the Type III and evidence suggests another, even higher-functioning type but we’ve not positively identified one so in the meantime please enjoy the Bluebird Project guide to idiot types.

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[An idiot, dolt, or dullard is a mentally deficient person, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way.] (Wiki)

Standard Idiot.

The standard idiot is to the human race what pigeons are to city streets. Irritating whilst simply being themselves and individually harmless whilst large concentrations can prove deleterious to health – mental health, that is.

An endearing characteristic of the standard idiot is that once the outward manifestations of idiocy are pointed out, and this may require some patience and the boiling-down of simple concepts, the standard idiot will usually grin in understanding then endeavour to improve themselves. The fact that they were born an idiot generally precludes spectacular progress but the process has a faintly charming quality nonetheless.

Danger level – minimal.

Type I Idiot.

The Type I is as above in many ways but lacking the kindly nature and slightly guilty manner when confronted with evidence of its own idiocy. The Type I is usually either obnoxious or overly friendly, the latter requiring most caution as those unskilled in spotting the more exotic idiot forms may realise somewhat later than is comfortable to tell the offender where to go. Occasionally a vestigial form of learning ability still exists in the Type I and, with extreme stimulation, a punch in the face, perhaps, or telling the offender precisely what you think in good strong language, this recessive attribute may briefly spring to life and exact beneficial change on the individual concerned.

Danger level – low to moderate.

Type II Idiot.

The first of the dangerous varieties, Type IIs are predominantly masters of the over-friendly method because all doorways to the human world would otherwise be closed without this vital coping tool. Mild pity may be taken on examples that combine stupidity with idiocy though these are rare – the majority of type IIs are reasonably intelligent but lack the closed loop linking self-observation to the learning and behavioural-modification centres of the brain.

This cerebral short-circuiting is best observed in the Type IIs frequent and expeditious flight into a huff condition when faced with the conflict between idiotic self-recognition and the absence of an innate mechanism for rapid behavioural modification.

Patients exhibiting these symptoms are at serious risk of spiralling into the Type III regime of heaping spectacularly stupid acts one upon the next in an orgy of self-defeat.

Another seldom-encountered evolution of the Type II is the intelligent / obnoxious variety where the cumbersome matter of outward friendliness is dispensed with in place of learning, researching and accumulating vast tracts of knowledge with which to impress and regale other idiot types and weaker subjects.

It should be noted that all Type IIs are dangerous due to a typical inability to modify their stance regardless of how utterly defeated, outgunned or proven wrong they may be. Extended periods of mental hibernation awaiting the trigger that will start them off all over again is typical and may give others some respite but the Type II has a single redeeming feature elevating it above the Type III, this being its modicum of low cunning and on rare occasions the Type II may see a vision – a vision of themselves as others see them – and, although unable to publicly acknowledge this epiphany, they will usually drop from sight at this point never to be seen or heard from again.

Danger Level – moderate to high.

Type III Idiot.

The Type III is to the human race what syphilis is to sex, it represents the highest functioning idiot life-form formally classified by social science. There’s good reason why words do not exist in the English language (nor probably any other) to fill the disbelieving silences left in the wake of Type III activity.

Type IIIs are the true masters of the over-friendly technique and with a penchant for overdone pleasantries they make smarming headway through the social orbit of their victims with a desperate need to please and a love of mummy that would make Oedipus blush.

True Type IIIs are serial losers with little to show for their stay on the planet, their calling requiring the sacrifice, faith and lifetime dedication of a monk.

Career-wise, they find themselves endlessly returned to square-one due to an inabilty to work with anyone, finally achieving middle-aged stagnation when claimed either by premature redundancy or a weak-willed and last-ditch attempt to work for themselves.

But what really sets the Type III apart from other idiot species is their staggering determination to heap one fantastically stupid act on top of the next leaving observers intrigued and dumbstruck in equal measure.

The Type III doesn’t rest for a moment – forging relationships that live and die like summer moths it slithers through society like diarrhoea, afflicting many but making no friends in a transitory universe utterly beyond its grasp where only family and other idiot types can tolerate long-term association.

Like cancer, two discreet forms exists. The benign form is often found in bureaucratic circles making preposterous rules that no one can understand whilst the malignant form grows as an ugly, unwanted tumour within a social group spawning poisonous platitudes that, due to an inability to learn, alter little with the passage of time.

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But back to the serious business of tin-bashing… we’ve still got lots to go at and one area that’s well advanced these days is the cockpit and, as its creator and head of the Anal-Widgetry Dept, Mr Bull now takes up the tale.

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Step In To My Office

By Mike Bull

While everyone in the workshop can lend their hand to most things when needed, many of us also have our own specific roles and for myself, my biggest solo responsibility by far is getting the little visual details right, especially in the cockpit, where a lot of the finer detail was lost in the crash and never recovered, or recovered at the time and then lost! Either way Bluebird was without many features of her cockpit, so I’ve been a busy boy in there, and have much still to do. It is fast becoming a recognisable space though, so here is a little descriptive tour of the cockpit as it stands, from left to right, to give you an idea of how it’s going- what’s original, what isn’t, what’s done, and what’s still to do. The text is keyed to these photos-

The actual structure of the cockpit is largely original- the frame tubes either side, the bulkheads, seat structure, floor, inner cockpit rails, exterior skins etc- only the right hand cockpit rail and the F18 and F20 bulkheads are new, along with two new outriggers on the right hand side at F18 and F16. Recorded photographically for all time, the dreaded bright green new parts have recently been hand painted in silver along with the rest of the cockpit, bringing it all back into one unified appearance at last. Doing that alone took me days!

Starting our tour down at our left, mounted on a little bracket attached to F17 is the gorgeous brass valve that controlled Donald’s breathing air, and its associated Siebe Gorman contents gauge. (1) Both these items needed little more than a good clean (thanks, Novie!) and putting back into place. (Very heavily made as it is, I still marvel that the gauge wasn’t shattered in the impact, given that it was located right down on the left hand side, which impacted the water first) 

Directly above the breathing air, fixing into captive nuts at F16 and F17, is the radio box. (2) As you’ll all know, Corporal Paul Evans was seconded from the Army to assist Donald Campbell with his communications and Bluebird was fitted with a Murphy A41 Mk.2 radio set of the kind more usually carried by a soldier in a ‘manpack’. These radios are very heavy items, and Bluebird’s original set is surely lost forever, deeply sunk into the gloop at the bottom of Coniston. We have a rare replacement set that was kindly donated to us in 2007. The radio sat on top of it’s battery, which was a cardboard outer case filled with cells- the original will of course have long ago dissolved into nothing in the lake, leaving us with a look-a-like recreation that I’ve made; replacement originals are hard to find but moreover in this case, they are full of corrosive nastiness that we don’t want leaking out into our precious museum exhibit!

The radio box itself however IS original, coming out of the lake squashed virtually flat and for the most part rebuilt a few years ago by Mark Evans, son of the Corporal. I’ve finished the box off by assembling the brackets, painting it and reattaching the original rubber strips, electrical connector block and P-clip to it. Interestingly, the box was painted blue on the outside when recovered- not ‘Bluebird blue’ however, but obviously just any old blue paint they’d had to hand at the time, presumably to negate the fact that the radio set itself was…gasp…green!

Hiding under the radio box and partly obscured by the air valve is one patch of cockpit that we’ve not painted silver- the little hand-signed dedication from Gina Campbell on F17, made on the occasion of her setting the first ever rivet in the rebuild. That particular rivet itself also remains subtly unpainted. (3)

Continuing forwards on the left hand side of the cockpit we come to what we refer to as ‘the steering cover’. (4) This is an item that was fitted to Bluebird from new and which seems to have remained pretty much the same through all her many variations. Fitting from F17 to F19, the lightly padded aluminium cover separated Donald’s left leg from the linkage of the steering mechanism, which ran from the left side of the foot well, back parallel to his leg, and then outwards at F17 to the side of the boat before continuing aft. On top of the cover was mounted a G-meter, which was also padded over, in a little kennel of vinyl and foam. The G-meter was a totally self contained item, with no external power supply, remote sensor or the like- there’s simply a little screw on the back to lock or unlock it, and a knob on the front to reset it. As far as is known, no readings were ever kept from this gauge, and at a guess it was probably fairly redundant much of the time. The gauge is an exact replacement item, and the cover is also new, though luckily all the holes needed to reposition it exactly remained in the boat. Interestingly, the positioning of the cover means that the pilot’s left leg is always pressed somewhat into his right- Donald would have had to discreetly and carefully adjust himself when sitting down, for fear of trapping any of his vital personal equipment!

Moving hastily on, above this position, at the forward end of the left hand inner cockpit rail, is located the fire panel. (5) This little square plate held the two lights and two switches associated with the on-board fire suppression system, and is another item that had to be recreated entirely from nothing but photographs. Luckily it used totally standard car warning lights and known switch types, so getting replacements was, for once, an off the shelf job. The panel itself is just a square of bare aluminium, with two water-slide decals that I recreated in my computer, again from the reference photos. Interestingly, the panel is largely hidden from the pilots view when sat normally in the boat. (‘Across The Lake’ fans will note that when starting his boat, Donthony Campkins was actually pressing buttons on the fire panel!)

Moving to the centre of the boat, down in the foot well between F18 and F19 we have a recreated piece of raised flooring, located where Donald’s feet would have rested. (6) A remaining task here is to mount the radio foot pressel switch, another item that was fitted to K7 for virtually her whole career. Mounted then on F19 itself is the throttle pedal (7).

The pedal on its shaft, the operating arm and the right hand mounting bracket/bearing assembly that fits behind F19 are all original- only the left hand bracket and the foot plate are new items. To the right of the pedal (and mostly out of shot here) lives a favourite little item for many on the project, ‘Donald’s trouser guard’. Lord knows what the guys back in the day actually called this little piece of thin aluminium, but it can only have been there to keep the pilot’s trouser leg out of harm, or perhaps to help position his foot? The ‘trouser guard’ is entirely original, and is fixed back to F19 in every last one of its original rivet holes.

Staying in the centre of the boat and coming up, we get to the instrument panel. (8) Bluebird went through a few of these in her time, of various shapes, sizes and mounting methods, but by the time she was rolled out in 1966, it looked like this.

The panel has been a real labour of love, given that the original- which would have been a very heavy item indeed- was lost and is (as yet) unrecovered. Mounted only on eight small rubber anti-shock mounts, and with some cabling behind it, the panel- one of the thickest slabs of tin on the whole boat- would have sheared out of the collapsing cockpit and shot out probably virtually unimpeded, flying off in who knows what direction, most likely in one piece.

So a new panel was required, and luckily, there was enough good reference material to make one. The biggest help was that the instruments and switches were all universal sizes, making the scaling and positioning of the panel’s contents (which are neither symmetrical nor level with one another!) a fairly easy task. Only the top edge of the panel remained uncertain for a time, having as I did to wait and allow for fitment under the gently curving body skins.

From the off, the panel had two redundant screw holes in it which don’t correspond to any of the switch or instrument types, so heaven knows what they were ever for, but I positioned and drilled them anyway! Luckily for me the panel was clearly hand made, with less than perfect holes for the gauges, poor counter sinking, etc- so it was right at my level!

Replacing the contents of the panel has been interesting- some items, like the warning lights, push button and switches, are very plentiful and freely available, likewise the RPM gauge on the right, but the jet pipe temperature gauge to the left- known as the ‘EXH gauge’ in our case- has proven to be fun to track down. Very close matches can be found, and indeed we have a few of these in stock, but an exact item has eluded us to the point of me thinking that as Donald’s donor Gnat was a pre-production prototype, so might his gauge have been. Well, we could use a gauge we have as-is and virtually no one would ever spot the tiny difference, or perhaps we’ll get the card of one tweaked to suit- we’ll see.

The air (water?!) speed indicator at the top of the panel is also a very standard gauge, with one exception- it’s marked in MPH, not knots. We never did find out what application used the MPH version, but we do at least have a beautiful example of the right instrument, from a kind donation. Currently our panel is in the 1966 configuration, but of course once at Coniston the speedo was soon raised up to the very top of the panel, housed in a little raised box- to move it more into Donald’s eye line as he drove- and we will of course be doing the same in due course. A little-noticed fact is that there was actually a little pivoting glare shield fitted above the speedo box as well- another item that will need careful recreation.

Another significant item to be mounted at the bottom left corner of the panel will be a Longines stopwatch. Though we’ve yet to fabricate a mount for it, we finally acquired one of these exquisite items in 2009, at some expense- so please keep those donations coming in, and then one day the rest of the team might stop ragging on about ‘Mike’s watch’!

Attention to detail on the panel will extend to copying things like the original being hand painted, with visible brush marks, and to using Donald’s own Dymo machine (and even the same roll of blue tape) to make the labels. (See Diary, Jan 2010)

The section of angle bar spanning the cockpit and holding the bottom of the panel is new, the original having come out of the lake a few days after the crash, still attached to the right hand cockpit rail, steering column and F20 bulkhead. I was able to recreate the brackets and position this angle bar exactly as thankfully we had the original left hand cockpit rail complete with rivet holes and scribe marks showing me where the original had been located, and I was able to copy that information over to the other side. At the time, just spanning the cockpit like that felt like quite the achievement!  

The steering box remains a matter of popular debate, with a few clues but no definitive answer as to what the boat actually had fitted to it. If only they’d left the original one in the lake in 1967! We have a box in the stores that appears to be very close indeed to Bluebird’s, so if all else fails we shall use that, mounted down on F20 and with the column extending up to the centre of the angle bar, secured in an alloy block. We shall of course also have to recreate the big Bluemel’s steering wheel too, although an exact spare of Donald’s does exist though sadly locked away from sight/use.

Now we’re over onto the right hand side of the cockpit, right of the instrument panel and directly opposite to the fire panel; I call this spot ‘Donald’s glove box’. This open space, with the formers rising up from the old flap tray to support the raised exterior skin, is we think a strong contender for being where Mr Whoppit was put for a run. It’s often said that Mr Whoppit was ‘sat under Donald’s seat’, but there simply isn’t an underneath to the seat, so unless Mr W. was sliding around on the floor under Donald’s knees- where he had every chance of being a very naughty little bear by getting into the Bloctube linkages to the right- this ‘glovebox’ area seems to be the most logical spot for him to have gone.

Heading down to the area under this position (10) we’ve yet to fit a mass of brackets and push-pull rods, some of which will be original and others which we have yet to recreate. (We have a good stock of new genuine Bloctube parts though) This gubbins was associated with the throttle pedal linkage and with the low pressure fuel cock- the original handle, rod and bearing for which are back in place on F17. (11) Below this handle, mounted on a stout bracket between F17 and F16, is the big black Bloctube control box, (12) which was quite a large affair for something that was just another link rod control, this time controlling the high pressure fuel. The original Bloctube box was recovered from the lake and was the subject of much debate on the project forum about whether it should be conserved ‘as recovered’ or restored to full working order. As I write, the poll stands at a fairly conclusive 93% being in favour of the control box being restored to full working order, as per the rest of the boat and the entire Bluebird Project ethos. However, it would be easy to control the HP fuel by another means, and just leave the box as it appears here. What do you think?

The last significant thing to mention about the cockpit is the overall upholstery- the seat and headrest are already long made (see Diary, August 2008) but there’s quite a bit of foam and vinyl yet to go into the cockpit. Seat sides, cockpit rails, knuckle guards, F16 pads, F17 knee pad, etc- this will all be fitted probably a little later in the day, in the interests of keeping the dust and swarf out until we finish the rest of the boat!

It’s an honour and a privilege to be recreating Mr Campbell’s cockpit for him and it is very spooky when sat in there surrounded and faced by everything I’ve just described to you. All manner of things come to mind- practical matters like how easy it is to step over the cockpit sides and sit down, how enclosed you are once you’re in, how massively safe and solid the boat feels all around you, how easy it is to see right across the boat’s nose, how your legs are squashed together…and then the more emotional side where it’s almost inconceivable to imagine some of the things that must have gone through Donald’s mind over the years when sat alone in there with the canopy shut, perhaps freezing cold and with the sound of water lapping all around him.

It makes you think, and I hope I do him proud.

*

Another part getting the treatment, and probably the last big challenge on the machine, is the air intake assembly. It basically swallows air from either side of the cockpit and feeds the engine deep in the craft’s bowels but it’s a piece of work to say the least.

We now know that it went through at least three evolutions that seem to have gone unrecorded except for the final one in 66 when the inlets collapsed and scattered metal debris into the spinning engine. The inlets came with a design flaw that made them predisposed to failure that wasn’t really sorted until the 66 mod’s and, if you know what to look for, you can see evidence that they were continually trying to fix it before it gave up totally when faced with the Orph.

It’s the same old trouble – designing an all-metal boat was never going to be simple and by the time the inlets were done it was a hell of a lot of weight up-top despite the use of paper-thin but extremely strong materials straight from the V-bomber parts catalogue.

Because of this, and the fact that we had to build from new, we’ve implemented a design revision that keeps the weight within limits, increases the strength of the bits that like to fly apart and engineers out the reason for them wanting to fly apart in the first place. The result… our shiny, new inlet duct.

It’s a single piece of tin from the throats all the way back to the engine inlet fabricated from a multitude of wheeled segments fully welded and dressed. It’s a work of art to say the least but making it look good is only half of the problem because it has an insidious enemy that seems not to have been accounted for in the original design. Its natural frequency is such that any cracks would grow and be exploited with the engine running so every weld has been rigorously tested and signed off as flawless.

Crack testing is fun to begin with, it’s like messing with pantomime blood and there’s lots of jokes to be made with the girls and dye-covered rags that would have a Sky Sports presenter shown off the premises without his feet touching the floor, but after a while everything turns pink and the floor gets slippery so I was glad when it was done!

There’s various means of finding cracks but this is a simple one you can do at home. You cover the job, yourself, the floor and your mates in fake blood, give it half an hour, during which time it creeps by capillary action into any areas of porosity, then you wipe it off again.

The second stage is to spray it with a developer, which is essentially talc suspended in a solvent. The solvent pulls the red dye straight back out of its hiding places where it shows up like veins on an alcoholic’s nose against the white talc. I’d like to show you that part but by the time I thought to write it down everything was fixed. Maybe later…

We’ve been plodding on with the fluted panels too. They’re another example of picking away at a problem until one day you look and say, that’s ready for the paint shop…

Girl has been on the TIG torch systematically welding rivet holes and rebuilding localised corrosion pits…

…then John gets stuck in to dress the welds as though they’d never been.

Followed by a jolly good whack with a hammer to cure the shrinkage caused by all that welding.

After that, the boys check it for fit and finish and it goes for a further round of fettling. This one is almost done.

The rivet twins have practiced setting rivets in confined corners with a special test rig made from genuine scrap flute too (a section that was replaced on the right-hand side many moons ago). So when the time comes they’ll be able to bash this on in an afternoon.

Then there’s the nose – it’s almost finished. Or at least it was. You see we built it, dressed it, finished it and proudly hung it in place…

…then we found these in the stores.

Genuine chunks of nose, ripped to shreds and crumpled but the real deal nonetheless and, by the time we’d rooted out all the pieces we have, we realised that in actual fact we have more than half of the original panel and you just know what that means. We wasted no time, here’s the first piece shrunk back to flatness, reshaped and put back where it came from.

There’s method in such madness too. I was once told by the museologists (they told me every bloody day for years, actually) that straightening bent metal was destroying history, that every last tweak and ripple was a snapshot in time and once straightened it could never be recaptured. True enough but my argument was that we had two hundred thousand snapshots from which we could keep enough to tell the story, which we have, and build a boat from the rest to give us the best of both worlds. I bolstered this with a further case for photographs being a perfectly valid means of preserving history because for the best part of a century that’s all we had of Titanic. But I’ve since come to realise that the musos are guilty of a far worse crime against history, that of locking it away never to be seen again, which they still do with painful regularity. In the case of our nose wreckage there’s not a shred of doubt they’d have done no more than have a conservator poke at it for weeks then stick it on a plinth with all the subtleties it contains locked away for the rest of time.

Once unravelled the recovered pieces of nose tell us exactly where and how the runner for the cockpit canopy was fixed, where the screws go on the foredeck to hold it down, where and how many screws held the spar fairings – all of which we could have gleaned from photographs but not to this extraordinary level of accuracy – and that small flaps of metal extended down over the top of the spar inside the fairings. What purpose did they serve? We’ve no idea but they’re there now. Without fettling that piece of tin we’d still be guessing and the boat would be less original, so we’ve fettled and welded and can you see the join?

Then there was this piece.

It comprises the greater part of the left-hand side of the nose and once shaped in and finished it too adds originality. Here it is as a work in progress and looking very good.

As a slight aside, remember I mentioned those flaps of metal on top of the spar? You can see one in the above shot. Well we have both of them and they’re completely different side to side for some reason. If we’d only had one we’d have copied it over to the other side and been historically incorrect.

We do, however, work with and respect the museum folks these days now that we’ve reached an understanding forged over the past decade and in the unlikely event that fixing something is decided against in the interests of museology we immediately pass said object to our resident conservator, Louise, for a good going over with those strange implements and potions she keeps in her cabinet. It must be said that we don’t exactly have her run off her feet because there’s not much we can’t mend and this makes the parts we do consign to her tender charge all the more interesting.

We recently reduced K7’s fuel tank to a flat pack because it’s heading south to where our Cockney mate Chris lives and to the headquarters of Proalloy (http://proalloy.co.uk/) where he works, to be properly fettled back into a useable fuel tank. But therein lay a small problem because on top of the tank was an inspection sticker dating back to 1958 (for some reason – what were they buggering about with the tank for in 1958? Anyone?)

The inspection sticker is quite fragile considering that it wasn’t up to much even when new and then it spent forever under water so there wasn’t any way it would live through what the rest of the tank needs to fix it so we did the only decent thing and chopped it out.

We have the best of both worlds now. See that rectangular cutout below?

That’s where the sticker used to live and by removing a rectangle of perfectly ordinary tin we can both conserve the sticker and return the tank to operable condition without compromising either.

This is Louise’s report on what happened next.

*

Bluebird Fuel Tank Inspection Label

Condition

General surface dirt, built up debris and discolouration throughout. The whole section is convex and slightly misshapen as a result the piece does not sit flat.

Numerous areas of heavy pitting and ingrained dirt to vinyl surface with areas of surface loss, most notable on lower section. Surface scratched and lightly abraded.

Total loss of the vinyl towards the top proper right hand corner, edges are tenting/ lifting and undulating. These edges are extremely fragile and need consolidating to prevent further loss.  Losses suffered to all sides of vinyl, small areas of tenting again consolidation will prevent loss.

Cracking/ crazing has occurred in localised areas across the vinyl surface, this will also need addressing to avoid additional deterioration and surface loss.

Before                                                                     After

Treatment

The surface was cleaned with swabs moistened with saliva, followed by swabs moistened with deionised water to remove any dirt or built up debris to prevent or delay any additional losses. A microscope was used whilst cleaning to ensure the surface was not abraded or any loose fragments of vinyl were disturbed.

All loose and tented areas of vinyl were stabilised/ re-adhered using fish glue along with a heat controlled tacking and spatula iron.

Close up detail under microscope:

Recommendations for Display/Storage:

50% RH (± 5%)

18°C

<200 Lux max

<75 m/Lumen max

Store in darkness.

*

So now you know that K7’s tank held 45 ¾ imperial gallons, just another snippet the museologists would have locked away never to be seen because that sticker lived up on top of the tank and we needed a block and tackle to drag the mangled air intakes off it to get in there.

You’ll have noticed by now also that we have several contributors to this month’s diary update and as everything he writes has us rolling with laughter our final contributor was to have been our Roberto… half of the rivet twins and long-serving team member. Unfortunately, however, they’ve been a little short of rivets to bash this month so Mick has been making beautifully sculpted patches for the last remaining piece of floor while Rob has been bashing our Fairey Barracuda into manageable size pieces – more manageable pieces than the pilot broke it into sixty-odd years ago.

The result of this is that we didn’t quite get the in depth account of how the riveting is going but we do have a perfectly valid and largely accurate appraisal of another of mankind’s pointless activities…

Enjoy.

*

When Bill last asked me to do a bit for the diary, despite not knowing the first thing about it I decided to do the piece on F1 motor car racing. Like I say I wasn’t up on the subject so the piece was based on what I saw of it through the eyes of an outsider.

Now Bill has asked me to write another piece for the diary I thought I would practice what Bill has always preached. “Research your subject and don’t write anything down unless your sure of the facts” (Apart from the bit in the last diary entry which said. “That fateful morning in January 76”) I think that may well have been a typo rather than lack of research though. It did however prevent me from joining in the slating of that lady journalist Helen whatshername  as I would have felt a bit of a hypocrite.

Anyway, back to my own research. As luck would have it I was browsing a charity shop when I came across a book. Nick Faldo.  My life on the circuits. Sure to be some good F1 info in that, so I paid the lady on the counter the 25 new pence price tag and off I went home to read up on the sport.

Now I don’t know where this guy gets his money to spend so long on the golf course because I know that’s not cheap, but it became pretty clear after a few chapters it certainly wasn’t from racing cars, the mans a bloody fraud.  Hang on my daughter is trying to tell me something. “I’m thinking of who”?  “Niki Lauda” Ah right, easy mistake to make.

As it turns out Bill didn’t want another F1 piece after all but an account from me of the last month’s events in the rivet department. Just as well really considering my F1 research didn’t go to plan. If you ever want a piece writing about golf though, Bill I have a book….What? You want me to do it now? But I was just about to tell all the boys and girls about how well the riveting of the cockpit rails and stuff went, and how whenever we move onto a new section of the boat before that section even sees a rivet the thickness of each of the skins to be riveted and the amount of skins to be riveted on that section is measured. It is then replicated using scrap pieces, each the same thickness and same order as the job to be done. We then drill holes into the set up and in this case countersink the holes and if necessary use that practice piece for a full session or more to make sure we are getting the rivets perfect every time. We now know the length of the rivet to be used, exactly how we expect it to set and how many hits of the hammer it is likely to take, only then do we move onto the real thing. As Bill said. In the future people will look at the shiny panels on the boat but wont have the first idea of the amount of preparation that was involved in getting even the smallest panel from the scrap pile, to the riveted on the boat stage.

But if Bill wants me to do a bit on golf I will leave that till later.

Now it is common knowledge that I am a keen ball chasing fan. However this is not the case for all ball chasing sports. It rather depends on how far and how quickly the ball is being chased. I have two golf courses within a couple of miles of my house which I will come back to a little later, and as I may have upset a few f1 fans with my last little rant it may well be the case some golfers may find this offensive.

As far as I can make out there are 18 holes to play. Which stretch for several miles. You have a bag full of sticks with varying sizes of metal or wood on the end. The start of each thingy is the tee, You put your ball on the tee, whack it with a woody stick from your bag as far as you can then walk slowly toward the place your ball landed while chatting to your opponent who did the same with his woody stick. When both balls are found they hit them again this time with an irony stick, at this stage it becomes almost as exciting as the pit stop because when you hit the ball this time it could land in a hole that some daft bugger has filled with sand or even worse a duck pond without ducks. They probably got sick of being hit by golf balls so buggered of to Coniston to be manhandled by Bill. There s also an area where the groundsman couldn’t be bothered to cut the grass called the rough. If you land here you can spend many happy hours looking for your ball while the good players look on in amusement from the fairly short grassy bit known as a fairway.

So the idea is to eventually get your ball on to the green which is basically a lawn that has had a Brazilian. It’s no wonder the man who cuts the grass doesn’t get time to trim the rough when you see how much care has gone into this bit. Now It gets serious as in the middle of this perfect snooker table like lawn you have a sunken baked bean can with a flag sticking out of it. When the player is close enough to see the hole the flag is removed, and a stick with a flat irony bit on the end is used to knock the ball into the hole. Whoever does this in the least hits has won. Well they have won that particular hole, They then do this 17 more times??

I can sort of relate to what happens next, except for one bit. When everyone has knocked the little ball down 18 holes and walked further than a polar explorer its time to hit the clubhouse, otherwise known as hole 19. Or known to me as a place that sells booze, where everyone has a good drink, they deserve it after walking that far.

The bit I don’t get is if you hit your ball from the tee and it goes straight into the hole at the other end in one go, you owe everyone in the club a drink, surely that should be the other way round. Not so bad if you get a hole in one then get round the rest a bit sharpish. Only a couple of people in then, but if your crap and only get a jammy one in at the last hole, your last in the club, the bloody place is heaving, cost you a bomb that would, I would be aiming for the duckless duckpond every time.

The worst type of golfer though is by far the beginner, only you can’t call them that.

They are novices with a handicap. Never a truer word ever bloody spoken. The handicap being that they will let anyone, be it friend, stranger or enemy that they are now a member of a golf club and are totally miffed that you don’t want to read the latest golf magazine they have finished with after a 20 minute bus ride.

I played along with one of these handicapped people by saying I was right into golf too. He took a right hump when I mentioned the trouble I have getting through the door of the little windmill.

But these poor sods are encouraged by the so called veteran players who tell them that golf is the most important thing in the world. I can sum it up with this little story.

A novice hit his ball from the tee but sliced it badly. He went to look for his ball and met a veteran coming the other way. Have you seen my ball? He asked.

Yes said the veteran, it went over the fence and hit a man riding a bike on the head, he swerved in front of a motor bike which killed him, the motor bike then swerved into a car killing both rider and pillion. The car was then hit by a bus all four in the car killed. The bus ended up down an embankment in front of a train killing forty people on the bus. The train derailed and turned over killing one hundred and twenty people. A wheel from the train shot up in the air bringing down a 747 which was landing killing another three hundred people.

Oh my god cried the novice, what can I do.

Well said the veteran if you just bend your knees a bit before taking your shot.

And that must be the mentality of the golfer that whenever I drive past either of the courses near to me come rain hail snow or shine they are there with their bag of sticks knocking balls down holes.

So hope you can all join me next month when despite having sunk another thousand rivets I could tell you about, we will be discussing the merits of cricket.