The Bluebird Project

Thanks for clearing up the enquiry gentlemen. E en if it did show me up as something of an idiot. As the articles responsible for the splashes weren’t at all what I thought they were

Fab little doco / interview here with the genius behind the Orph', amongst his many other achievements. Not to be missed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4lH2whhjk

Been following the twitter feed / pics for a while now.

Something that intrigued me today...re original & new panels - it looks like only parts of original panels are there? How did you integrate original with new and have you found any of the original parts to have any particular metal fatigue weakness?

Bit of a newbie question I know...

Something that intrigued me today...re original & new panels - it looks like only parts of original panels are there? How did you integrate original with new and have you found any of the original parts to have any particular metal fatigue weakness?

If you have a dig back through the diary you'll find lots of how we did it but essentially what happened when we had an old and wrecked panel was to build a brand new one from fresh material that was a perfect fit then gradually cut it away and let in the old, damaged material, adjusting the shape as we went until old had completely supplanted new but with its shape returned. We called it 'conserveering'. The museum types wanted it all left bashed and broken but it was useless like that (we did leave some parts bashed up to tell the story and things like the old air intake skins, which are on display in the museum) but mostly we could make it good again. Conservation meets engineering - get it?
The old panel you saw tonight on Twitterface departed the scene wrapped around the end of the front spar and so is mostly original. The sponson noses are new-build so they need almost no fettling ahead of the blue paint.
As regards fatigue, etc. There was some age-hardening of some of the more exotic materials and some were heat-treated to give them certain properties but such things can be reversed, corrected and made good with appropriate heat treatments, which we used where necessary. That along with x-raying the frame and using dye-penetrant or fluorescent/UV testing on any safety critical parts left us completely confident that we've left nothing of concern lurking in the structure. It's been a pretty thorough job.

I recall the panel which Bill is currently working on, I spent a large amount of time making a perfect (if I do say so myself) reproduction, unaware of the intention to merely use it as a buck to fix the original fabric (which I didn’t know we had)

Indeed it was an Alfred Hitchcock moment when Bill and Mike produced the wreckage from the store, and whilst sniggering somewhat, theycset about hacking into my work of art.

Ultimately it was for the right cause, it resulted in the correct shape being obtained and the original fabric being returned.

Wouldn't it have the capacity to be possible that the best secure speed for Bluebird k7 to soundly go before taking care of be airborn had recently of late been misconstrued with the guide of the Norris siblings and numerous others?

Sorry Gene, I don’t understand what you have said, I am guessing google translate has not worked

Richie

I think perhaps what he is trying to say is, what is the maximum safe speed for K7 before it tries to become airborne ? Implying what was thought to be safe before the crash was miscalculated. It is not a simple question to answer as there were, I suspect, many more factors other than speed that are not in the public domain which contributed to the accident.

Are you thinking about filament wound composite for the new cylinders or are you sticking more "Old School" ? Or can that never work.

Are you thinking about filament wound composite for the new cylinders or are you sticking more "Old School" ? Or can that never work.

We can have some good old boilerplate spun into hemispheres that will hold back 300bar and give us a couple of good starts. We won't incur an appreciable weight penalty so old-school will do just fine on this one and it will look right too. We're tied to 12" OD so the increased wall thickness of a composite bottle would just rob us of volume.