Micawber wrote:Anyway, the arrival this morning of a 1/12th scale K7 Touchwood model that requires some restoration that my wife recently picked up off the 'bay has given me a big enough kick up the bum to put finger to keyboard to say hello.
I don't like to see the words bum and finger in the same sentence, but that notwithstanding, a word of praise for Stuart Delf, the proprietor of Touchwood Models, who is also a member of the
Quicksilver team ...
Stuart and his son - Stuart! - played a big part in helping us with the construction and modification work needed to support our windtunnel test programme when we were assessing Ken Norris's reverse four-pointer concept. The two Stuarts also had at least one day with us in the windtunnel at Southampton University, installing the model in the tunnel prior to test - although I'm not sure if that was one of the days when Ken himself was actually present.
We have various Touchwood Models gracing our HQ at East Midlands Airport to this day - including a big model of
Bluebird K3. We used to have one of Stuart's big models of K7 on display, too, and at one stage we had that 3D-scanned by laser to reverse-engineer it into 3D CAD and then ran the CAD model through a CFD programme to retrospectively assess K7's aerodynamic performance and get a unique insight into aerodynamic factors which may have contributed to Donald's accident.
It says a lot for the accuracy of Stuart's
Bluebird model that professional aerodynamicists who had previously worked on
ThrustSSC could use it as a basis for such an advanced study for
Quicksilver.