Several years back I visited Athens and took a trip up the hill to where hosts of sweating, Greek craftsmen were knocking the Parthenon back together using traditional methods. They were doing amazing things with basic tools; like splitting huge slabs of marble using wooden wedges bashed into carved troughs full of water so the wood would swell and exert irresistible pressure until the block fell in two.
They’ve been rebuilding their treasured building in blazing sunshine for many years now and as the job is about done they’re also ready to unveil a beautiful new museum full of ancient Greek artefacts including a marble frieze dating back to goodness knows when. Except that they only seem to have half of it…
The problem is that some arrogant Brit stormed over there in about 1800 and nicked the other half. Elgin, he was called.
The property he burglarised has languished in the British Museum ever since but now that the good people of Greece (and they’re proper good people in my experience) have spent the time, effort and money creating a world-class attraction atop the very hill where Mr Elgin went thieving you’d expect those guardians of museological morality to do the only decent thing and give it back, wouldn’t you…
But what do you suppose the British Museum is really doing about its stash of pilfered marble?
You probably guessed already – they’ve made replicas, hypocritical b’stards that they are – and offered the Greeks a heap of cheap reproductions with which to complete their display while we hang onto the originals! No doubt it took a good many ‘experts’ to arrive at that decision…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7381738.stm
How utterly disgusting.
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Here’s another thing…
I was recently pointed at this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-KD431-Time-Capsule-Fighter/dp/075094305X
It’s the story of a Royal Navy Corsair, one of the last examples manufactured during WWII. It rolled off the Goodyear production line in nineteen forty-something and saw limited service as a carrier-borne aircraft before being shipped back to RAF Cranfield as a training aid.
There it was poked at by wannabe airframe fitters until 1963 when Cranfield gave it a lick of paint and put it on display. All well and good, you’d think, but then the museologists got their mitts on it…
Realising that the original WWII paintwork survived beneath that applied in 63 and that it was almost otherwise untouched since it rolled out of the factory and not a mish-mash of other planes spannered together in the heat of battle they started to take the 1963 paint back off again.
But not with anything Chemettal-Trevor might dish up – oh no – they took it off with toothpicks, baby wipes and squares of old, cut up anoraks dipped in water, or was it razor blades, sticky tape and thinners?
Either way, they not only painstakingly removed the 1963 paint molecule by molecule; they also researched everything thus revealed to the far ends of creation.
How the RAF roundels were applied, for example, (using a dodgy stencil with a bit missing), what kind of fuel was supposed to go in the tank (the factory applied instructions said one thing whilst some long forgotten crewman had crudely painted something far less confusing on the filler cap). The list is both endless and fascinating. The amount of history contained in a single aircraft and uncovered by the team is astonishing and a real credit to their dedication. But just as it was about to get really fascinating they put away their toothpicks and went home!
Hang on a minute…
What about all those intrigued folks who want to know how difficult it is to start a genuine WWII, Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp installation with all its yesteryear spark plugs and magnetos and such?
Why couldn’t they give their Corsair to someone who operates a running example today to explore the differences in such things as the flying controls and brakes so we could learn what those pilots of old were really up against?
I once met a bloke who worked on current Merlin engines who explained how during wartime the engines were built with big clearances everywhere and used enough oil to provoke a small war these days so as never to seize up as they fought for their lives in extreme manoeuvres. Whereas modern-day builds use much tighter clearances and up to date oil-sealing technology so their owners don’t spend all their pocket money on expensive oil only to get covered in the stuff whilst climbing in and out of their plane.
But no – the museum types just donned their tweed jackets switched out the hangar lights and went for a pint of warm shandy. So whilst the museologists are satisfied, us engineering anoraks will never learn all the details we’d like to know.
Still – a cracking job by all concerned. Give us a call when you want the boys to come down and get a tune out of that engine.
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What am I doing here?
Ah yes, our big blue boat. What have we been up to?
We mended the other squashed flute this week. It seems that when K7 tumbled during the accident she smacked her front-right and rear-left corners so how the hell the fin stayed so proud and upright is a real mystery - sheer bloody-mindedness probably.
The right-hand flute was caved in at its front end taking out the F-10 to F-13 outriggers necessitating the graft that we inserted a few weeks back. The left-hand flute was caved in at the opposite end between F-1 and F-4 with no hope of getting a tin-bashing hammer into the affected area. Even were this possible there was too much stretch in the metal to deal with without cutting and shutting it.
Here it is before we started work.
Not only crushed but split too. We had the same argument with the tweed-types about this damage because the water would p*ss in here too if we didn’t close it – and the buggers had better not mention meddling with history to me ever again after offering the Greeks cheap imitations of their own heritage on a take it or leave it basis…
Sorry about that, where were we?
We marked it out with a pen…
…then, er, chopped it to bits.
Next, we bashed it with hammers for ages because it’s the metal equivalent of a violent criminal when it comes to rehabilitation. I asked John to put plenty of pins into the newly corrected part as we put it back – a strait jacket and handcuffs approach – before the hot metal glue went in.
Again, cracking was initially a problem but we worked out a new process to get preheat into the material and it all worked out beautifully in the end.
There you go – good as new, totally original too (well, except for the half-dozen welding rods) and it’ll also keep the water out now.
There was a small loss, however. You see, what we had to do was to push all the stretched metal into one corner then cut it off, so there was a slice of LOOF (Loss Of Original Fabric). You can see it here curled up just before we cut it free and made the welds.
But that’s nothing, if the flutes are fairly uncompromising then the following is the Kray twins, Bonnie and Clyde and Al Capone all rolled into one.
It’s a piece of floor.
The main floor is irreplaceable. Not only does it comprise a material that is near impossible to obtain in any shape or size nowadays it’s also of a shape and size that’s virtually impossible to obtain in any modern material except industrial carpet! And as can be clearly seen this bit has broken off and taken considerable punishment along the way.
It simply will not weld or straighten without literally going off with a bang. It’s absolutely the toughest aluminium alloy I’ve ever come across so if we’re to tame it something drastic will be needed.
Following considerable research we contacted a global supplier of heat-treatment processes with a 6 metre furnace not too far away and told them what we had.
The piece you see above is being cleaned prior to being annealed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_%28metallurgy%29
Because we’re about to try a bold experiment here.
The plan is this.
We’re fairly certain that we can anneal the material to make it sufficiently ductile that it’ll weld and shrink but it’s going to be a huge amount of work to repair the entire floor in the hope that we can then have it heat treated back to its original hardness. We’ve told the heat treatment guys what’s what but as you might expect of a fifty year-old material they’ve never heard of it nor passed any of it through their furnaces so we’re on slightly dodgy ground.
It’s going to be either a massive triumph or a crushing failure but the Bluebird-Project remains a bastion of uncompromised optimism and lives by the motto, ‘it’ll fix’.
Here’s hoping.
Another experimental technique we perfected this week is the removal of deep corrosion pits from aluminium skins by filling them with new metal. It only works on fairly heavy material because lightweight stuff just blows away but the essence of the process is this. You take your average corrosion pit…
…and clean back to good metal with the die grinder.
Then you fill the pits with fresh, hot metal glue and whip out the die grinder again to take the tops off the welds.
And finish with a sanding disc and lots of lubricant. See, good as new and another panel saved.
