Seems I escaped virtually unscathed with the last diary entry. Invariably someone is insulted or upset so I expected a battalion of Euro-do-gooders to explain the terrible dangers of egg-eating process operators and tadpoles, but no. Only a couple of low-yield whiners mailed to say I was unqualified to comment on matters ecological as being an exploitative employer with a fat car my carbon footprint was almost as big as my mouth.
Well, whiners, shut up and learn that it helps to know your enemy because here’s a previously unseen eco-warrior on a mission to help explore the habitat of a beautiful, white coral called Lophelia pertusa and assess the risk to it from indiscriminate deep-water trawling. And beneath my feet is the uninhabited island of Mingulay in the Hebrides
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lophelia_pertusa

And what was I doing there?
I went with these guys…

…as I have many times over the years on all kinds of actions.
Cheap beer, free helicopter rides, fast boats, law breaking, hell raising and all the while doing my small bit to help the planet alongside zealous individuals who get off their backsides and do something rather than writing strongly worded protests to their local MPs in the hope that someone else will look after their dirty work. Try it sometime – it’s fun.
But mostly what they do is in support of serious scientific endeavour so this time the ship was full of coral-ologists. I started out messing with the sonar on the ROV because it was a Tritech system I know inside out but the ROV eventually died of terminal water ingress so I finished up driving the sampling grab used to snaffle chunks of coral for the scientists.

“Had much experience operating one of these?” a concerned boffin asked me as I prepared to lower his expensive grab complete with cameras and lights 140m to the reef below. The regular operator was knackered and had demanded the afternoon off.
“Nope,” I said. “But I have thousands of hours on a sidescan winch and my towfish cost more than your grab.”
It becomes second nature to avoid crashing thousands of pounds worth of sonar array into a shipwreck as unrepentant after more than half a century on the seabed as it was the day Adolf Hitler sent it over to kill your grandparents.
What you do is watch the telly, staring at the back of the grab hanging a few metres above seabed, as the ship drifts serenely over the ocean.

Then when you see a chunk of this stuff go by…

…you grab it and haul like buggery.
By tea time I’d wrenched enough Lophelia free to satisfy the scientists who placed their living coral in a special habitat for transportation to the lab. In fact, they had so much of the stuff that I asked whether I could keep a small piece and like Mr Benn,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Benn
I now have a small piece to remind me of the adventure.

*

Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, they say. I beg to differ here too.
As the darkening nights of 2007 began to suck the warmth and light out of what remained of the year we bade a sad farewell to our friend, Alan Dodds. Being slightly beyond spring-chicken age he’s not keen on travelling cross country in crap weather so he reluctantly resigned himself to a Bluebird-free winter.
That seemed aeons ago and I distinctly remember thinking, we’ll not see Alan for ages now. But last weekend the sun shone and the rain took a day off.
The Bluebird project has been in a holding pattern lately for a variety of reasons. We got the nose somewhere near and there’s always a quiet spell after a major victory. Then I caught Ebola haemorrhagic fever from an early tadpole and was confined to bed for almost a week; plus, my dad landed himself in hospital at the same time, which was like trying to keep a rhinoceros in a Tupperware box so we had to do the cohesive, family thing to keep the lid down. He’s OK now and expects to have his forklift service back to its regular timetable by next week.
So the Bluebird team went for it big-time on Saturday.
Alan made his way across the A69 with a pressie for the boys. He just can’t stop bashing metal with hammers. I know how he feels, it’s addictive. He’s only gone and wrought the BBP logo from what looks like old knives and forks, welded it together and painted it all the right colours.

Brilliant, isn’t it… But simply saying, ‘here it is’ does no justice to the artistry involved. Next time you’re settling comfortably into your sofa for the latest instalment of East-Pretenders or Constipation Street try switching the telly off, emptying the cutlery drawer onto a tea tray and working out just what you’d have to do to replicate Alan’s masterpiece. Brain-training… it’s almost as old as recycling.
We had a quick committee meeting about where to hang it and decided that next to the entrance to Rob’s Passage looked about right. We tried it above but Alain’s air pipes didn’t compliment it too well.
Having agreed on a suitable location, Rob was quick to fix it in place then indulge his own strange compulsion.

Looks good with a light behind it, it has to be admitted. And it’s one of those items I plan to snaffle when the job is done to hang on my office wall though I fear I’ll have to be quick…
Alan wasted no time getting to work. He ran a practiced hand over the seams on the nose then whipped out his body file and started searching for low spots.

What you do is to gently file the surface and where it’s low the file misses so you can see the problem. You next push a dolly against the back, which is simply a heavy chunk of smooth steel, and give the panel a tap either side to raise the low spot. Run over with the file again to be sure it’s done then move onto the next problem area.
I absently mentioned the material being only 1mm thick to which Alan growled something about having never filed through a panel in his life.
Being a mere pup of a tin-basher I decided to shut up and go for a new bottle of gas for my welding set...
Alan was hammering and dollying in some tight spaces when I returned so at the risk of being told to bugger off a second time I introduced him to the bullseye-pick. It’s a clever thing of American invention (I think) that allows you to whack a low spot up to height from the outside without having to contort your forearms around all those sharp edges.
It’s a C-shaped affair with a flat foot that you place on the surface of the area to be treated. There’s a target semicircle let into the foot and a pointed hammer that swings upwards to hit the underside of the panel by squeezing a handle. It’s designed in such a way that the hammer always arrives within the semi-circular cutout so you know where you’re going to hit every time.

You position the semicircle over the low you want to raise then simply hammer ’til it’s flat enough to smooth with the file.

Simple but effective. Alan hadn’t seen one before but it took him about four seconds to get it working.
Quite a bit easier than hammer and dollying, he concluded.

And you can bet that next time we see him he’ll have built one from the wreckage of an old greenhouse and some fragments of a Zeppelin that crash landed on his house during the first war.
Ours was kindly donated to the project by Frost Tools.
Bullseye pick.
Alan also quickly spotted where I was going wrong with my tuck-shrinking. This is a process whereby you literally tuck the edge of a piece of metal like a folded over piece of paper then hammer the metal you don’t want outwards leaving the edge of the panel shrunk. Try as I might I just couldn’t nail it whilst Alan makes it look ridiculously simple. But after a few minute’s instruction he’d spotted the problem and put me right so after thanking Alan I showed him how we achieve a similar result (albeit much slower) with the mechanical shrinker also donated by Frost Tools. Five minutes later and he was into that too...
Old dog…
Another stalwart of the project made a triumphant homecoming last week. Tony Dargavel is back in one piece having wounded his hands in a motorcycle accident some months ago. He donated all his uneaten, Christmas biscuits to a greedy, grateful crew, demonstrated that his tea-making abilities haven’t improved during his enforced absence then took to his blast cabinet as though he’d not been away. Good – as the pile of shot blasting grows with each passing day. Welcome home, Tony.

Still feeling slightly weak from my bout of fever I did little more than take Henry Hoover for a spin around the workshop while the crew did all the real work.
I put the rest of the welds on the nose…

…for Alan to file down then more or less kept out of it while he and John-Tidy went on to build a replacement spar fairing.
They copied the formers from the other side (I remember welding them together at some point) then pinned the new ones in place.

Alan and John then rolled a slice of tin to suit.

Alan left while he still had daylight for the trip home so John buggered about with the fairing for the rest of the day and most of the evening until it fitted perfectly; it’s amazing what an influence such a small piece has on the overall visual effect. And, like the nose, it’s a deceptively complex shape as it tapers not only top to bottom as it nears the outer end of the spar but also fore and aft.

Meanwhile, because we have to build the root fairings next, I dinged some pieces of scrap left over from the nose development (whilst stoned on co-codamol) to find out what’s involved in making them for real.

Not bad; so we can measure up next and make some proper ones to finish the job.
Here’s a good question.
I was asked last week whether we intended to replicate the dent caused by Donald driving into a duck. Tricky one, that… After all, Gina’s brief for the rebuild was always to return the boat to how she was a minute before the accident so we really ought to build a bird-cannon and fire a defrosted duck at that new fairing. Then we also ought to create the impression of a startled seagull in the rear spar fairing. Best leave this decision to John. I’ll print off a picture of the duck-damage and hand it, along with a mallet, to him next weekend but rather than expecting authenticity in K7’s historical accuracy you’re more likely to see me with a bandage on my head for a week or two.