10th January 2008

A nice quiet diary entry this time, methinks. The last one ruffled a few feathers with the mention of toe-rags visiting the museum from Manchester and Liverpool …
I’m from Newcastle, for heaven’s sake!
We invented hooligans in our football stadium in the seventies then went on to become the car crime capital of Europe for most of the nineties whilst Liverpool is European capital of culture these days. Making mention of those two splendid, British cities closest to Coniston was a straightforward question of geography – it’s simply too far to drive from Newcastle to Coniston in a stolen car whilst under the influence of crack-cocaine…
But as someone said in the workshop today, ‘not everyone has a sense of humour,’ and to stick with this job you certainly need one…

Anyway, and having amended the text for the benefit of those with a humour deficit, we’ve been doing a bit of going backwards in order to move forwards this week.
 With the cockpit opening now pretty much complete we’re moving towards construction of the new nose.
The original cockpit rails were relatively heavily built and sufficiently far back from the bow that a surprising amount of material was salvageable and at the same time we could still lift worthwhile data from what we couldn’t fix.
This, then, would become our datum for rebuilding the nose. It’s also more important that the air intakes are properly built than getting the nose right.
The nose just has to look OK – the intakes have to perform when our new engine begins sucking madly through them. We don’t want a repeat of the 1966 rivet-slurping incident.
Mark gave the cockpit area a thorough titivating – he’s good at this stuff.

It’s just about there now and if you look closely you can see that we’ve done a proper repair on the transverse former at the front of the new panels too. This was because we were about to embark on some scientific trickery to sort the nose.

Get an eyeful of this heap of work in progress. If you look along the upper, front edge of the spar there’s a piece of tin nailed in place with blue pins. That’s another original deck former and it came up with the spar. If you dig out a pic of K7’s nose you’ll see two rows of screws across the foredeck – that’s what the aftmost row were fastened into. There’s another former to go in at F-22
Next, go aft to the transverse former beyond this one, (It’s at F-19 for those of an aluminium-anoraky disposition) and you can see a better shot of the repair. The left side is original, the right is new but now they’re welded together. I’d bet you’d not find a chapter on that in the big book of museum conservation…
The former behind it (F-18) is similarly reconstructed but we haven’t made the final fix yet and with good reason. Again, the left half is original, but if you look towards the centre there’s a triangular cutout. This is where the former was hacked away to reposition the airspeed indicator in 66/67 and (probably) Leo’s impromptu mod’ has taken away most of its strength so we beefed it up temporarily while we worked on the foredeck and cockpit rails as we didn’t want any underlying structure moving about as we tried to get the skins right.
It would’ve mattered nothing when it was cut away in 66/67 because the outer skins were riveted in place and therefore had plenty of strength but for now it’s the other way around.
We’ll make a proper repair when the front is all happy and content. The cutout should be a rough semicircle but we saw no point in replicating it in our new piece of material until the welding is done.
You’ll notice also that there are three lengths of wire strung between the spar and the deck former in question. This was set up to get the heights correct all the way to the spar from the cockpit. Then we had to think about what happens between the spar and the nose.
There was another former ahead of the front spar and it came up with the nose section in 2001.

But one of the divers was allowed to look after it until needed for the rebuild then when we sent a request that it be returned to the museum its guardian falsely claimed that Gina had given it away!
Not true at all, and one day, one way or another, it’ll have to be returned but for the moment we chose to work without it.
Then Bluebird’s bad luck put in a cameo appearance. For a long time I’ve had a copy of the nose profile drawing and various people have forwarded copies of it over the years so it’s fairly widespread – it’s also a ‘red herring’.
It’s from a sketch of the wind tunnel test model but it seems the boat was never made that way. If we’d not recovered the deck formers from immediately ahead of the cockpit we’d have been building the boat the wrong shape by now. Their indisputable height proves that the commonly accepted nose profile cannot be reconciled to the frame dimensions or deck heights. It’s about 100mm too high and 40mm too long though the curve is fairly close.
What to do?
We made up a tool to get visual with the problem but it soon became apparent that our suspicions were correct.

We scaled the drawing to within a millimetre or two – the limit being the thickness of Ken’s pencil line – and tested our mental arithmetic on known dimensions like frame tubes and such, then made up the shape. Hmmm.
Too bull-nosed.
We considered guessing at it but just in case we’d missed something we went mob-handed to the office where Ken’s drawings are stored and pulled everything out; our brief being to flag anything relating to the nose.
It’s almost as though that wise, old engineer identified the problems that would hit us hardest and dealt with them well in advance because amongst much invaluable sponson data that he sent some years ago it turns out that another vital drawing was included.
I’d looked at it numerous times but only in the context of what it illustrates. It’s one of the pedestal brackets used to rejoin the ends of the front spar to the sponsons after the spar was raised back in fifty-whenever. (When exactly was that done? Somebody tell me please).
It’s a side elevation showing the top deck of the sponson structure, the pedestal with its small forward-running support strut and the outer end of the spar.
The drawing is not one of the formal offerings with the Norris Bros. legend in the bottom right corner. This looks more like Ken rolled out a blank sheet of paper in his office one day and pored over the repositioned spar with slide-rule and pencil. But in the background he’s drawn the nose in perfect profile with reference points along its length and his calculations at the top edge of the paper.
Manna from heaven!
Rob went back to his joinery kit and quickly produced what we named, ‘Rob’s tool’.

Now that looks right and is a perfect match to the drawing. We made up some transverse tooling to run across the F-22 bulkhead too (centre of the three in the above pic) so all we need to do now is bash some tin around it.

We’ll get onto that as soon as Carl and his boys have finished installing the heating system in the assembly shop – they’re due on Monday morning.

*
I heard this week that the sponson material is on the way too. I had to sign off the drawings for the mill so they can make their tooling to produce the impossible extrusions we’ve requested.
The sponsons are unquestionably the most exotic part of K7. Forget the main hull and the engine. They’re merely accessories to those twelve-foot canoes strapped to either side.
They appear simple enough, oh yes, but each one is a complex work of art and a brilliant piece of design and engineering.
Because they’re still a viable design over half a century later and because that design remains the intellectual property of the Norris family there are elements relating to them that won’t be posted here but be assured that we’re doing it right.
How I wish Ken was about to be a part of this adventure. There’d be no dealing with him…
And how to treat the replacement sponsons as part of the rebuild became an agonising process. After all it would be simple enough to mimic the shape in our choice of materials and make visually accurate copies. That would be OK if all we wanted was something that would float and with a bit of meat added they could even be made to stay together at low speeds. The weight, balance and buoyancy would be all over the place but a few lumps of lead here and there could probably get her looking right.
 But forget it when it comes to planing because we’d have to push the sponsons through some serious dynamic loading before they unglued themselves from the water, which would need something bloody strong to keep it all together so we’d have to do due-diligence on every aspect of the engineering before ever trying it.
This gave us two choices – either start the design process from scratch using modern materials or build to Ken’s original design.
Remember also that this is the first ever ‘conserveering’ project (that we know of) where conservation and engineering have merged to turn out a museum object both properly conserved and fit for purpose. We just had to go the Norris Bros. route.
And it seems like a no-brainer until you go looking for the material… Ken and Lew took advantage of just about every grade of aluminium to give the required strength for their carefully calculated weight requirements but we can’t do likewise because most of what he specified can’t be bought anymore.
Think about it – we could build the sponsons from commercial grades of material and rationalise it into stock, metric sizes. A straightforward job after which we could doubtless ask nicely and receive the bits from the stockist down the road free-of… But Ken designed his sponsons using high-duty, heat-treated alloys because in certain areas K7 needs all that strength without being too heavy.
Not a problem, all we need do is build the sponsons using thicker material – put the strength back that way. But that would increase their weight whilst they’d have no more buoyancy than before so they’d sit lower in the water (if they floated at all) and that would work against us somewhat when the time came to get her planing again.
It seemed we were back to a complete redesign until another sponsor stepped in to save us and then things went all complicated.
You see, the material we need is a military grade, made under license in the USA, and people attempting to buy military hardware from our cousins across the pond inevitably come under a spot of scrutiny. The US State Department had to be satisfied that what we needed was for the restoration of a jet-hydroplane and not the manufacture of home made cruise-missiles…
Well, it’s done, the drawings are signed off and the metal is inbound. Oh and there’s a high-level meeting at Rolls-Royce this week too regarding the possibility of official support for our engine so cross your fingers.
So with the US State Dept. pacified, and everything sent to R-R for the meeting, next on the list will likely be some moaner e-mailing to say,
“Oooo, Mr Smith, your diary entry of March 2003 made my wife and I very angry because in the picture of you bending over it’s clear that you’re wearing green underpants and this is unacceptably disrespectful to Mr Campbell who didn’t like green. Blah, blah, blah…”