We’re not in a hurry but this part of the job is not like the nose where all we could see was a task stretching off to a distant horizon. This is more what we’re used to – small repairs (lots of them) and the fettling of parts that took a tweak in the accident.
That nasty hole in the flute has now gone for good.
If you look carefully you can just see the join where that blue G-clamp is situated on the left but the rest is completely original. Good as new, eh?
That hole was a constant cause of conflict between the HL-effers, Tweedies and the project team.
The do-gooders would ooh and ahhh and poke about inside it but the idea of repairing it was anathema to them and they said so.
“Why do you want to fix it?” they’d ask indignantly.
“Because the water will p*ss in if we don’t,” we’d point out somewhat sadly because their mentality seized up way short of allowing such an important object as K7 near water ever again so they never understood us; yet plugging that leak seems perfectly obvious now it’s done.
So, sorry folks, it’s gone.
Well, not exactly. It still exists in its entirety and will end its days in the museum display for Tweedies to ooh and ahhh at as a sad aside to excited schoolboys (and girls) who’ll doubtless ignore a scrap of bent tinwork in favour of the beautiful craft that took Donald to seven world water speed records.
So, having sorted that bit, we moved forwards to put more of this beautiful old girl’s clothes back on.
It’s intensely annoying (though completely understandable) that people are more impressed with the outer skins than the multitude of complicated features – many of them crash damaged, corroded, salvaged from beneath a mile of mud then finally repaired to full serviceability – that go into holding her skins in their proper positions; but there you go.
It’s like moving all the furniture in your front room, stripping the walls, sanding the woodwork, filling the cracks then sanding some more. Then you paint the ceiling, do the preparation needed to slap on the new décor so you can shift the dust-sheets when all’s dry, vacuum the carpet and finally invite the family round to have them admire the pattern on your new wallpaper… But that’s just how it goes.
We had a few outriggers left to mend on this side too because they’d stretched in the crash and the stretching in this instance is often so severe that the only way to be rid of it is to cut and weld the panel. We’ve become experts at this but evidence suggests that K7’s entire structure from front to back was momentarily twisted something like six inches without most of it letting go and this has left many components with a small stretch here and there.
So we acquired this…
…or rather, I called the boss-man at Frost Tools having researched the topic extensively and asked whether he’d be kind enough to donate one to the project as Frost seem to be the only UK supplier of this miracle cure.
He said yes. (link – frost tools, shrinking hammer)
It’s a shrinking hammer – the only shrinking hammer I’ve ever tried that actually works (and I’ve tried a few). The spiral-ground face is rubber mounted so what you do is put a good, heavy dolly on the back of the offending part then whack it with this thing, which screws the metal together with each hammer blow and shrinks it. Very impressive.
It took a little more than a tap with a hammer to put this one to rights, mind you.
It’s the wrecked remains of F-11- S, the most badly damaged outrigger from the big hole, and here it’s marked off with black pen where surgery is about to commence. We held a meeting about whether or not it ought to be retired to the museum display or conserveered back to life and quickly agreed that even if we saved only fifty percent it would still count as an original panel. Rob therefore did his usual as head of the patching dept. then I went in with the hot metal glue.
It’s all better now.
Another clever appliance of science we had in the workshop this week was a gizmo for measuring relative humidity along with a real-life museologist to operate it for us.
Meet Louise… She’s a proper conservator from a real museum proving beyond doubt that not only are we still an equal-opportunities employer but that we’re getting soft in our old age too – but more of that later.
You see, RH is life or death stuff in a bona fide museum.
Remember how museums exist only for the public… but the public tend to breathe, fart, sweat, come inside in dripping clothes, etc. (They also want the lights on and the heating turned up).
In short, they keep buggering up the museologists environmental ideals and worse still, in our lowly Bluebird workshop, we don’t even have a million-dollar climate control systems to prevent our resident icon from fizzing away to dust.
Vicky once told me that a RH of 50 was considered OK and you didn’t land in bother ’til it hits 60-ish so discovering that our workshop was hovering at a paltry 43 evinced much satisfaction.
We had a great turnout last week too with veterans of various types turning up to keep the job moving.
Whisked eastwards by the Novie-taxi once again came good old, ‘Doddy’ with his bag of hammers to bash tin with us. He mended a couple of squashed brackets that hold the fuel tank in position. I’d had look at them then made a deft body-swerve but Alan took them on and soon straightened things.
Novie, in the meantime, spent the whole day crawling about the floor cleaning a ridiculously long strip of aluminium with a zillion rivet holes in it.
Here you can see only the last four feet of a piece that runs almost the whole length of the boat. Then there was this other bloke…
Mr Hannarack – another veteran who, er, helped Novie with his cleaning.
Meanwhile, the tin-bashing continued with the next piece of forward skinning. We’re now working with all-new material, which is slightly easier than welding yesteryear onto today so the regular tin-bashers soon had a little more of K7 watertight.
(Pic © Louise Bainbridge 2008)
Bluebird is clothed as far forward as the centre of the main spar-box at this point with only the section between here and the centre of the front spar-box to complete. But there are one or two outriggers in that section that still need some work before the skins can go down smoothly. We’ll get onto them next week.
Then the usual suspects cut another slice of tin and clashed it over the remaining holes.
Next time you see this sheet of high-duty alloy it’ll have been stretched, shrunk, joggled and wheeled into a brand-new cockpit wall that’ll blow your socks off and completely overshadow the countless hours spent searching a freezing English lake for every millimetre of its supporting cast.
C’est la vie…
Our sponsons won’t be far behind either – look at this lot.
Sponsons… flat-packed, admittedly, but sponsons nonetheless.
Were this a meal you’d be looking at something made with Périgord truffles as a starter followed by choosing the lobster for your thermidor then perhaps a perfect crème brulee and a splash of vintage Armagnac for afters.
Six months it’s taken to bring this pile of historically-correct material together and it’s been well worth every second. Ken and Lew would be well chuffed…
The sponsons are a part of the boat in which we can include only a very small proportion of the original craft. We have a number of salvaged formers from the top fairings that will be reincorporated and, unbelievably, one of the rear ends of a fairing came out of the lake virtually intact. It seems to have simply popped off like the lid of a beer bottle so that’s going back on.
But mostly the sponsons are a new-build and whereas we could have redesigned them to get their mass, displacement, strength and buoyancy within prescribed limits using off the shelf parts, the fact that we’ve sourced without compromise (and even had made from scratch in some cases) the material we need to make perfect, historically-correct replacements means that they’ll be worthy to ride with K7 when next she gets wet.
Then we’ll sweep and paint the workshop, reacquaint ourselves with our neglected families for a week or so, and then get stuck into the next project; something that has nothing whatsoever to do with boats!