16th January 2008

Remember I mentioned Bluebird’s bad luck making a cameo appearance last week… Past events really have been quite extraordinary.
For example, just as we got word to recover Bluebird, half the cows in the UK went down with foot and mouth disease so we had MAFF or DEFRA or whatever they were called back then poking their interfering noses into a diving operation in case someone with unwashed wellies hiked into the national park for a look-see.
Then Donald would have been given the hero’s send off he fully deserved had not the planned date been September 12th 2001. To add insult to injury it rained torrents all morning as we trudged through the dripping streets only for the sun to split the heavens five minutes after we squelched our way indoors. I swear I heard Donald laughing at that one…
Then the future was decided for Bluebird so we applied to a funding agency with ‘heritage’ in the name only to discover where the incompetents left over from the millennium dome project were hiding. They consequently did nothing but waste fifty-odd grand and four years of our lives before being unceremoniously sacked.
Moving on, the Campbell family kindly gifted Bluebird to the people of Coniston on what ought to have been a quiet news day, so we called a press conference – but no – a freak hurricane tore a dozen roofs from their moorings in central London causing all the Sky News vans to uproot at once and thrash southwards before the wind died down. Our list of ill fortune reads like a book of improbable happenings and another chapter was written this week as we waited for word from Rolls-Royce regarding our engine but instead, BA dropped a 777 into the grass at Heathrow. Thankfully no one was seriously hurt but it gave R-R a pair of Trent 800 engines to worry about ahead of our Orph’. Unbelievable!
But best that they get to the bottom of the problem, I reckon.
Not to worry, other things went our way this week.
This arrived one afternoon so we popped it on top of the container for the moment.

It’s a 1200 litre oil tank donated to our project by Balmoral Tanks of Aberdeen (http://www.balmoral-group.com/tanks/index.asp) and what a piece of work. It’s a tank within a tank so if the inner hull splits all that happens is that the fuel sloshes into the outer. That way it doesn’t have to be built into an enclosure but the inner won’t split because it made of the toughest plastic imaginable. It also has a nifty, digital fuel gauge that plugs into one of the sockets in the workshop to tell us how much juice remains. John-Tidy and Alain, the gadget guys, loved that…
Then one of these turned up.

A big-boy heater, made by Roberts Gordon Engineering Ltd (http://www.rg-inc.com/UK/infrared-heaters-UK.htm), the whole deal having been put together by Carl and his company, Spencair.
What a Gentleman. We did the publicity shots for the sponsors…

…then he got his work gear on and cut a hole in our ceiling while I was sent out for bacon butties.
Brummie-types (the entire West-Midlands is inhabited by Brummies so far as us northerners are concerned) prefer brown sauce on their bacon arousing suspicion and confusing the sandwich shop staff in Geordieland as ketchup is our thing but we got the southerners fed eventually.

After lunch, and having wiped the grease from their chins, the boys from Spencair set about making everything work. Pete hurriedly plumbed in a piece of pipe then called a one-man photo shoot in front of our big blue boat.

Notice to the left of the posing heating engineer that Bluebird has grown an extra piece of bodywork going forwards over the spar. We’ll come to that shortly.
He and Dan were soon working hard to have the heater positioned and connected up by close of play.

Next morning another pair of Spencair operatives arrived to connect up the wires and get a tune out of the beast. Matt and Jay put the finishing touches to our luxury heating system then sparked her up.

*
John-Tidy walked into the workshop on Saturday morning bearing his usual collection of woolly hats, gloves, and extra jumpers. Unlike some of the crew he lacks an insulating layer of fat so extra thermal protection is de-rigueur in his case. But within half an hour he was stripped to his tee shirt.
The new heating system is absolute, unimaginable luxury! It switches on smoothly and quietly then, without fuss, maintains perfect temperature in our workshop. And because it heats air, blows it out the top, then slurps it back in the bottom to top up the temperature where needed, the clever thing is so fuel efficient that it literally sips inexpensive fuel-oil through a length of Morris Minor brake pipe!
 The value of working in a warm environment is something we’d not properly appreciated – until today.
What can I say? To our old and dear friend, Carl, well I guess you know the score. And to those companies generous enough to allow us the use of their products without charge – massive thanks from the (warm) workshop team at the Bluebird-Project.

*
Other stuff – Alain got a welding lesson.

We kitted him with a hat and a pair of gloves then I showed him the basics of how to hold and operate a MIG torch. It’s a different process to TIG, which I use to weld the alloy panels. In that case filler rod is hand fed into a weld pool heated by an electrical plasma formed between the end of a tungsten electrode and the work piece. With MIG the heat source is the same but a constant supply of filler wire is mechanically fed through the tip of the torch and fuses as it hits the molten weld pool. Once the machine is properly set up the welding technique isn’t too difficult especially on heavy material.
But what was Alain doing with a welding set?
Simple really, we bought some big-boy castors to put under our new engine so we can shove it about. Orpheus’ are big, heavy items, we’ve had three of them so far and they’ve all had to be shifted more times than is funny so this one is on juicy, fat castors for ease of manoeuvring.
Alain made up some feet for the engine cradle so we can take the castors off to stop the engine shooting up the road when we fire it up then welded them to the bottom of the cradle.
We’ve been cracking on with the new nose too. ‘Rob’s tool’ has grown a pair of rounded bits…

Fortunately, much of the shape of the replacement nose is set in stone. The planform, for example, is beyond argument because its shape is defined by the original floor panel salvaged from the lake and reattached to the forward frame. There’s no arguing with that. Nor can the deck height above the front spar be disputed because the original former never left the spar.
The side elevation has been scaled directly from Ken’s drawing so that’s assumed to be correct too but what we don’t have is any cross-sectional data as the nose comes to a rounded shape at the front end. That’s going to be a little bit of educated guesswork, careful study of a sh*tload of photographs and a lot of tin-bashing.
The guys at ThyssenKrupp came up trumps again by providing extra material just in case we got it wrong seventeen times so we rolled our last sheet to get a look at the problem.
By the way, forgot to mention, the nose is made of 1mm thick material, which we didn’t realise until making a final check prior to breaking out the hammers. The cockpit rails are all 1.5mm so there’s a little more leeway with those when it comes to dressing the welds and raising the low spots for a smooth surface. We’re going to have to be extra clever with this thin stuff.

Shouldn’t be too difficult though, methinks. I’ve said that before too!