Now then – here’s another jigsaw-piece of outward irrelevance.
I bought my first house in 1988 and found myself, as a 21 year-old entrepreneur who would’ve been sacked by Sir Alan (http://www.bbc.co.uk/apprentice/) in about four seconds, living next door to a professional engineer who made sweeties for Nestlé in global quantities and who was also Daddy to a brace of lovely, young daughters.
Twenty years later, my father-in-law, Andy has retired from process engineering to become a vicar at weekends so if ever there’s anything I need to know about matters theological he’s the man.
He’s very much one of the lads too. We call him ‘the vomiting vicar’ because of a particularly entertaining (in retrospect) fishing trip aboard Predator when the sea chose to do it’s most horrid, rolling, seasicky thing for long enough to turn him a dreadful grey colour.
Being a long-time sufferer of the old mal-de-mer I instantly sympathise with anyone feeling queasy so I shaped course back to the Tyne at sight of his waxy pallor. But what’s deceiving to the inexperienced sufferer is that things sort themselves out immediately the boat gets going again…
By the time we made it to the river, Andy was feeling right as rain and perhaps a little foolish for causing such a fuss so he insisted we stop and cast our hooks like nothing had happened.
But I knew what was coming having been there so many times myself.
The sea was lazy and oily with diesel fumes and colour quickly drained from Andy’s face yet he took it stoically. But the end was at hand and I watched surreptitiously until, with a great heave, he dashed for the rail, glancing skywards as he went, pleading, “Oh God,” before spewing copiously into the North Sea.
He chucked again and again despite our ministrations until we warned him that should he feel something circular and rubbery pass his lips he ought to bite hard and swallow it back down as he’d need it at the other end once he’d recovered.
We laid him in the recovery position, reeled in our lines then headed upriver. It was later in the pub that mention was eventually made of Andy’s final, desperate plea to his boss before violent emesis claimed him.
“The big cheese didn’t save you then…” I suggested rolling my eyes heavenward much as he had. I supped a pint as Andy placated his outraged stomach with a half of harmless bitter.
My father-in-law’s demeanour told me firmly that I’d not heard the last of this as he met my playful challenge.
“That’s because he has your sense of humour, you b’stard!” he told me...
Andy’s a great bloke – and that’s part of the reason why am I relating so much nonsense when we’re supposed to be building a big tin boat?
You see, he has an interesting tale to tell about that island I flew over earlier.
Way back when, in about 700AD as it happens, a monk called Eadfrith was bored stupid in his monastery having fed the chickens, tended the vegetable patch then downed a gallon of mead.
The monks kept bees so they had lots of honey and therefore no shortage of plonk with which to while away those dark, northern evenings.
Putting up with a life of poverty, chastity and obedience would have been unbearable without a few perks so Eadfrith took up his quill, poster paints and the skins of 150 calves and painted himself a particularly tasty illuminated bible.
These were the days before the Gideons left them everywhere and as Lindisfarne was the most important seat of Christianity in the British Isles (hence the Holy Island thing) Eadfrith made sure his creation was a real work of art.
Now then, Eadfrith’s book, known subsequently as the Lindisfarne Gospels, ended up being snaffled during the dissolution of the monasteries after which it meandered through a private collection or two until finally washing up in the British Library and into the hands of the museological hypocrites.
And guess what…
You got it in one – now that the time is right we want our book back. But they won’t hand it over.
This is despite a vigorous campaign backed by the local newspapers and charitable organisations offering a choice of perfect locations in the north east where it could be displayed and properly looked after. The southern musos were even exposed writing derogatory e-mails about us northerners and how we’d not take proper care of our book whilst in the same breath our Tyne & Wear museums are feted as flagship establishments whenever it suits them.
You see, they’re at it again and they keep getting away with it, which is why I flag their disgusting behaviour up at every opportunity. And they’d do to well to listen because while all we’re doing at the moment is bashing lumps of tin and screwing skin pins into everything one day we’ll roll out a beautiful, blue boat and you just never know who might call up and ask for an after dinner speaker…
The Association of Chief Police Officers hired me one evening only to enjoy an illustrated presentation on the best way to blow up a shipwreck with illicit explosives – but that’s another mischievous tale so for now it’s back to the tin bashing where the air intakes have become an iconic case of historical reversal without a flapping of museological tweed to be seen.
The plan was to complete the side skins, which we’ve now done apart from some minor snagging on the flutes, then flip the boat over and crack on with the floors. But the floors can be mostly built away from the job whilst having the hull upside down would mean we’d not be able to do any of the much needed work on the top. For that reason we’ve left her right way up.
Remember this mess?
Pic © Steve Rothery (www.marillion.com) 2001
You’re looking at the front of the main spar at F-15 where the boat snapped. Part of the seat harness still hangs forlornly from the horizontal frame tube and our boat hasn’t even dried yet. This pic is from March 8th 2001.
But what’s most important is the mass of wrought metal at the top that once comprised those elegant air intakes.
If you look closely you can also see the rail that once stood at the back of the cockpit canopy between the inlet throats.
This one…
What has proven especially interesting with the current phase of the build is that we’re reconstructing the intakes almost as fast as Rob can strip them down.
Rob has worked single-handedly drilling literally thousands of rivets often in difficult positions due to crash damage in order to keep up a steady flow of pieces for the tin-bashing crew.
Rivet drilling, however, has not advanced as a science and even though Rob is unquestionably the grand master of K7’s rivet technology his drill doesn’t turn any faster than it ever did and his pin punches still must be hit with the same hammer.
The tin-bashers, on the other hand, can whip pieces of scrap through the stripping bath then in and out of Tony’s blast cabinet in double-quick time then push them back to their former shape just about as fast as rob can pry them free.
Take the foremost air intake frame, for example.
This wrecked former once spanned the boat side to side near the engine inlets defining the shape of the throats on either side of K7’s cockpit and it took Rob nigh-on a week to get it loose. Unfortunately it had also taken a bit of a tweak and had its ends torn off too. Worse still, it’s a channel section and we don’t have a clever method of repairing such shapes. We can, however, work with angles so out came the panel saw and once again we chopped history to bits.
You can see that the inner half has now been removed so we’re treating two angles instead of a channel and that’s one hell of a lot simpler.
With the other side cut similarly thus giving us three straightforward repairs instead of one impossible one we drew out a template and started mending things.
Why-oh-why did those Norris Brothers have to make everything so flippety-blinking complicated? Why couldn’t they just draw around the bottom of a bucket or something to make their inlet throat profiles? Instead they created a stupidly difficult shape that can only be drawn using distances and angles from a datum. We threw it roughly onto a sheet of chipboard and got bashing.
But it gets worse – because it appears that at the last minute the throats were modified to give an extra half-inch of inlet area near the upper edges and this isn’t included on the drawings we have – so how do we know about it?
Because, if you look at the top of the piece above there are a few skin pins popped in there and this is down to a lucky chance that unlocks another fragment of untold history and something only discovered because we’ve dismantled K7… (Pay attention, ‘Johnny-Paint-Preserver’, (Rachel’s name for the bloke with the Corsair)).
You see, Salmesbury Engineering made it wrong in the first place – the former, that is. Their finished effort is actually about an eighth of an inch too low along its top edge so what they did to fix it was flush-rivet a strip of alloy up there then file it to suit. Better still, they used yet another piece of V-bomber wing spar so when everything was blasted to smithereens all the spacer did was shear the heads off its rivets and stay exactly as it was. Without this vital piece of evidence we’d have been hard-pressed to work out why our intakes didn’t fit the drawing. As it turned out we simply made the spacer fit the frame again then reverse-engineered the throat profile accordingly.
Rob, our resident wood-butcher, was then detailed to fabricate what immediately became known as ‘Pinocchio’s kidneys’…
…around which Doddy, John and I made everything fit with our tin-bashing hammers…
…before welding all the pieces back together again.
The ‘Salmesbury spacer’ can be clearly seen running over the top of the frame. And, best of all, not a hint of new metal thus far. Everything you see is completely original. That’s not to say that we won’t need new material. We will, but only for the boring bits. The inner and outer skins of the ducts will need to be replaced but all they do is obediently hug an underlying structure that’s going to be almost entirely original. No mean achievement considering what we started with.
It remained only then to pop the end we managed to salvage back onto the frame…
…then knock together a new one for the other end (new material at last) and weld it into position.
That’s the frame complete apart from the usual snagging that we’ll do when it’s time to bash the rivets in.
Our heat treatment of the floor material was a success too, but then we knew the softening part would be. In fact our test piece is now so malleable that it sagged under its own weight in the furnace and came out banana shaped. Before treatment it would easily take the weight of a fat bloke then spring back into shape; this time I pushed it flat by hand but it’s whether it can be made springy again that remains to be seen. Hopes are high though and in the meantime, Rob is furiously drilling rivets again as he dismantles the floors into their various sections.
And another thing – we’ve been promoted.
Our elder-statesman and mentor, Mr Alan ‘Doddy’ Dodds, reckons we’re now past the beginner’s stage in our tin-bashing training so according to Rob we must now be ‘intermediates’.
Doddy was tin-bashing before any of us were born so it’s a bit like having your pilot’s license presented by Wilbur and Orville...
What a joy it would have been to have old Ken Norris watching over the project too but sadly it wasn’t to be.