It’s not terminal though and a lot has been done despite this failure. The sponsons are now digitised, for example. This week we took the drawings plus some pics of the sponsons under construction to Matrix Lasers whom I’ve worked with for over fifteen years and pretty much took over their CAD dept for most of an afternoon until the salient shapes and dimensions were born into cyberspace.
Next we’ll have the necessary templates and formers water-jetted from a suitable material and begin assembling our tooling. It’s exciting to be building something absolutely from scratch with no stretched, corroded or temperamental material to work in as we go.
The nose was all new but had to be a copy of a shape that exists only as images and the replacement cockpit skins are also built from fresh metal but they had to marry up with original panels that Donald had made most intriguing for us. The sponsons are a real breath of fresh air.
And still the conserveering continues…
Louise brought some more museological gadgets this week. Don’t get us wrong here – we’re only having a bit of a laugh with this because if anything is discovered to be way outside of limits there’s bugger-all we can do about it anyway.
So we checked the UV but anyone who’s ever visited our underground workshop will tell you that if you spent enough time here your skin would whiten and your eyes would turn pink; so we passed that test.
Alain then tried the light meter. He’s a bit of a photographer in his spare time so he knew his way around it and soon verified that we’re also OK for luxes…
It’s all go at the museum too. Here’s one for the Hapless Lottery Failure…
Yep – That’s Vicky, Gina and Anne shovelling grass in the middle of a building site. The builders are so enthusiastic about this project that the girls struggled to find any remaining grass to dig up! We’ll shortly have four walls for our Bluebird wing and the roof will inevitably follow so we can take our rebuilt boat back to where she belongs and home-port her (except for days when she’s taken out to make a noise, thrill the crowds and blast jet fuel all over the local ducks) as the world-class attraction that she truly deserves to be.
It has to be said that the museum team have done an absolutely outstanding job in earning well deserved support from those funding agencies unfettered by standard-issue HLF bifocals.
We’ve justly proven that giving free rein to those best able in each discipline was the way to go.
I could never put up with the bureaucracy (if nothing else comes from this project I’ve learned to spell that bloody word) of the museum world and I’m sure Vicky and Anne would acknowledge that they’re not well versed in materials science. But the bureaucrats always wanted a single manager to spin all the plates and therefore may as well have sought a herbalist who dabbled in quantum mechanics…
Where were we?
Here’s an interesting piece.
It’s a blister once fitted to the lower left-hand side of the cockpit wall to provide clearance for the steering gear. In itself it’s quite unremarkable.
So Bluebird’s builders needed extra space beyond the cockpit skin and a blister was the obvious solution without having to re-profile the whole side of the boat. But what makes it interesting is the pair of vertical creases where it has been violently wrapped around a vertical frame tube. What this actually demonstrates is that the frame failed at F-18 before it went at F-15 allowing the blister to wrap around the frame vertical.
Right – that’s enough history – we hit it with a hammer then wheeled the middle bit curved again.
You can still make out the creases though they’ve largely gone now and will soon be lost forever under a new coat of paint but all you have to do is scroll upwards a little to see how it once was.
Then we wheeled, shrunk, stretched, cut, welded, folded and bashed that new side skin into shape…
Not being very good at this wheeling lark we went very slowly with lots of hands on the job because the sheet tended to sag until we gave it some shape. Then it became a case of a stretch here and a shrink there – try it against the outriggers (F-19 still turned out to be wrong despite all our efforts last year) – then coax it some more until everything fitted properly.
It was a tricky one to get right. But we seem to have won.
Notice how there’s a lot of shape on the left whilst the right is almost flat. Distributing the metal evenly without leaving lumps, bumps and ripples really put our amateurish abilities to the test but it looks OK and it fits nicely.
That’s the right-hand side pretty much finished now, or at least all the parts are made for the big build.
The limiting factor at this stage is that nothing is properly nailed down and by the time you get to three or four thicknesses of material it becomes impossible to continue with any reliable degree of accuracy. We’ll be unable to finish that outer skin until everything beneath it is permanently fixed so for now it remains a few millimetres oversize.
Each piece has to be properly primed and painted before riveting too. You’d never dream of simply sticking two bits of aluminium together and hoping for the best, especially where there’s water involved.
Left-hand side next…
We had some snagging to do on some of the right-hand outriggers before they can go to the paint shop but having mostly bottomed the problem there was no stopping us. Many hands make light work – so they say – and this time K7 was rolled onto her other side in double-quick time.
Everything here is in much better condition and as we’ve solved the fabrication problems for the skins we expect a quick finish on this side and then we’re into the floors.
Meanwhile…
Louise is busy conserving those panels that we can’t put back.
Unfortunately the one thing we really can’t beat is corrosion and where it’s done this to an outer skin that has to keep the water out we’re forced to retire and conserve it for the museum display. We were once accused by those who shall not be named of attempting to, ‘write the 67 accident out of the history books’. Yes they can be that stupid – but nothing could be further from the truth. These parts will be conserved (not conserveered in this instance) to the same shiny, defiant blue of the tail fin and added to a sensitive museum display that will enable the public to understand and properly interpret the events of January 4th 1967.
That’s museology speak for it’ll look amazing without being macabre or displaying a wrecked boat.
This part is somewhat trickier.
It’s the air intake assembly from immediately behind the cockpit and we brought it out of storage to rejoin the rest of the project this week. It’s languished in a container for a few months while we developed the art of conserveering. We sprayed it with a clever inhibitor supplied by Chemmetal Trevor before it went away and it’s not deteriorated in the meantime but as you can see it’s a little squashed. This is one part we’d not feel good about displaying in the museum. It clearly came off second best in its altercation with the lake whereas the tail fin seems to have put two fingers up at everything the water threw its way. So what to do with the intakes?
They happen to be an integral and fascinating part of Bluebird and show evidence of much modification and development over the lifetime of the boat so there’s only one thing to do though the guys did give me a few odd looks when I said the usual, ‘it’ll fix’.
Much tin-bashing lies ahead, methinks.