Don’t get me wrong – intelligent, informed comment is invaluable but some people just whinge for fun and become little more than background noise so eliciting valid input is often best achieved – like taking canaries down the mine – by upsetting a few sensitive types.
Therein lies a good reason for being a little more controversial, less politically correct and, speaking of which, something was said in the workshop this week that was met with, “you can’t say that!” by one of our visitors.
Can’t remember what it was but it only made us worse.
We’ll shortly need to install a doorman at the BBP workshop with one of those small sliding screens to see who wants to get into our politically incorrect speakeasy. We work in inches, eat full-fat food and wipe political correctness from our boots before we enter the door.
For example, I am neither ‘mass enhanced’ nor ‘circumferentially challenged’ – I’m just fat.
My lack of hair doesn’t make me ‘folically disadvantaged’ either – only baldy as a snooker ball.
Rob is a self-confessed short-arse whilst Alan Dodds has more earthy expressions for his advancing years than ‘chronologically gifted’.
There’s something life-enhancing about getting together with a group who know and trust one another and enjoying the daft carry-on without worrying about someone feeling the need to make a parachute for their teddy bear.
One memorable occasion I recall was when we had a diver working with us who was – how can I put this – of an alternative sexual orientation. But after a week of mucking in with the lads he’d grown a five o’clock shadow and was thrilled to be told he looked butch.
“Butch…no one has ever said that to me before,” he beamed.
Then we took some girls diving off the Northumberland coast because they wanted to swim with cute, cuddly seal pups; but Predator has no toilet facilities so we told them they’d have to do it over the wall the same as the blokes. On the appointed day they each came aboard and made their dive then stood at the rail and applied a modified teaspoon to their bedroom equipment using a process they refused to let us inspect and went at it most effectively over the rail just like the boys. We were intrigued, mystified and doubly impressed.
Then there’s the downside…
I went for a pint and a curry once with a HLF manager because he’s a great bloke and we get on like good mates ought to but he still had to declare his two pints of Guinness (that he paid for himself) and a chicken Madras to higher authority in case a relaxing social evening somehow swayed our lottery bid.
This is something that many missed – the fact that the Hapless Lottery Failure are exactly that but on a personal level we got on extremely well with a small number of delightful and intelligent professionals who were just as shackled to the inside of their organisation as we were to the outside.
Their officialdom took a well deserved slap in the chops when we went public with the ‘experts never clapped eyes on Bluebird, thing’ and determined not to be caught out a second time they sent an ‘expert’ archaeologist prior to the second bid.
“Ooooh, an archaeological dig in miniature…” gushed the ‘expert’.
The dig in question had been swept from the workshop floor and into a plastic crate that we’ve saved to this day in case there happens to be a stray rivet in the bottom but to have it accorded even minor value when not a metre away lay twenty-odd feet of Donald’s decomposing boat was something to wonder at.
I remembered all this yesterday when moving said crate into the space vacated by the right-hand ‘main flute’ as we’ve always called these huge sections of K7.
You can see the panel here painted blue. It’s fluted along its length, hence the name. There’s one of these either side and they’re unquestionably the largest, single pieces of outer skin anywhere on the boat. They’re both in excellent condition too. The one above has impact damage at its forward end but the material is as good as the day it was made.
What’s happened is that now that we’ve broken the back of the work on K7’s nose we’re returning our attention to those parts at the back of the boat yet to receive our full attention so it’s now time to show off a real ‘archaeological dig in miniature’.
This is ‘conserveering’…
Like father, like son. Greg and his dad spent a day lifting blue paint from the flute. Greg is well under forty years of age and so ought not be interested but you just can’t tell ’em.
All that could be carefully picked free and placed in a box was saved then a dollop of Chemmetal-Trevor’s pink slop was splattered over what remained.
This gloop is the stuff of legend after a restoration project on a DC3 had rostered their volunteers for a nine-month stint to get the paint off only to have Trevor shift the lot in an afternoon.
It’s properly pink…
…and it shifts paint like I can clear the bar on a Sunday evening after eating sprouts for lunch.
Notice the wrecked end of the panel. We always believed this to be impact damage from the right-hand sponson but having since seen many pictures of the recovered sponson and knowing how it was constructed it now seems more likely that the dent in K7’s starboard side is actually water impact damage sustained in her violent cart wheeling over the surface.
We found a world of corrosion beneath the paint where Donald used to stand as his boat was hauled from the water. It’s the only part of the panel showing corrosion damage so we have to presume that all those minor scratches and cracks in the paint over the years allowed that part of the underlying metal to suffer more than the surrounding material.
And here’s another part of our archaeological dig. Recovered from the lake in 2007
Go on then – guess what you’re looking at here. It’s actually the foredeck, or what remains of it. To get orientated look bottom left at the well defined right-angle let into the material. This is where the right-hand root of the front spar was faired in. Look a little higher and you can see a short length of the track in which the cockpit roller used to run. Go higher again and you can see the remains of the other root fairing with a shard of the original nose skin extending forward.
There now, that’s better, and thanks to Mike Bull for the sketch.
John rescued the root fairing…
…and bashed it somewhere near.
In the meantime we did some advanced tin-bashery to close the big hole in the nose. Imagine what the old girl will look like when she comes out of the paint shop…
Then Alan Dodds caught the Novie-taxi and came back for more.
It wasn’t long before the spar fairings began to come together whilst John-Tidy worked on fabricating new formers for those on the rear spar, which we’ll build as soon as the front ones are sorted.
Meanwhile, I plugged away at the battered fragments lifted from the lake.
Getting there… The top portion is original except for a thin strip of new material grafted in to replace the tortured edge where the parts were originally welded together then mostly torn apart again. The vertical piece is entirely original. They just need welding back together now.
There you go – how’s that for archaeology? We know these parts are correct because they’re the ones Donald could see through his canopy.
We do other museological stuff too, like bringing history to life. Or at least Alan does by returning to work on K7 after fifty-odd years and he soon had his fairings together. (Notice that lunch is served from the foredeck so as not to stop the job)
We reckon he’s quite handy on the tools is our Alan…
And the first flute came up extremely well. We need to make some repairs to it but for now it’s up on the mezzanine while we deal with its opposite number.
Not bad for 34 years on the bottom of a lake, eh? You can imagine just how quickly she’s going to look like her former self once those big panels go back on…
I’ll try not to leave the next entry so long next time so keep tuning in.