Remember the weekly football reports – and I can’t stand football – because all we were doing was painting walls and floors.
But painting walls and floors is as important in its own way as bashing slices of tin. The guys supplying said tin don’t want it shipped to some dusty craphole and would not be impressed if their customers saw such a thing.
On the other hand, the same customers are invariably more impressed with a beautifully sculpted nose than a technically-perfect outrigger. This Bluebird-Project job has always been an extremely delicate balancing act.
For example…
Many enthusiasts reasonably assume that I’m a Donald Campbell aficionado but those who know me better will tell you that, although I think the bloke had big balls, my real heroes in all of this are Ken and Lew Norris.
Think about it… Malcolm Campbell’s boy, and that’s all he was at the time, comes knocking on the door of two young and ambitious engineers and says, ‘I want to build a boat to bring the world water speed record back to Britain’.
Consider that John Cobb had just killed himself in pursuit of the same and you could excuse the Norris brothers for quickly showing young Donald the door.
But they didn’t…
What they did instead was to design an all-metal, jet-powered hydroplane the likes of which has never been seen before or since. Equipped with only a drawing board, slide rule and self-belief they must’ve posessed similarly big balls.
Ken is sadly departed nowadays and Lew isn’t up to giving us a hand either so it’s up to the BBP crew to get it right so this week we finally declared the pointy end complete and moved on to where it all becomes serious.
Although the nose looks impressive, at the end of the day it’s only so much aerodynamic fairing and cosmetic glitz. It’s all lightweight stuff designed to keep the breeze out of Donald’s underpants but now we’re off back into the bilges and the nuts and bolts of K7’s structure.
The plan is to complete the sides of the hull and then the floors and bulkheads before the build-proper commences. Oh, and did we mention? The sponson build has commenced too. Our materials finally arrived from across the pond and now we’re only waiting on a few bits and bobs but we can make a start in the meantime.
The assembly sequence for the hull and sponsons must be precisely followed too or we’ll be left with large assemblies that won’t complete unless we tear most of our work back down again.
Pulling the old girl apart initially wasn’t a problem because she’d been ragged in half but the further forward you go the more heavily built and complex the floors become in terms of how they interact with the frame and hull sides to keep the water from stripping the skins off with the design climaxing in a symphony of Norris Bros. brilliance where the cockpit floor meets the step at F-19.
We need to get amongst the spars too because x-rays have revealed damage to the internal structure at the outer ends. The main spans are simple enough but the extremities are very tricky; you just have to look at how many rivets there are out there…
The front spar also has a slight twist across the internal bulkheads that keep the centre section rigid. What happened was that in the accident the left-hand side let go first and put a tweak on them. It’ll all fix.
But for now we’re working on the last few damaged outriggers.
We stripped K7 almost back to the frame then rolled her onto her port side.
She’s a heavy old bitch but with the help of a few chain-blocks and strops we got her comfortable then pinned the damaged parts in position. These are the outriggers from around that water-blasted hole in her starboard side. The damage extended from F-10 to F-12 with some minor dings fore and aft but fixing it isn’t simple because we have no reference. The outer skin was trashed and every outrigger aft of F-14 has been substantially modified to accommodate the flutes, which were a later addition that don’t appear in the 54 spec’ so we have nothing to work with except the other side and we’ve come to realise that even this can’t be relied upon.
Job-one – to get what little we had somewhere near. This is F-10 as recovered and cleaned up.
The water burst through K7’s outer skin below and aft of the main spar destroying three stations and stretching this outrigger into the shape of a wok! It took some putting right, I can tell you.
John Tidy took this particular part under his wing and wouldn’t let it go until it was spot-on. The biggest problem is that at some time in her history the boat was significantly slimmed down by the simple process of lopping the ends from most of the outriggers so in this instance all we had to work from was the relatively undamaged panel from the port side. But K7 is far from symmetrical so building to the sizes from one side doesn’t necessarily mean your parts will fit the other and all it takes is a thickness of material (16 gauge for the outrigger and 12 gauge for the flute (in old money) and bugger-all will fit properly)
Undaunted, John made a best guestimate, guillotined the panel in two, removed a slither of what he gauged to be stretched metal then gave it back to me to weld together again…
Then he sliced it the other way – more welding. Next he cut a slender triangle from its upper half to remove more stretched metal – yet more welding. Mending that daft piece of tin took up most of the afternoon.
Until… a final check before our resident perfectionist signed it off – phew – I put the TIG torch down at last!
Rob, meanwhile, was performing flute-surgery because it’ll not fit back on the boat with all that crumpled mess at the front end. We held a meeting to decide how much history to destroy, took a gulp of Chris Knapp’s ‘reality dictates’ potion then let Rob loose with the panel saw.
He rattled our brains, despite our ear defenders, for what seemed an eternity as he excised the dead bits…
…then we excitedly attached a batch of the already conserveered, original panels…
…so the flute could be put back for the first time in over a year. The flutes are great, solid slabs. We were amazed at how heavy they were when they came off and decided they must’ve been cut from the wing spars of a scrap V-bomber. We had a go at straightening the crunched bit with a view to reusing some of it but to no avail… But we’d considered this and whilst obtaining the sponson goodies we’d ordered full sheets so there’d be some leftovers of the right stuff to mend the flutes.
Seemed like a good idea at the time, and despite it being tough stuff to push about, and not being able to take too much bend without cracking, making up the repair section didn’t take long…
…welding it bloody well did though!
It doesn’t like being welded. There’s no welding in the sponsons so no problems there but what a murderous task it proved to be on the flute.
The first few attempts we tried on a test piece cut from crushed flute-metal resulted in instant cracking as the material has virtually no ability to elongate as it cools but we’d already learned the ropes on the inner floors some months ago so it fell to John and his blowtorch to apply vast amounts of preheat then post-heating to the welds so they cooled slowly and gently found their level. Job done…
We’ve had to replace about 15% of the flute overall but what’s left is original and we have an extremely exciting display idea for the museum involving the removed sections so nothing will go to waste.
Other side to sort next.