What did I say about, ‘watch this space’ after the new baby was born?
A few of the boys met up for a pint or two last Friday resulting in a late start on Saturday. Fortunately we only had a skeleton crew that morning. I’d not normally say this was fortunate but you understand…
Tin-bashing commenced soon after 11am with an attempt to rebuild the right-hand inlet to its 1954 specification. We need the 54 spec’ build to support the 66 setup and as the original was buried beneath the later mod’s it was therefore protected to an extent in the crash but still well squashed by the time Rob dug it out. The piece we wanted was the Norris-designed inlet lip built at Samlesbury’s in 54 so a hundred million rivets and ten drill-bits later…
…Rob got it free but it looked a bit sorry for itself.
And then a very strange thing happened.
Whenever a piece of tin is hauled from the wreckage the first thing I do is give it a good twist and a pull about to assess its mechanical qualities. Depending on what it’s made of some parts are like roofer’s lead and can easily be shaped by hand whilst others, the floors are a good example, are so tough you wonder whether they’re made of some top-secret stuff from the fifties the formula for which was lost during the Cold War.
But this was like nothing thus far encountered.
It didn’t feel particularly springy nor was it soft; but as it flexed in my hands it began to return to its original shape without need of a hammer – truly weird.
It was as though it was straining to get back from whence it came but hadn’t quite the strength to do it unaided. All I had to do was lightly push it where it wanted to go and hey-presto…
It turned back into an intake lip; can’t help thinking Donald took an hour off seducing angels and popped into our workshop for the afternoon. How I wish the whole boat was made of the same stuff.
So what you see now is the 54 arrangement and the setup (correct me if I’m wrong, anoraks) used on all of K7’s victorious campaigns. It’s also a less than ideal profile for slurping air around corners so the Bristol Siddeley engineers had just cause in ordering modifications once their comparatively hungry Orpheus replaced the old Beryl hairdryer.
What’s especially gratifying about the above pic’ is that apart from a piece of shiny scrap we’ve clamped to the outside in place of an outer skin – we did this to check the accuracy of our work on the profile of the transverse formers – you’ll not find a fragment of non-original material in sight.
But it’s far from simple. John and I spent a whole day trying to work out how this lot was put together. In the interests of perfect, historical authenticity we want to build it exactly as it was but achieving this often involves extensive detective work.
The thought that went into solving the myriad problems with getting air into that engine is aptly demonstrated once you gain an understanding of how the intake was constructed and still it’s important to remember that it remained a ‘work in progress’ throughout the life of K7.
We’re trying to resurrect thirteen years of mechanical evolution from the smashed remains of a major accident followed by thirty-four years of slow decay on the lakebed. Guess it wrong and we’ll be hooking bits of scrap out of our wrecked engine.
The other side wasn’t quite so accommodating; Rob released it in fragments…
…and this pic was taken long after the tin-bashing commenced otherwise it simply wouldn’t be recognisable.
It too wanted to return to its original shape but if the spirit of Donald Campbell made a cameo appearance in repairing the other side then by comparison mending the above must’ve been overseen by the ghost of Fred Dibnah.
Don’t get me wrong here – I’m a great fan of the late Mr Dibnah but you’d not want to be in too much of a hurry for your job, would you… Bless him.
The same gathering of fragments in quarantine – we often spot-weld such assemblages then leave them untouched for weeks until subsequent tin-bashing exercises prove whether we’d got it right or wrong first time around.
Incidentally, I proudly showed this image to Rachel. “It’s full of holes,” she said disgustedly.
These partial repairs are much easier to cut up and fix when only spot-welded, something to which Alain will testify this week regarding the doubler he made for one of our transverse formers – but that’s another story.
You’ll notice a shiny, new piece of tin too. Rob packed away his drills and pin-punches after so many weeks of dismantling the intakes, moaned about his ‘broken finger’, which isn’t really broken at all (and if he hit it with a hammer then who’s fault is it anyway?) and knocked up a new closing plate for the back of the cockpit. Nice job.
Rob deserves a medal for tackling such a bewildering mountain of rivets over the past few weeks. Instead he rightly greeded the entire resources of the BBP to clean and fix his collection of Meccano and miniature, Mamod steam engines.
We resolutely pushed the broken bits of aluminium back to where they belonged.
Considering where we started things aren’t going too badly here but there’s a downside to all of this.
Our original plan was to have a more or less complete boat by the end of 2009 whilst we’ve qualified this throughout by stating that it’ll take as long as it takes.
Much of what we’re attempting is breaking new ground so if it stretches to the horizon then so be it but there was never any intention to rebuild that intake. Nor did we envisage four months on the lake last year sniffing out that lost frame section. We really believed our new survey kit would turn it up in an afternoon after we missed it in 2001 without ever considering that it might have flown further than the front spar.
In consequence, taking the inlet repairs and our gallivanting on the lake into account, we find ourselves with about eight months added to our schedule – in theory at least.
We were asked on numerous occasions how long we planned to search the lake for the final piece of frame and the stock answer, ‘until we find it’, always made me nervous. There are pieces down there that we surely haven’t found because nothing shows above that impenetrable mud. The fact that only a handkerchief-sized fragment of aluminium flagged the whereabouts of a two metre section of steelwork testifies to the luck we’ve been dealt from time to time. Had the frame landed the other way up – and who can say how it behaved as it tumbled through the air then plunged to the bottom of the lake – that tiny shred of alloy would have been forever buried and we’d probably still be looking.
But then, perhaps we made our own luck… Admittedly, things were beginning to come apart by the time Carl made that decisive dive. So many individual theories on where to look and what had happened to the missing piece were being pushed forward; and that’s the most depressing scenario in project management when the doubts of others heap upon your own and every step becomes twice the effort because morale is wilting by the day.
I like to think that had we not finally nailed that missing piece by logical and rigorous searching we’d have eventually resorted to a grappling hook and smugly patted ourselves on the back many months later when it came up with a dripping piece of frame on the end.
And yet, like the hypothermia victim opting to lie down for a short nap, it would have been so easy to say, ‘we can’t find it because…’ and close our eyes forever to the problem.
Likewise, it would have been painless to pronounce the air intakes deceased. I mean, who would’ve argued? We could then have set about making new ones, learned nothing of the history wrapped up in the originals and built their replacements wrong into the bargain.
But we’re not. We’re plugging away so if it takes time and extends the schedule then, we’ll all just have to live with it.
No apologies.