October 2012

Yes, yes, yes… I know it’s been ages but it’s been a peculiar year. I’ve been driving a desk of late, something I promised not to do ever again after I turned 40 in 2007 but in January I discovered lunatics running my asylum and had to clear the decks before a long overdue propelling of my businesses into the 21st century. It’s been a most rewarding challenge but it’s eaten into my Bluebird time – a sad tale of the seven deadly sins but it’ll keep for another time…

Because of this I got home late the other night and stuck my nose into the living room to say hi only to be ignored because the telly was showing pseudo-cockneys slugging it out over fictional domestic trivia. Eastpretenders, I think it’s called. The missus watches another called Constipation Street that’s more or less the same but with Mancunian accents and once we were accidentally trapped in the room as though by fire for about twenty seconds with Britain’s Got an X-Talent Pop Idol or some similar abject bolleaux while she punched frantically at the stack of remotes and I ripped plugs from the wall in an effort to shut off the horror. It was awful!

Nah, forget all that fake stuff, if you want a real soap opera the Eurozone crisis is unmissable.

I love Greece. The laid-back lifestyle, the food, the sunshine, the welcoming people… but, let’s be honest here, had tax evasion been an Olympic sport they’d have had to pay extra to get their medals home and it’s a place where, if you want to get anything done at an official level, you’d best take a big bag of illicit wedge. Our 2003 Britannic exped arrived on site only to be told our permits weren’t the right ones because they’d been issued by a now defunct government department and we’d have to reapply to the local minister for sitting on his deckchair by a pool, on which he’d doubtless avoided paying the swimming pool tax until busted by the advent of Google Earth. Or, in plain language – now you’ve got this far, cough up a big bung or we send you home empty handed.

€30,000 later we had new permits and the TV company was considerably lighter in the budget dept. Good play by the local minister, I thought.

Then there’s Italy.

Beautiful people, admittedly, (at least the wife says so of the men) and ofttimes an excitable lot. The crunching shower of plastic followed by shouting, arm-waving histrionics as thirty Smart cars charge a single Rome alleyway at a change of lights is a joy to behold, mainly because when they’re done they simply clip the bits of plastic back to their cars and carry on like nothing happened. The food and wine is equally fabulous but it’s another place you’d best take a secret wad of moolah if you want to get anything done in a hurry. Anyone remember the days when you got a gazillion Lira, or Drachmas, to the pound because their currency was endlessly devalued? So who on earth had the bright idea of saying come spend our Euros instead? I’m no banker (though I’ve heard the odd reference to the merchant variety over the years without understanding why) but even to me this seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.

I just can’t deny my savage glee as I watch a slightly panic-stricken Angela Merkel running around her six barrels of snakes with only five lids.

But (presumably) saner heads kept us from joining their party so now the pound is safe and strong, which has a certain feel good factor about it, and our holiday spendies go further, but it’s not good for exports whilst on the other hand we can offer to help bail out the Euro-losers only if some of the stupid rules foisted on us by Brussels over the years are renegotiated – result!

But that’s enough politics and economics – the reason I mention any of this is because it left me with a hint of optimism about the Olympics.

You see, the Chinese put on quite a show, and so they should because they can do whatever they please without having to worry about such things as pleasing their electorate, the H&S wombles or what old, Mrs Miggins might say about having a missile battery mounted atop her care home. We, on the other hand, love to pander to whiners and I had visions of the whole running, jumping and spear-chucking contest descending into an over-budget, risk assessed, method statemented farce – but there was always hope that those who saved us from the Euro-mess were somehow enmeshed with the Olympics in which case we were in with a shout of not ballsing it up.

Went off rather well, didn’t it…

I remain firmly of the opinion that running fast, throwing things and jumping over stuff, though it had survival value to our forebears, only demonstrates the more primitive side of mankind whilst F1 and the Red Bull air races show how clever we’ve become so a carbon fibre pedal-bike had to do, but nothing lost and wasn’t Jess Ennis perfectly lovely?

The whole spectacle brought a swelling of pride and I’d bet Seb Coe ended well chuffed with himself along with countless of thousands of deserving others when the curtain came down. Even our very own Checkie Rob was down there doing something clever for O2 to keep people’s little screens working. Speaking of which, and I digress mildly, even the glass phone company seems to be getting its act together these days because the new Podeye phone seems to be made of something durable at last.

They used to be made of breakable glass, of all the stupid materials! Some genius designed a gadget to be taken into the real world by ordinary folk where it’d meet the terrors of everyday life that breaks if you give it so much as a hard stare. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone I know has dropped their iPhone 27b onto a feather pillow from a height of three millimetres and now it’s shattered and dead as a brick. Why would anyone buy such an ill-conceived thing in the first place knowing it’s not safe to be taken out of its packaging? Would you buy a car with porcelain bumpers? No, of course you wouldn’t, so why buy an everyday accessory that’s about as robust as a lead crystal champagne flute? Then, when it breaks, you take it to the Apple shop where they mend it expensively and you’re really pleased. They ought to make a thingamabob that makes a sound like a farmer approaching on a quad bike with a trailer full of sheep pellets when you shout, Baaaah! at it. That’d sell…

So people who bought the old version then had to save it from disintegrating if a breeze sprang up by encapsulating it in layers of plastic or bits of old tractor tyre… You’d think that if the people who made it in the first place had any common sense they’d wrap it in tyres before it left the factory.

Ahh, but on the face of it, they seemed to have common sense aplenty because they’d smugly watch their glass phone rendered mildly bump-proof at the customers’ expense or otherwise charge to mend it, so when the new, unbreakable one was recently announced I asked a gadgetologist friend of mine how come that had happened.

“They’ve listened to their customers,” I was told.

If that’s the case then they clearly had no common sense at all because surely a global company doesn’t need a miffed bloke with a smashed, glass widget to tell them it wasn’t a clever idea from the off, which leads me neatly back to the Olympics and to the point of all this rubbish.

What was it Seb’ said about the ‘legacy’ of the Olympics and about inspiring a generation? Young folk today really don’t have much to be inspired about at all, do they… overpaid youths running after a ball, perhaps – great, just so long as you don’t require intelligence in your chosen hero.

So what of those geeky kids who do things like homework, don’t get a girl / boy until half their pals are already married then grow up to be computer programmers or engineers? Who or what inspires them?

Just maybe a big, tin machine tearing down a lake will do it for one or two… the centre stage of an arena that must sustain its home-grown commerce and traditions into the future when you can fly to the sunshine for the price of a pint these days.

Having retired recently, after a long and illustrious career circling the globe in the employ of a gobsmackingly massive company, a gentleman instrumental in ensuring our ongoing success decided a slow tour through the Lakes with his missus would bring relaxation. He didn’t live far so I just assumed he was steeped in the place; but it turned out he’d never set foot amongst tarns or fells in his life and was totally blown away by it all.

“I get it now…” he said of the Bluebird Project and I thought he’d got it all along!

Then there’s another pal of mine who’s enjoyed soggy slate and dripping ferns his whole life because his folks took him to the Lakes as a kid and the magic just never wore off. He could go anywhere in the world but Ullswater does just fine.

So – here’s the question, I’ll make it multiple choice, as is the way of things these days, so even the nuggets are in with a shout.

When our big tin machine comes back to life, smells of jetfuel and we’re ready to get her wet and see what she can do, should we,

1. Run her out of season with the short-sighted aim of persuading people to Coniston when the weather is crap for the sake of a brief spike in the cashflow of some local businesses. Or…

2. Run her at the height of the season so the kids can come and have their minds blown, their imaginations fired and their education furthered as they fall in love with a place they will then doubtless return with their young-uns one day?

Which is likely to be most beneficial in the longer term? Maybe we ought to ask the miffed bloke with the smashed glass phone to explain it better.

But I shouldn’t criticise the Glass Phone Co. because they certainly know how to sell stuff just as we’re forever being pestered to offer a few new treats. We’ve made a point of never taking more money than we’ve needed and up to now our prints, DVDs and other merchandise have met our meagre financial requirements adequately but as well as rising costs for things like exotic tin from California to build sponsons, Mike’s million-dollar rivets and a zillion captive nuts to hold all the bits together there’s a constant request for new kit for its own sake to offer something different so we mulled over the catalogue and chose a few new bits and bobs.

Our John is very careful with his money and usually keeps it locked away in one of those Velcro ripper wallets so we bought him a new one.

Lots of compartments and such for your bus pass, donor card and winning lottery ticket so long as you’re strong enough to tear your way into it. Your cash certainly won’t go missing!

Then there’s this body warmer, or ‘botty warmer’ as my kids obstinately mispronounce it.

Pockets in places you didn’t know you had and super-warm (except for your arms) a must-have item of BBP branded clothing. And, just in case it rains, or the sun comes out…

One of those golfists’s brollys with a carbon-fibre stick up the middle. Very cool and the very dab for sitting beside a muddy lake with your carp rod for a whole day or getting caught in a cloudburst a million acres from anywhere with only your golf bats for company. Then, if you get properly cold, you can wrap yourself in a genuine BBP blanket made of some warm, comfy stuff that isn’t scratchy at all.

Perfect for draping over Grandpa’s knees, keeping the dog off your furnishings or the ants out of your picnic or, for the serious Campbell anorak, just the job to snuggle under at bed time. We had lots of requests for a blanket so here it is. (photo-bombing tot not included).

And, finally… Meet ‘Mumbles’ the teddy bear.

What can I say about a teddy bear, we all love them and he’s delightful so you can now buy all of these quality items in our shop except for the lovely Charlotte who kindly offered to model for us.

Thanks, Charlotte.

But how are we doing with the big tin machine, I hear you ask? And herein lies a problem because there’s only so much to say about the rivets that amount to pretty much all we’ve been up to – that and some minor bits of tin-bashing. The outer skins are very much an ongoing programme so for anyone who’s just joined us here’s a recap plus some new stuff.

It’s an awful long time since we stripped the outer skins from our boat and it was a nerve-wracking time because, though all our careful surveys and expert advice (that’s real experts – not the numptys foisted on us first time around) suggested that we had solid foundations to work from, the proof was always going to be found amongst the mud, dust and swarf so it was a massive relief to find the frame good as new even in the places where we hadn’t previously been able to access it.

Some of the outer skins were a different matter, though.

This one was a real pain because Donald’s mates shoved all sorts of fittings through it. Everything from electrical connectors to the outfall for the bilge pump, and not one of them was the same material. The result – granny’s lace curtains yet again. But we’re used to that, and the trick is to let in the patches of new material one at a time, returning the panel to its original shape after each one.

It’s fairly thin material and it welds easily but the resultant shrinkage is such that even a small insert will ruin its shape. If you then weld something else nearby it not only creates its own set of problems but it also captures some of the misshapenness of the previous repair making that even more difficult to deal with so the problems heap one upon the next as you go. It’s a long, painful process; welding then stretching then dressing the panel back to smoothness time and again. We did the left-hand side some time ago, this side is complete now.

Another important part of what we do is to studiously avoid removing shape that’s original. For example, you may discern a slight ‘quilting’ around where the vertical rows of rivets attach the panels to the formers. This was caused back at Samlesbury Engineering in fifty-something when they got the panel near enough then fired it down, stretching the skin slightly as the rivets were set. There’s no need for us to undo this so it’s been left alone. The last thing we want to do is sanitize our iconic museum object so unless we need to put back strength or keep the water out we don’t mess with history.

The tail cover is progressing nicely in this shot. Still a lot of pins but this many means it’s been choccied to the last and is ready for rivets rather than just hung together awaiting something else.

The yellow pins are through original holes and are 1/8th of an inch diameter. That’s 3.2mm and, more often than not, those holes can be reused because we took the old rivets out very carefully (and expertly by the time we stripped the tail cover). You see red pins where new material has been added and we’ve drilled 3/32nd diameter holes so there’s minimal loss of original material.

I remember someone being in awe that we’d had to take a rivet out of every hole without ever considering that, not only did we have to put them all back again, we had to add many thousands of extra ones to put it all together for good.

There you go, almost no pins, each replaced with a rivet. Each hole and its countersink has been carefully cleaned and maybe tickled out with the appropriate tools until it’ll take a rivet smoothly and neatly. It’s not unusual to have to cut each rivet to length too as the depths of the countersinks vary (not our doing!) and it can take an inordinate length of time to finish a single row if that’s the case. Each hole gets a dab of choccie on the end of a piece of welding rod to make each rivet watertight and impervious to dissimilar metal rot before the gun is applied to one end and a block to the other to hammer the rivet tail flat thus firmly clamping the skins together. Of course there’s a layer of choccie between the skins too so the whole lot soon begins to ooze like an over-filled jam sandwich and before long you’re covered, the tools are covered and, unless frequent breaks are included to mop up with a piece of towel and some isopropanol, the work area becomes covered too.

The engine cover is much more involved than the tail cover due to the way we designed the new doublers. Many of them overlap and the assembly sequence is critical. We repaired the engine cover first then applied the lessons learned to repairing the tail cover so we saved ourselves a world of pain with that one.

It was the usual grubby mess when it came apart but things always look better when they’re cleaned. The boat slapped down hard, hydroforming the right side of the engine cover inwards but it wasn’t a big job to send the metal back from whence it came.

This is the station immediately aft of the air intakes where those two little horns normally stick up through the skin.

The horns were merely little vents. Forward facing and connected to steel pipes that descended to face aft and force a draught past the engine and out around the jetpipe to ventilate the hull and prevent a build up of explosive or flammable vapours.

Here’s one, and notice the repair patch it’s sitting on. The inside of the skin has been doubled then a patch made to bring the material thicknesses and heights back to where they ought to be.

And here’s the whole area with the worst of the damage shrunk out and some doublers in place.

See where that G-clamp is hooked over the forward edge of the cover… that’s about the centreline, the spine of the boat, and notice a circular hole just aft of it. That contained a rubber grommet that blanked a redundant hole. It’s because it was rubber and not some sort of metal that that hole is perfect but look a little further aft and there’s another, ragged hole where some steel fittings were attached and then either side of that is another pair of similar holes where the horns used to be.

Then, with all the parts fettled to the Nth degree, Bettablast painted them and off we went. Or rather our dedicated teams of rivetists went.

Above, you see the cover with its left-hand, lower skin choccied and pinned. It has two lower skins, joggled under a large cover over the top. Here’s the other lower skin choccied and pinned.

Although most of us have bashed in a rivet here and there and we’ve all screwed pins until our fingers bled, John and Richie have made riveting the covers their baby.

We don’t even look to see what they’re up to nowadays. They just quietly assemble stuff then (incredibly) noisily rivet it all together to the most amazing standard. Here’s the top cover going on, note the ocean of choccie it’s about to splash down into.

Same routine. Pin it to death then steadily swap each pin for a carefully cut, fitted and set rivet until you end up with something that looks like this.

There’s several thousand rivets in that and, though John and Richie seem to communicate by telepathy, the din they create is so bad that it ruins everyone else’s enjoyment of our huge music collection. So much so that I seriously considered buying one of those Podeye thingamywhatnots. You know the job, one of those things that will only work if you give it an apple to talk to and even then it’ll drive you around the bend when you want to do something basic like stuff your MP3 collection on there and give it a listen. You could, of course, buy a Sony Walkman for a fraction of the cost and put whatever the hell you like on it but that would be way too logical. The saddest part is that your Podeye is sold as being clever enough to store so much music that you could plug it into your ears as a child and only have it chiselled from a crust of petrified earwax three score and ten years later when the nurse came to swap it for a hearing aid but I digress. I found I can put music inside my phone – what will they think of next – and that does in emergencies.

Possibly the biggest problem with writing the diary nowadays is that we can go ages with nothing really interesting to write about and most of the above has been touched on before.

The engine and tail covers represent cutting-edge conserveering but they’ve been disposed of in a few hundred words, unless you’d like to read a detailed account of each rivet going in, and even the more complex systems provide only limited scope for storytelling.

The update about the air-start system, for example, covered two years work as did the one about the fuel system with Aero Engine Controls. Countless hours spent in research and meetings, thousands of miles traipsed around the country and untold empty evenings in business hotels but also meeting amazing people and making new, lifelong friends. It’s as rich and heady as the brandy-soaked ingredients of a Christmas cake but when the time is right true justice is done in about five thousand words and fifty-odd pictures.

But here’s one you’ve not heard so much about and which may take a little more explaining.

When K7 hit the water she was executing a quick roll to the left, most likely because, for a brief moment whilst in flight, her ex-gnat fin led when it ought to have been trailing. Because of this her left sponson hit fractionally before the right but the relatively weakly mounted front spar was powerless to arrest the roll so, as the sponsons ploughed more or less evenly into the water stripping off the upper fairings as they went and tearing them from the spars, the main hull continued its roll and entered the water left-side down. The cockpit frame was first flat-packed from left to right then everything forward of the main spar separated, the forward two-thirds of the left-hand cockpit wall rolled completely under the boat and was spat out of the other side to finally expend its energy a hundred-plus metres to the north east.

Amongst this carnage the left-hand air intake was first to shove its open maw into the water and the result was catastrophic. It tore wide open, almost stopping K7 dead in her tracks, tripping her up so she cartwheeled and slapped down flatly on her opposite side.

The right-hand intake was squashed shut as she went over and the entire structure was crushed almost beyond recognition… You can clearly see in the pic above how the left intake was ripped aft and open by the inrushing water. Notice also the fairings on the tail that have been blasted to the left when she slapped down, all very interesting – but so what?

It left us with a very squashed air intake structure that was so badly forced into the void around the main spar that we had to use a chain-pull attached to an overhead RSJ to get it out, and when it did it was with a loud release of energy forcibly stored in that millisecond of violence in 1967.

K7’s last seconds and how her intakes came to be damaged are incontrovertible fact borne out by the physical evidence but the intakes themselves remained a mystery – we actually knew very little about them and could barely further our knowledge by simply looking.

So what to do with them?

We could conserve and shove in the museum and build new but we quickly spotted significant deviations from the 1954 drawings and that was without the modifications made over the years so whatever we built could only ever be a best guess and many of the answers were folded into the wrought metal and hidden from view.

We could tear it down and learn all about it then build new but that would leave an iconic piece of the boat even more unrecognisable than before and in a pile of bits. Or we could have a crack at rebuilding the original.

In the words of Campbell historian and author, Neil Sheppard…

*

K7's air intakes are a very intricate piece of engineering and design. By virtue of the nature of their use in a boat, with severe packaging constraints, and with very high levels of inertia from stationary, they gave Campbell and his team problems throughout K7's record breaking career. The chief problem was water ingress, caused when K7 was getting under way. The bows of Bluebird, together with the main Spar linking the Sponsons to the hull created enormous waves of water, which tended to be drawn into the intakes, which when Bluebird was at low speed were only about a foot above the water level. When K7 was first launched in Feb 55, her two spars were at the same level, and she had a foredeck that was flat all the way to the floor of mouth of the intakes. These were either side of the cockpit, and were necessarily bifurcated, meeting a central duct to the front of the engine about 4 feet from the intake mouths. The intake ducts also also had a decline of approximately 12 inches to the front of the engine. The intakes themselves remained relatively unmodified though out their life, notwithstanding a total redesign of Bluebird's nose and foredeck, carried out in May 1955, by raising the forward spar some 8 inches, and attaching it to the top of the frame, rather than running it through the frame. The raised spar meant that ramps now had to be incorporated from the foredeck height to the base of the intake mouth, either side of the cockpit. the took the form of two fairly steep slopes about 12 inches long at an angle of approx. 35 degrees. Alongside the cockpit was a virtually flat floor at base of intake level of approx. 24 inches. This ramp in and of its self was not a cause of any problem, but it lead indirectly to more pressure on the intake ducts because they masked the intakes of clean airflow, causing the engine to have to 'suck' harder at low speeds. Various methods were tried to shield the intakes against water being drawn in, including building up the metal panel work from the floor of the ramp to midway around each intake radius (This restricted air flow,and was abandoned), placing wing like structures below the ramp floor, and integrating a metal shield alongside the ramp base linking the intake leading edge with the front of the ramp that meant the height of the fore deck was maintained, when viewed in profile. This proved successful at Ullswater in 1955. When the team moved to Lake Mead in October 55, the 4000 feet height of the lake above sea level, meant that this solution was masking airflow around the intakes too much, meaning the Beryl engine could not generate full power, and the shields had to be cut back. L shaped baffles were tried, at the height of the ramp floors, but these proved very problematical, with continual engine flame out's that meant Bluebird, which was started from a battery pack in a tender boat, was helpless once the engine had flamed out. In October of that year, Bluebird sank at Lake Mead, in relatively shallow water, after taking on water via the jet pipe in water churned up by spectator craft after a flame out. Recovered, and repaired, the team eventually settled on to a baffle solution involving curved Perspex, that had a similar radius to the intake nostrils, and were mounted some 4 inches from the body work on brackets, so as not to impede airflow, but keep the water out. This was successful. Following return to England, in 1956, K7's rather butchered intake area was substantially cleaned up, and a new sliding cockpit canopy was incorporated. The intakes themselves were not modified. In 1957, Bluebirds intakes suffered a partial failure when during a static test, flush fitting rivets in the intakes were drawn into the engine, causing compressor blade damage. The area was fixed and reinforced and a successful attempt was made. Following this, in 1958, the intakes were cleaned up to help improve air flow. They ran in this form until 1966, taking 3 more records, although water ingress was never really solved, DMC perfected a technique to get Bluebird onto plane without creating too much water disturbance. In 1966, K7 was fitted with a much more powerful Bristol Siddeley Orpheus turbojet, with the full co-operation of BS. Their engine installation specialist Ken Pearson was concerned that the intakes were marginal in terms of capacity and recommended that certain modification were made to the intake lips, ramps and baffles to improve airflow at low speed. The intakes lips should be given a bull nose profile (thicker lips) to improve contraction and aid low-speed airflow as opposed to their present tighter radius. The intake ramps should have their step blended in alongside the cockpit, so it was one continuous gradient of approx 10 degrees, from the top of the foredeck to the base of the intake mouth, and finally the spray deflectors should be cut down to reduce their masking effect on the upper quadrant of the air intake mouth, and allow air to be drawn in from all sides, not just the front. This would relieve stress on the intake mouth. Pearson produced a sketch of the modified flat spray deflectors that did not follow the curvature of the intakes, to demonstrate the configuration he was trying to achieve. Ken Norris expressed doubt as to how important these recommendations were, and was minded not to carry them out if they would significantly delay completion of the refit or involve substantial additional cost.

The air intakes collapsed during a full power static test on the 5th November 66, after the upper quadrant of the intake interior - duct - blew out due to the extreme depression in the intake. In order to modify and reinforce the intakes, two of BS's recommendations were now carried out, and the intakes were given thickened lips, by incorporating a sleeve to be attached to the leading edge with a blunter radius. The spray baffles were also eventually modified to become flat triangular plates. The ramps were not modified.

BS had concerns about the mod’s. (They had right to be frustrated that the modifications were not carried out before the attempt, although there is no evidence that DMC personally was aware of their proposals), but calculated that with Bull nose and shield away from the upper part of the intake, the intakes would cope.

*

And cope they did until shoved face forwards into the lake at great speed, but this little lot was going to take some sorting out.

It’s upside down here so it looks even worse. We asked Rob to work his magic on it and initially he complained because, due to the convoluted metal obscuring many of the rivet heads and making it extremely difficult to dismantle, there didn’t seem much point seeing as we couldn’t use most of it – then he cracked on and started pulling it down regardless. The first piece recovered was the central plenum.

Now you’ll need a little imagination here and more than a little faith. It’s upside down in this shot so see that straight piece gripped in a right glove? That used to locate the left-hand, aft edge of the canopy when it was slid back to the closed position, then see the bit running away from it to the right at the bottom with a strip of foam attached? That sealed the top edge of the canopy where the latch was.

The plenum is marked on the early drawings as the ‘electronics bay’ and lies behind the headrest. It tapers down the centre of the intake duct bifurcating it from the inlets either side of the canopy down to a circular throat through which the engine breathes.

This is the other end – the engine end where the two inlets become one.

Don’t worry, it’ll get clearer in due course, but it’s worth seeing these really crunched shots to get the effort involved into perspective. Yeah, right. There is simply no way to convey how much work it takes to sort even a simple piece of crushed tinware. The plenum stripped into a pair of (once upon a time) flat sides, a set of internal bulkheads plus the so-called, ‘space-age pointy thing’.

See… very space-age and terribly pointy. About as pointy as this ‘flat’ plenum wall– but at least it’s an improvement on what we began with.

Now if we show you this shot it ought to all make sense.

The bit with the two orange clamps on it is where the foam was attached in the earlier shot – the top edge of the canopy. Then you have the two flat sides spaced apart in this case with a couple of bulkheads shoved in there, and on the back you have ‘space-age pointy’ to which it was laterabbreviated. And from the front…

Got it yet? Makes sense all of a sudden, doesn’t it.

Now that plenum normally fits inside a one-piece duct that delivers air from the inlets either side of the canopy down to the engine and the original was absolutely shot to pieces for lots of reasons. Shows just how long ago we started work on the inlets too. The frame isn’t even painted here so that takes us back to about 2007, without checking. Next we had to add some formers, which were also a tad bent and had to be extracted from the maelstrom of whacked tin.

Above is the aftmost former still attached to the inlet duct, the outer skins have been stripped away by this point. The middle former looked like this by the time we got it out of there.

It’s worth remembering that at this point we weren’t actually trying to mend the inlets, we were just getting a kit of parts together and finding out what could be reused and what couldn’t. Without doubt the trickiest part was immediately named the ‘Spectangles’. It’s the original leading edge of the inlet throats and had a radius of only 5/8ths of an inch and was made of incredibly thin – and horribly damaged – material. But in fixing it we knew we’d have the inlet throats exact and that was a prize worth fighting for. It came out of the wreckage in fragments…

…and was eventually recovered along with the formers. We even knocked up an interim inlet duct to keep it all together and kept on hanging recovered pieces of tin from it.

By the time we’d finished, about all we couldn’t use was the original duct and, as it was an iconic piece photographed a thousand times as the boat emerged from the lake in 2001, we elected not to reuse the devastated outer skin either in favour of conserving it for the museum display.

At the end of the day we were able to recover most of the intake structure, all the important bits at least. Using what we had and a nod to the drawings, which the Samlesbury boys obviously only nodded at too, we could put all the parts we didn’t have in exactly the right places and perfectly recreate the inlets using mostly original metal. Just for fun we skinned over it all – because we could…

…then we stripped it all down again, threw it in a corner and got on with the more important stuff.

To be continued…