Said I wasn’t going to write any more diaries

Said I wasn’t going to write any more diaries. The fun had gone out of it. You see, the only part I actually enjoy writing is the rubbish at the beginning. It’s like making a curry. You marinate the meats and roll in the spices then watch while it bubbles and the kitchen fills with wonderful aromas, season to taste then, when it’s perfect, boil up a big pan of rice and serve it up. The artistry is in the curry, not the rice. Rice is easy as is all that boat stuff that we’ve discussed, planned then executed. Been hands-on with it... So the last thing I want to do is write about it.

But then all you good people want to know how it goes so it’s pretty selfish to just not bother, which is why a nice pot of controversial curry goes on the stove to be tweaked and picked at while the rice is boiling.

Last time the bleaters got their knickers in a twist about foxes.

Okay, so I thought the trampolining fox advert was stupid so whenever it came on I just ignored it. I didn’t run to the nearest keyboard, so if you don’t want to know what foxes really do just scroll past that bit. Then before that I was accused of not caring about my dog because I described how he was euthanized after 17 happy years. Once again, Angry from Manchester felt the need to protest. Just don’t read it! You know there’s a heap of dry, boring Bluebird stuff coming right up so if all you want is a big plate of boiled rice scroll down ‘til you see the first picture and get stuck in but if you read the next bit and don’t like it – keep it to yourself!

Oh, and by the way, whatever I write is either my opinion or just total nonsense.

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I was in the pub the other night. I pop down for last orders most nights. I bought my beer then pocketed my change, which to my annoyance, fell straight down my leg and rolled across the floor – hole in my pocket, bah…. Having retrieved my coins I asked, jokingly, if the barmaid, who I thought was my pal as she was oft my late night companion, could sew.

She bristled at once.

“Why?” she asked, accusingly.

I was onto her in a beat and already a little hurt but, sod it, she was getting it back.

“Because that’s what girls do.” I said.

Now tell a bloke that he farts in the morning, smells like a swamp by the time he gets home and lives like a pig and he’ll likely smile wistfully, laugh a little then agree but ask a girl if she can sew and you risk of a tirade of what a disgusting sexist pig you are, and that’s exactly what I got.

Well, I’m sorry. Women make great nurses, secretaries and PAs. Men make good lumberjacks, coal miners and F1 drivers – which leads me onto another point. No grid girls this year? Really?

No doubt that’ll pacify someone but what about all those happy go lucky, pretty girls who willingly sign up for the free travel, interesting opportunities, the off-chance they’ll beguile a billionaire, not to mention wages for a young person before they settle into a proper career or raising a family – and all because they’re blessed by nature? As a veteran of many a trade show I’ve met lots of lovely agency girls. It’s one of those jobs you do when you’re young, like working in a bar or as cabin crew. They love it but, alas, people who ought to live and let live can’t help but poke their noses in.

I am also blessed by nature. Not with looks to die for or a body that would grace Adonis (unfortunately) but with the ability to speak pure, unrelenting bo**ocks for indefinite periods and as long as I apply this blessing to Bluebird related matters people actually seek me out to entertain at their gatherings. They feed me for free and keep my beer glass full, put me up in expensive hotels and take me out to meet interesting people and make new friends. How glad am I that there’s not a hunting pack of do-gooders behind me railing at the injustice of my exploitation.

Many years ago when I worked in Russia I’d frequent the Tribunal Bar in St. Petersburg where pretty girls were celebrated. (Had a quick Google – seems the good old Russkies haven’t lost their sense of fun). The place was always packed and I remember supping a beer one night, not three feet from a girl in a black bikini dancing on the bar with another wearing a red one. Moments later I was verbally assaulted for watching by some irate woman bent on telling me how awful it all was, how exploitative… and guess what. She was the biggest, fattest, ugliest babushka you ever saw in your life.

Now, I have a theory, that it’s ugly people who scupper pretty ones for these stupid reasons. I mean, I reckon, had the babushka been as gorgeous as the bikini girls and not wreathed in spare tyres, extra chins and hair where it oughtn’t have been she’d not have been so quick to pour scorn on their way of making a few tip so I’m going to check something out.

For as long as I can remember we’ve had a calendar on the wall from the same welding supplier as has every fabrication shop on Tyneside, it’s almost a rite of passage, a welcome sign, the secret handshake. You know you’re safe when you walk into a workshop and see it on the wall and so it’s been for at least twenty years. Until now…

The weeks went by but our welding rep’ didn’t come with the customary Christmas bottle of wine and the calendar until I was finally faced with a double mutiny from both the main factory and the BBP shop.

“Where are the new dumplings?”

Now I must point out that the calendar, though depicting the naked female form, is most artistic and graced with girls who evidently choose to display their assets willingly and with great pride. We’re not talking one of those gruesome medical jobs here full of quarter to three shots – oh no, this is genuine art beginning with the subjects and ending with the exotic locations and first rate photography.

Things were getting desperate so I called the rep’, whom we’ve known and dealt with for many years – one of those constants in life – because the welding supplier has had this advertising and branding exercise sewn up to perfection for as long as I can remember and my main concern was that they might’ve gone out of business leaving a whole swath of Tyneside scrabbling for welding consumables.

The explanation was ludicrous.

“Hey, Tony, where’s our new calendar?”

“Erm… we don’t do them anymore.”

“What! There’s Hell-on in here wondering when they’re coming. It’s February! What’s the problem?”

“Sorry, mate. The new boss is a woman…”

Oh, for goodness sakes – let’s set everything else aside for a moment. From a purely commercial perspective, this woman is now the boss. How did she get there? She has to be good at something. Yet to look at the calendar situation and demolish twenty-plus years of brand awareness over some feminist crap is just poor governance. Your average Tyneside welder is no more politically correct than he was when we had shipyards to mess about in and won’t change in our lifetime so play to your audience if you’ve any commercial and common sense at all. Stupid woman!

We’re dished out endless calendars from other suppliers depicting the best of British viaducts or the best cars ever that we’ve seen a thousand times before and they all go in the skip. There’s but one calendar that never gets binned and the new boss-woman has scrapped it.

I’ll bet a fiver she’s not calendar material…

This is where we left off. Having K7 mostly fitted out and all her systems up and running for an engine test after which she was gutted out and put back on the rollover jig at the start of 2017. Now it was time to put her clothes on and get her watertight and this was going to be a big job!

Most of the panels are repaired originals with only the right-hand cockpit wall and the infill panel immediately behind it being completely new-build – oh, and a good proportion of the ruined air intakes. This, for anyone new to the tale, is because the boat was in a fast roll to the left when she hit the water due to the fin momentarily leading as she flew backwards and upside down; then she righted herself so as the sponsons touched down the centre hull was twisted free and landed left-side down. This had the effect of crushing all the panels down that side onto the frame and blowing all the ones down the other to smithereens as the air pressure inside went off the clock. The front end just burst like a crisp packet so we recovered very little of the right-hand cockpit wall and the panel behind was fairly devastated too.

The little piece up at the nose wasn’t in bad shape, however, so we salvaged that and cheated somewhat. It’s other half was missing so we made up a new section then claimed the whole panel as original so it got painted grey instead of that awful Kawasaki green – soon to be covered with a splendid coat of blue.

The section aft of there was a real mess. Yes, we’ve straightened out worse but what settles it is the amount of corrosion. You can have a panel that looks essentially OK but it would be more patch than panel when mended so it’s better off left alone to tell the story.

Those who’ve followed us for long enough will recall the bureaucratic ditherings of the Hapless Lottery Failure and their insistence that any interference with the wreck would be ‘destroying history’. That the boat was a ‘snapshot in time’ and all those parts were ‘telling a story’. Our counter argument was that we could use 99% of the parts to rebuild the machine and the remaining 1% would adequately tell the story – and that’s exactly how it’s played. The old air intake skins and bits of the right-hand side are in the museum in their original blue and the rest are back where they belong. This bit was especially fuggered.

So we made a new one.

This is going back awhile but it meant that these parts were a least in the stores and simple enough to install when the day came.

Now when I say simple…

Even a brand new panel has to fulfil two requirements. It has to be a panel that does its job and keeps the water out and then it has to be historically correct, which in Bluebird’s case means either looking like a dog’s breakfast, albeit in shiny blue pint, or festooned with redundant fasteners, or both and this was no exception.

The job is well advanced at this stage. Look and you’ll see all the captive nuts on the inside. Most are redundant from the early experiments to get the boat planing in ‘55 or whenever it didn’t work straight out of the box. Others are to hold on the spar fairings and then the whole thing is painted silver on the inside because it’s a damn-sight easier to do that before installation. Notice the 600-odd rivet holes too. All carefully drilled, pinned then deburred and countersunk. Each captive nut has two countersunk rivets holding it on too. Days and weeks of preparation to load a single panel, and that’s a new-build part.

Good slobbering of choccie on the underlying structure…

Then clash it on with many rivets.

One thing we discovered via our partnership with Stanley Engineered Fasteners is that modern day rivets are infinitely better than those used in the original build. It’s easy to put solid rivets, i.e. those that need a rivet hammer on one side and a block on the other, into freshly drilled holes, but once a structure has been de-riveted and it’s time to put it back together again this can be problematic because a hole that’s already held a rivet becomes slightly stretched and putting in another can get tricky. Although the holes in the new panel were all brand new it was the ones in the old structure that would have caused the headache. Up-sizing will fix things usually but far more effective is to use modern blind fasteners that one person can insert with a gun from the outside and which are 100% reliable and effective. We used a 1/8th closed-stem rivet on the cockpit wall made by Pop and they worked every time, pulled like you’d not believe and forgave holes that would have given a solid rivet a fit. To say that panel won’t fall off would be a massive understatement! And that’s without the adhesive, sealing and stiffening properties of the good old choccie sauce, something that was never included in the original design or build. And, just so you understand the level of detail in the rebuild, at some time a rivet must have given up and Donald’s team tried to mend it. They likely tried to upsize but it was in an awkward place down on the turn of the hull on the right-hand side and very tricky to access from the inside so, following what must have been an intensely annoying attempt at repairs, they finally put a screw through with a nut on the inside and tightened it up. So Mike worked out exactly which rivet had failed, drilled it to the right size, extracted the nut and screw from the dead panel and put it in the new one.

Cool, eh? And, no, all those little holes won’t let water in because they don’t lead to the inside. The back of the rivet is closed, then there’s the filler, then there’s the high-build primer, then there’s the three coats of shiny blue, but that’s a little ways off in the future.

The other cockpit wall was a horror story by comparison. Largely original it was very fighty and took many weeks of fettling and shrinking before it would even go onto the frame.

This was the first major piece of wreckage pulled from the lake and it tried to kill me with a lift bag – but that’s another story.

Only its centre survived so pretty much all its perimeter is new material but the hole in the middle, covered by a blister that the steering linkage pokes through, revealed a piece of material that was painted once only when the boat was first built then covered over by the blister once they realised the steering wasn’t going to fit so we were able to identify 1954 Bluebird blue with absolute certainty – RAL 5007, is that one.

The skin also contained a startling piece of evidence of the violence of the crash. See below where the material had petalled out as though a bullet has passed through from the back. That’s where the end of the steering shaft, an inch diameter steel tube, twanged through it when it snapped. The shaft shouldn’t have snapped at all. It should have bent but such was the speed of the hit it shattered like glass and the broken end slapped from right to left and blasted that hole in the panel. Scary stuff.

The panel was gradually brought back to life. Most of it came out of the lake in 2001, the forward part was to have a further six year slumber in the darkness down there before we got it back attached to the missing piece of cockpit frame in 2007.

This was taken in October 2014 and that was that for a few years until we got back to needing it. Fast forward to 2017 and our Barry from Grimsby inherited the thing.

It was even more work than the other side and took months because many rivet holes had to be welded up and re-drilled, and as well as the same collection of pointless fasteners it also has doublers behind a few corroded areas and this one has the blister on the side too. Barry very carefully marked out all the areas needing rivets and devised pitches to ensure every last one went into good material. At this point it’s being pinned with red, 3/32nd pins but they were later upsized to 1/8th then countersunk and deburred once the panel was painted.

Almost there… only the choccie sauce and a shedload of rivets then a good clean up and it’ll be on for good. Oh, and install the blister.

There you go – all done. The blister was a modification made necessary by a bit of an oops. The hull, once complete, was handed over to the Bloctube people to fit the controls. A crazy idea when you consider how much easier it would have been to work through the sides of the hull as we did but, hey-ho, that’s what they did with the result that, no matter how they tried, the steering linkage as specified to give the correct gearing and force to the rudder wouldn’t go in until they cut a hole in the side of the cockpit for part of it to protrude as it travelled so then they had to put a cover over the top. We spent a good while properly restoring the original. The file marks are those of the craftsman who made it originally.

So that was the cockpit closed in at long last and the infil panels aft of the cockpit were much the same story. One brand new and relatively straightforward to install, the other an absolute nightmare of repairs and reinstating its subtle shapes ahead of a world of losing and re-drilling rivet holes, etc. The right-hand side one managed to get to the paint shop before we’d finished the tin-bashery on it so I was never happy with it but only for cosmetic reasons.