Lovely – and very precious – items

As all the doubting Thomas’s can see the guys are working very hard in the background to achieve our ultimate aim of a free standing Whirlwind mk1 Fighter standing on its undercarriage.

Fourteen months of hard work and tireless pursuit of the slightest leads and the generosity of guys with experience and detailed knowledge of CAD has brought the project very near to the exciting prospect of cutting metal .

The drawings produced so far a sample was posted recently on this forum are an excellent reference point to manufacture an aircraft thought to be long extinct and never to be seen again.

Support of one and all in any form is greatly appreciated please feel free to visit our site.Or email or PM one of us to find out more.

Mike E
Engineering leader.
www.whirlwindfighterproject.org

That tailplane don’t half look like a Meteor!

Hi Matt…

Their all on DropBox, and I was going to start a thread with the title “Look who came to dinner” but your’s is more in keeping with them, they are both on loan as Matt has already said, the one with the broken tail plane and chewed up wings is one that turned up in the depths of AgustaWestland archive, thank you Dave for letting us borrow it…;) The other pristine example is from a private well wisher that has very kindly let us borrow her to glean all the information she holds, after she has been measured in all her important little places, she and her older siblin are off to be 3D scanned in the new year by http://www.3dengineers.co.uk/ who have kindly offer their help and expertise to futher the project…

Here’s some more shots…

Absolutely!

There are significant differences between these and production whirlwinds – engine nacelles and tail acorn being the most obvious.The history of design development in these areas is known.

What we have is incomplete lofting information – small grey areas that the drawings that we do have don’t cover. One example is the area of fuselage side just above the wing root aft of the main spar, which seems to display very subtle double curvature.

It’s really a case of measuring these subtleties – but with the caveat that everything ‘around’ these subtleties – the basic lofting lines, so in the case of the area I mentioned the fuselage depth and half-breadth – has to match what we do know or we won’t use it. If that makes sense. This does seem to be a recurring principle of this kind of ‘reverse engineering’.

Courtesy of the shadow I thought you had the rare low-tailplane version there. It does look better, but flying characteristics are more important. If it is right, it’ll look right – not the other way around!

But this mistake does highlight the point that windtunnel models are not necessarily the same as the final product, so be cautious when suggesting taking loft lines.

Ban that man! He sounds like a wrong ‘un to me.

Ah, well, pics (and dining table) are courtesy of Stu H (Mr Bluesky on here). I’ll ask him for more..

I saw the heading of this thread and had a nice warm feeling.

There was I thinking: “Ah, what a nice fellow that Beermat is”

Can you imagine my devastation when the awful truth dawned. He wasn’t talking about the “Spitfire Three”….! 😀

Indeed they look stunning but more photos please.

Nice….

a tiny piece of history on your dining table ! If time permits can you add a few more pictures please?