Do any drawings exist for the early "up to MK 4" Gloster Meteor ???

A T.7 with the cockpit section removed is basically a Mk.4 airframe when it comes to the important bits. Where to find a Mk.4 cockpit though? That is the question.

Airframe part commonality throughout the Meteor types is very high. There are plenty of airframes around that can be measured (and I have measured several too).

My question was, what drawings have survived?

Reading another post here stating the remaining drawings went to Chadderton…. don’t hold your breath, as I spent some considerable time accessing drawings there and only ever saw de Havilland ones!

I would suspect that the only place to look now would be Martin Baker, being the last user of the type. They are an engineering company who use and modify the Meteor airframe, and I would be surprised if they don’t have an archive of the drawings?

By coincidence an elderly lady recently donated a large framed blueprint to us titled “Planning Chart F9/40”. I know it’s not an airframe drawing but it shows that this kind of thing is still out there. She wasn’t certain that it was anything to do with aeroplanes but it used to hang on her late husband’s modelling room wall which is why she thought to bring it to us rather than dump it. F9/40 didn’t immediately say Meteor to me but I had a suspicion which was quickly confirmed.
It doesn’t have an Isle of Man connection so we shall probably transfer it to Hendon unless anyone can suggest a more appropriate place for it.

The Hendon database has hardly any Gloster drawings and none for the Meteor

The Gloster archive faired particularly badly. When I first joined the aircraft industry I worked with one of the last employee to leave the Gloster drawing office. He told me the following tale;-

Given the impending closure of the Drawing Office (DO) its manager had been under instructions to sort the archive and decide what should be kept and transferred the Chadderton. The Gloster DO was being vacated and so they had a fixed date when it had to be cleared. The DO manager duly sorted the archive and requested 4 lorries of a particular size to transport the archive to Chadderton . A day or so prior to the vacate date a small van arrived and despite protests this was all there was. So the DO manager had quite litterally a few hours to radically downselect what was to be saved and load the van. The rest was sadly burnt in a single large bonfire the next day.

I’ve tried on sever al occasions to find out what was transferred but the Chaddrton was notorously bad for losing data so to date I’ve drawn a blanck

………. May be the RAF Museum will have something.

Anon.

The Hendon database has hardly any Gloster drawings and none for the Meteor

A T.7 with the cockpit section removed is basically a Mk.4 airframe when it comes to the important bits. Where to find a Mk.4 cockpit though? That is the question.

It is my understanding that the T.7 cockpit was basically a stretched F.4, so in theory at least,you could back- engineer one to F.4 standard.

I may be wrong on this, but you could, in theory as least, use a T.7 airframe, the Cosford prototype for reproducing engineers drawings for cowlings & canopy, and a modified set of NF Meteor outer wings reproduce a MkI or Mk III.

A T.7 with the cockpit section removed is basically a Mk.4 airframe when it comes to the important bits. Where to find a Mk.4 cockpit though? That is the question.

There was/is a surprising amount of commonality between all the marks of Meteor – excepting the major airframe and mark-specific changes that occurred.

Many of the assemblies, fittings and myriad smaller components were the same, however, I haven’t heard of drawings of any original drawings of anything surviving. May be the RAF Museum will have something.

Anon.

I have been asked if there are any manufacturing drawings for the early Meteor’s.
Does anyone know if any survive, & if so, where abouts they are ?.

I would assume that some of the later marks used a number of components that were also used on the early marks, is this so ?.

Bob T.

I’d like to know that too? Do any good technical drawings exist of the Meteor? Not GA’s, but airframe components, sub-assemblies, etc.