For you Beaufighter fans – Warbird Restoration Services Working Bee 5/10/13

Great pics and video Bellarine! Saw your thread on WIX too and posted on that discussion too. Anyone here have older video they can post of the engines running on Morrabin’s Beaufighter? Probably posted on the Forum before, but it would be a great addition to this post.

I’m not intending to hihjack this thread, but I’m wondering what precisely is missing or required to allow the restoration to running of the Hercules engines on TFC’s Beaufighter? Are the engines non-existant, exorbitantly expensive to rebuild or only just unavailable? Does TFC have the engine cores or do they lack even this?
Chris Wilkinson

The building was literally built around the Beaufighter.

Yep its very impractical which is kinda sad in my book. The wings would need to come off or else simply demolish a side of the hangar !

Neat to see, guys. Would be a real big thing if the engine was cranked up and run again… I take it it’s not so easy to get it outdoors without moving a dozen or so aircraft/engines/display cases etc, or removing an outer wall?

Apparently not, the simple answer is that it was moved inside. I just checked with Ash Briggs, one of the people who did the engine runs back in the day, and was the one turning her over yesterday.

I thought that the engine runs were stopped due to corrosion in the prop/hub assemblies?

Interesting….. I wonder if it might have been a case of Hydraulic lock and they thought it was seized?

Good to see she still has some life in her.. I remember when they used to do regular runs and then stopped running the port engine due possible issues on that side??

I had heard that as well, and may well still be the case, but Ash Briggs and myself rotated the props a few weeks back and saw no issues, and the prop turned over (in error) yesterday as well. Guess the real problem would not become apparent until it was really fired up so we are lucky in that regard to at least turn them over

Absolutely fantastic, but what are your future plans ??
It would be nice to see & here her live & taxi ??
ATB Duggy

We would all love to see that, but she is housed indoors for now. We are a volunteer group that attends the museum once every couple of months to do work where the museum does not have the skillsets or resources available, and currently work on a DC-3 that has been subject to the elements without care for far too long.
Believe me though, all of us in the group would dearly love to give the Beau a bit of TLC, so you never know. Lots of work has to be done on the leaks etc …

Great news! Thanks for posting. 😎

Good to see she still has some life in her.. I remember when they used to do regular runs and then stopped running the port engine due possible issues on that side??

Absolutely fantastic, but what are your future plans ??
It would be nice to see & here her live & taxi ??
ATB Duggy

Brilliant, hope this leads to more live action 🙂

Thanks for posting – lovely to see the turning prop and internal shots 😀

As far as I know it is the only one capable of this. Would be nice to go full and run the engines but being indoors it would probably blow all the other aircraft thru the hangar wall. There is also the issue of leaks, due to lack of ongoing maintenance we spotted the hydraulic reservoir leaking above the nav station and also oil dripping thru the port undercarriage system. Not to worry, we will so some work on her soon, I certainly had goosebumps being so close to this taking place (and of course being my fave aircraft too)

That’s marvellous, well done guys! Surely this is the only “live” Beau in the world?

And while grainy due to the iPad freaking out with the lack of light, the cockpit lights and internal lights all fired up too

Brilliant to see.

Moggy