Griffons Growl Again

Sure the old girl looked like she was smiling!

It was great to be there too! Great to see and especially hear those engines power up, a first for me! The Gatwick Aviation museum is a great place to visit , have been there a few times and have been made to feel really welcome from the engineers and volunteers! Thanks again.

Cheers
Jason

What a terrific sight! Long may she continue to growl!

One last antidet run Saturday, before the end of the year. she had a 25 minute run, to get her nice and hot before covering the engines for the winter. No snags, all started on the button, apart from n04, which was purely down to a little over zealous throttle chopping during fire up!:p… well when you’ve got 2500 horse power to reign back in 3-4 blade turns, whilst trying to keep an eye on the tachos, at the same time as looking out of the window at 6 blades less than 2 feet from you, it gets a bit fruity:rolleyes:

this time we ran her up, then switched to silent ground power, so that all growling could be heard, rather than a noisy GPU. vid hasnt been edited yet, but once done, we will upload to U tube.

Hi all, sorry or the v.long delay, but following on from the RAF 90th celeb run, here is a snip of some footage from the run (the run time was over 15 minutes, which gets boring to watch! hence cut down) sorry about the quality, but it’s the best we could do with you tube. Enjoy.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CDymRwG42V4

Glad you enjoyed it, we certainly did. The weather was a real bonus.
We had spent many hours on Saturday in the wet, cold and dark working on No.4. Sadly only with partial success, more to do there!

There were two of our members/associates taking video on the outside, plus two more on-board with video cameras. We are putting together a DVD of all the runs, not just the recent ones. The source material is on a numbers of different formats and this is slowing down the final version. Plus now course Rod will have to incorporate the footage from yesterday! By the way I don’t appear in any of your photos, I bathed specially too! Any one need to know how to burn £400 of AVGAS, just ask…….

Peter Mills ( the one on the end of a long headset lead)

Yup doode you going to get to do a piece to camera telling us what a grand old bird she is so the bathwater wont have gone to waste!!!
Many thanks to the Cranfield Lightning team who came down for our event.
I know one of them got some footage.
do be patient we have loads of stuff to look through and as Pete said it is on all sorts of formats. Just got a Matrox card for the desktop to sort it all out.
jb154

Here is the whole team who were involved in the Shack run on Sunday 30th
Peter Vallance on the right.

Judging by that photo, looks like your time on the wander lead made you tired Pete.

Well done to you all for keeping some of the collection running.

Here is the whole team who were involved in the Shack run on Sunday 30th
Peter Vallance on the right.

A very enjoyable day and great to meet a few forumites,I had a chat with 2 of the shack engineers before the engine run,really nice guys.Bearing in mind the engines had not been run since Dec,they started really well.
Pic 1…Pulling the props through prior to start.
Pic 2…Bucc S1,apparently engine runable !! unique ?
Pic 3…Was (pleasantly)surprised to find this,used to be at one of the prettiest aerodromes !!(might be biased;) )

Gary thanks for posting the pic, I think!

We are always hoping to get them inside. The politics changes little as each year goes by, but they are still here. We will continue to fight the effects of weather and age. With such a large airframe and only a handful of engineers, plus 20 odd other airframes we have to prioritize the tasks. For the Shackleton getting the engines running again has obviously been No.1. for those whose primary interest is the Shack. In policy terms our primary task list has generally been one of “getting things running again”. As a consequence the external appearance of some exhibits may have suffered. That not to say that some work is not going on to improve the airframes. The Vixen for instance, has had many panels removed and corrosion treated in the past couple of months, these are being repainted and will be refitted soon. The Bucc has just had the canopy replaced and we are hoping to get a number of parts for this airframe to improve her appearance and general wellbeing. We are often amused when just after we have simply re-painted an airframe to find it described as “fully restored”, if only!

As a group of volunteers we have decided this summer to reverse that “engineering first” policy and put engineering tasks as second priority, that’s always assuming that the weather co-operates! This should mean that a number of aircraft will end the summer in a much better external condition. Sadly, it is often the external appearance upon which the success of a museum is judged by, understandable, but possibly erroneous.

Vipers, well we have them, to be strictly accurate we have one on site and one at RRHT being refurbished. It takes RRHT five years to carry out the work. We are very grateful for the work that they doing on our behalf. It will therefore be obvious that any plan involving the Vipers is a long term version.
In outline; we do intend to refit them and make them runnable. Possibly reworking the installation to run on AVTUR/JET-A1 by using the tip tanks as the fuel source.

We would like to take this opportunity to say, thank you, to the many people who turned up and supported our efforts. It really makes all the work worthwhile.

Peter Mills

Sorry, Can’t give you the Gatwick video but have this one as a taste of what it sounds like….:dev2:

http://www.viduz.com/view-H-pHk5uQR2Amg-T-Avro+Shackleton+Engine+run-up.php

Further Vids of 1722 can be found here.

http://shackletonfilm.blogspot.com/

Wouldn’t a hangar be fantastic!! Two Shacks being pulled outside in the sun with one doing taxi runs etc not to mention all the other aircraft under cover as well!

Thanks everyone.

Found this shot just for you Peter.

Hopefully 982 will remain in ground running condition for the foreseeable future, its just a shame it can’t be hangared. What does the museum have in store for its continued preservation.

Septic

I’ve never seen the Gatwick Shacks, but I did get to see ‘963 do a twilight run at Coventry last December and I can still feel the ground shaking. If it’s stayed with me this long you should be good for a few months Gary. 😀 Thanks for the pics, and thanks to Peter and the team for keeping ‘982 growling. I haven’t seen her yet, but hopefully I’ll get to see a run before too long.

On a related note, are there any plans to get ‘982’s Vipers working? (And no I don’t mean the vindscreen vipers! Groan…)

Great pics, nice one!

Interesting to see the different shape of the tips of the front and rear propellers! Also, the different diameter is visible. Thanks for sharing!

Christer

Glad you enjoyed it, we certainly did. The weather was a real bonus.
We had spent many hours on Saturday in the wet, cold and dark working on No.4. Sadly only with partial success, more to do there!

There were two of our members/associates taking video on the outside, plus two more on-board with video cameras. We are putting together a DVD of all the runs, not just the recent ones. The source material is on a numbers of different formats and this is slowing down the final version. Plus now course Rod will have to incorporate the footage from yesterday! By the way I don’t appear in any of your photos, I bathed specially too! Any one need to know how to burn £400 of AVGAS, just ask…….

Peter Mills ( the one on the end of a long headset lead)

Very nice pic’s Gary, certainly sounded good.

Thanks for the pics. I couldn’t get anywhere near to get a shot! Thanks to everyone at GAM for a nice day. 🙂
UPDATE Yes Peter, several people, including those that appeared to be GAM related were taking video. Hopefully someone will post it.
Regards
John

Excellent photo’s!! Did anyone get vdeo of it?