Ploughshears into swords

There are blokes (almost always blokes) fascinated by mechanical devices. For some: buses, locos, ancient agricultural kit; we here: aero bits. Harmless. Very likely to die with our generation: if a Reception Class teacher spots a boy showing interest in lumps and data, uncomfortable with social interaction, then he is a source of additional school funds, since he is Special Needs, autistic. So the boy will be mentored into conformity.

A very interesting point. It goes without saying that a fairly substantial element of the aviation enthusiast community falls somewhere on the autism spectrum. Case in point, those museums that have ‘exhibits’ of excavated crash remains. The average joe isn’t going to care that much for tangled aluminium. History shows that these museums tend to run the gauntlet of bankruptcy because they don’t actually present a conventionally interesting collection to the public. The Kent Battle of Britain museum springs to mind as an ‘autistic’ museum due to the piles of wreckage, minimal interpretation and idiosyncratic nature of the owners. I wager a fair number of forum users start rubbing their trousers at the prospect of piles of wreckage, but you cannot really hope to build a sustainable business model off the back of it.

As for the notion of these autistic children being ‘mentored into conformity’, their quality of life is probably far higher now than they could have expected fifty years ago.

The public transport system in rural Philippines is the jeepney, much-personalised Willys left over from 1944.

There are blokes (almost always blokes) fascinated by mechanical devices. For some: buses, locos, ancient agricultural kit; we here: aero bits. Harmless. Very likely to die with our generation: if a Reception Class teacher spots a boy showing interest in lumps and data, uncomfortable with social interaction, then he is a source of additional school funds, since he is Special Needs, autistic. So the boy will be mentored into conformity.

The Clearing Sale

Australia. Summer. Undecided whether to yield to drought, lost clouds, pregnant with tropical vapour, look lost against the blue sky, then panic together, like sheep, and drop thick warm rain onto the dry, dusty landscape. Here we are in New South Wales. Somewhere between Griffith and Deniliquin, for a Clearing Sale. When you are old, when your vein walls are thin and you are a farmer, when your years are marked by all the fickelness and cruelty and wonder of nature, when you have had enough and your children are too observant and have drifted to the city, when you are ready to go, you have a Clearing Sale.

And all your neighbours and stranger like me come to look and turn over your memories with their boot. So I was after the Bomber Wheel Delver. A plough with a Mosquito wheel stuck to it. Mosquito wheels seemed to be the perfect height to work their way through scabby paddocks. In the 1960’s, when the scrapman slaughterman ran his dry calculating eye over the old Warhorse, the wheels had a whole abacus full of customers. So the wheels went into the enterprising shops of smiths to be made into implements , to coach and plead the wheat out of the dry ground.

So here we were sixty years later, and the Delver was abandoned into my hands, and the Whitworth threads that held the Bomber wheel against its true nature yielded, faithfully, and the wheel was loaded on my truck. Dry, dry and more dry meant the metal was sound. I wondered at the rubber. What a bloody good tyre.

In this district, soldier settlers, hacking the gas of Fromelles out of their lungs, were granted land. They dug canals by hand and horse, and brought water in. So suddenly you come onto paddy fields of rice. It is time for the crop dusters. Yellow flags mark the corners of paddys. The cropdusters swoop, and at the impossible last moment, flourish over the powerlines of the road. I have never seen such flying. Either twenty year olds building hours around boredom or a forty year old wanting fate to shortcut some type of answer.

The Mosquito wheel will come with me and be cleaned and inspected. Someday, if fortune is inclined, it will be attached to a Mosquito. If I am flying, I will be nervous. Every awkward noise will draw my eyes away from the simple pleasure of flying. I will worry about the simple electron grip of eighty year old metal in the wheel, whether on this landing it will laugh and give way. And so I drive the truck home. I figure that this is as good as it gets, travelling into the dust and the blue sky, into the yard of the old farmer, finding the diamond and giving the dream enough to keep it’s lungs moving, up and down, up and down.*

*The author won a school prize for English literature in 1987 and has an interest in deHavilland Mosquitos.
This is the second Mosquito wheel that the author has turned from a ploughshear into a sword.

Ironic really that the fastest advances in technology come from trying to find more efficient ways of killing each other.

I often wonder just how technically advanced we would be without the motivation of killing each other!

Which country did this happen in?

Australia. The engine hasn’t been opened, but I doubt there would be an alteration to its innards to stop backflow of previously exhausted air on the induction cycle of another cylinder. The only way I think it worked was relatively inefficiently (high turbulence), generating a positive pressure in the exhaust manifold that escaped to a one way valve inline to an air reservoir.

With no exhaust valve, air could not be compressed in the cylinder, only moved along, I guess a crude version of a supercharger or blower. Given the volumetric capacity, and a 1:1 drive ration to a big engine running at 2,000 RPM, this moved lots of air. It would all make a lot more sense if there was some sort of valve, at each cylinder, stopping scavenging of higher pressure air from the exhaust manifold, yes sir.

But then if there was an inline valve betwixt engine and reservoir there really is no connection to higher pressure or atmosphere in the exhaust manifold, so new air is just being inducted and moved down the back of the bus. It probably got hot, but a radial could cope.

Am I the only one confused by this thread?

The title is “Ploughshears [sic] into swords” yet people seem to be discussing swords into ploughshares?

Moggy

Over the years I have seen and found war items turned into useful objects that illustrate the “better angels of our nature”, so I guess the origin of this thread has to do with trying to document and share charming conversions of killing machinery. The title reflects on the warbird movement turning chook sheds back into representations of killing machinery, which, when I see a Messerschmitt with accurately portrayed swastika on the tailfin makes it unambiguous to me. I do find it unambiguous that my own interest in warbirds relates mostly to war and less to bird, or mostly the story of 20 year olds put into the circumstance of war, into the strange pleasure of ‘rhubarbs’ and 1,000 HP engines, nested in loss, brutality, dysentery and fear.

I think that what happened postwar with the jetsam of state sanctioned, industrial killing should be documented before people like me make it disappear by restoring it to its original function. I am interested in sharing S>P because everything else is P>S. I understand that I have also garnished this basic thing with philosophical rantings from out of a bubblegum machine and from God, so this is why the title may seem inverted to you. If you feel it is more appropriate to change the thread title I have no objection, but old testament God can get really angry !!

Re ploughshears, it is shears, like shearing sheep, shearing the earth, furrowing the earth, as much as it may furrow the brow.
It’s like fishplate, or fitchplate, or de Havilland, or De Havilland, you say potato, I say po tato

Which country did this happen in?

Presumably there must have been some sort of exhaust valve fitted, maybe a reed valve of some sort?

Here is a Cheetah engine which was used as an air compressor. The exhaust valve gear has been removed and the exhaust manifold has been blocked at its usual exit and a pipe fitting welded in. I assume either an electric motor or other engine was coupled to the prop shaft to drive the system. I have seen this before in four cylinder car engines where two cylinders ran conventionally while two were adapted in the same way to pump air, being a self contained ‘bush mechanics’ air compressor. Given the volumetric capacity of a Cheetah engine this would have pumped a huge amount of air.

An old truck driver walked passed this engine and instantly recognised its application as an air compressor. “Back then” he was a train fireman on diesel locomotives and said that they were adapted to the front of the very large train diesel motors to supply air for the air brakes, because the existing air compressor was not good enough. This was a direct drive off the front of the diesel crankshaft. The low revving, high torque, high horsepower diesel in combination with the high volumetric capacity of the Cheetah would no doubt supply plenty of air to an air brake system. Now that I think about the features taken off the engine and those left on the adaptation was done with the degree of practicality you might find in a railways workshop.

Am I the only one confused by this thread?

The title is “Ploughshears [sic] into swords” yet people seem to be discussing swords into ploughshares?

Moggy

Not going to join in the theological debate (Despite being a clergyman’s son – or possibly due to that fact!) but as a collector of WW1 Trench Art I have always found things fashioned from military equipment and munitions fascinating. Around the area I live there are still the odd farm trailers with wartime surplus aircraft wheels, though tyres are becoming a problem I believe. Also I have heard several local versions of stories of tail wheels from crash sites being used for wheelbarrows, but have yet to actually see one! Other tales involve aircraft panelling being used to repair several chicken sheds and pigsties locally, but they are always long gone when I try to track them down! I was once involved in the recovery of a Hadrian frame that had served as a chicken shed – Now at YAM after I donated it to them.

Abroad my fascination with French junk shops has uncovered a couple of portable compressor units featuring B17 oxygen bottles, but the wife put her foot down at the time when I suggested bringing them back in our already overcrowded VW camper (Kids and their toys taking up most of the room).

More recently I spotted the following items on display at the excellent Szolnok Repülőmúzeum in Hungary – a stove made from a B17 wheel and some rather fetching privy doors panelled in aircraft skinning complete with the aircraft’s national insignia still showing – not sure whether retaining this had been a deliberate feature or not but the display was balanced with one being American and one German. Finally a Fiat G12 Fuselage section – the sole surviving representative of its type I believe, that had served as a woodshed on a farm in Hungary for many years, after it was destroyed on an airfield by strafing P-51s near the end of the war.

Fantastic S>P ! I wonder how close the magnesium wheel stove might have got to rapid carbonising of the sausages !

I think firebombers are the best examples of warbirds doing more humane work in second careers.

Firebombers are probably the most spectacular role reversal for heavy bombers there could be. A great example. It would pay in the modern airshow, once there has been a simulated napalm dropping low pass, to send in a firebomber with dyed up retardant to put the flames out…

Great poem

powerandpassion, if you are not familiar with it you may appreciate this poem known as The Ballad of Tubal Cain. I first discovered it years ago when it was reproduced in Model Engineer magazine and found it inspiring. Here is the link:
http://phoenixmasonry.org/tubal_cain_poem.htm

A great poem that sums it all up pretty well !

I recall many years ago, back in my native Canada, walking past a place and my eye being caught by flower pots on one property that very clearly were engine cylinders.

I caught the attention of the property owner and we chatted a bit about it. it turns out that he was an aviation fanatic and his wife was an avid gardener.

Long story short, they merged their passions and she used his engine cylinders (which came from a variety of WWII radial engines) to hold her flower pots.

At least two of the cylinders came from Bristol Hercules engines, but I don’t recall the sources of the rest. There were eight or ten in all.

powerandpassion, if you are not familiar with it you may appreciate this poem known as The Ballad of Tubal Cain. I first discovered it years ago when it was reproduced in Model Engineer magazine and found it inspiring. Here is the link:
http://phoenixmasonry.org/tubal_cain_poem.htm

That was a blast from the past. I’ve not come across that since I left scholle ???? years ago.

Not going to join in the theological debate (Despite being a clergyman’s son – or possibly due to that fact!) but as a collector of WW1 Trench Art I have always found things fashioned from military equipment and munitions fascinating. Around the area I live there are still the odd farm trailers with wartime surplus aircraft wheels, though tyres are becoming a problem I believe. Also I have heard several local versions of stories of tail wheels from crash sites being used for wheelbarrows, but have yet to actually see one! Other tales involve aircraft panelling being used to repair several chicken sheds and pigsties locally, but they are always long gone when I try to track them down! I was once involved in the recovery of a Hadrian frame that had served as a chicken shed – Now at YAM after I donated it to them.

Abroad my fascination with French junk shops has uncovered a couple of portable compressor units featuring B17 oxygen bottles, but the wife put her foot down at the time when I suggested bringing them back in our already overcrowded VW camper (Kids and their toys taking up most of the room).

More recently I spotted the following items on display at the excellent Szolnok Repülőmúzeum in Hungary – a stove made from a B17 wheel and some rather fetching privy doors panelled in aircraft skinning complete with the aircraft’s national insignia still showing – not sure whether retaining this had been a deliberate feature or not but the display was balanced with one being American and one German. Finally a Fiat G12 Fuselage section – the sole surviving representative of its type I believe, that had served as a woodshed on a farm in Hungary for many years, after it was destroyed on an airfield by strafing P-51s near the end of the war.

What are some of the wonderful things you have found warbirds turned into ?

I think firebombers are the best examples of warbirds doing more humane work in second careers. With the B-17 arguably being the biggest change (from bombing Dresden and the like to dropping water/borate on fires). Since retired as a fire bomber.

Hueys (and others) as civilian medevac choppers.

Air racers.

Fighter canopies serving as mini greenhouses.

Titan missiles launching peacefull satellites.

etc.

A man without his sword is just a man
A horse with out his armor and knight is just a horse.
A chariot carrying hay instead of bow man is just a chariot.
A “war”bird without weapons is just an airplane.

Powerful stuff and very well expressed, powerandpassion.
Unfortunately I find none of your explanations/excuses express the truth, at least for me.

How do I go from drawing disintegrating RAF .303 belt clips with a nice rack of rounds to recite Vespers?
Understanding the technology of the Lancaster is a very big thrill. But how do I divorce myself from the consequences? And then pray “Lord, show your love to all men”.

Why is it weapons that provide the thrill of understanding, the lust to understand and possess the understanding? Ploughshares are boring. Yes, a DH Comet 4 is beautiful, but I’d go for a Lanc, Halifax or Stirling any time. Not so much a Wellington, funnily enough.

Or is it simply that I was born in the middle of WWII, surrounded by uniforms, big powerful military machinery and people living at a different level of intensity?
Mike