What I find interesting is the fact that many of those who are involved with airshows, flying warbirds, and correct R/T procedure, severely admonish those who stand in fields adjacent to DX airfield, branding them irresponsible, and potentially endangering the lives of the pilots, yet a known problem within the airfield boundary is ignored, on the basis that A/C aren’t meant to be there?

Personally I am a fan of the homebuild aircraft, especially warbird types, and this one looks brilliant; ( in the photo) best wishes to the pilot.

Well if that isn’t clever, I’d like to know what is!

The thing is though, it is all down to money, because if you had enough, you could get Rolls-Royce to restart production; in this instance CNC machines are to be used to produce a component from solid that was previously cast, and as such the water ways were easily created by that process.

Is it really that cost effective when you consider the wastage in machining from solid, and as is the way with these machines, a tool breaking right at the end of the process, rendering the almost complete part scrap, yes you will get failures in casting, but they are put back in the pot.

I think where the process has merit is producing crankshafts, con rods and reduction gears etc.

Ford did in fact question the tolerances on the merlin, and spent a huge amount of time redrawing it!

I believe it was little more than “flexing of the muscles” having been effectively forced to build another rival companies product, at any rate they produced merlins that are exactly the same as Rolls-Royce, and Packard, all are interchangeable; (I think they only built the 20 series engines)

Post war,one has to ask the question what did they learn from the experience, going back to sidevalve engines with white metal bigends, right up to the ’60’s.

Lets look at it another way, the mkI had weaker undercarriage pintles than the upgraded mkV (and on), very little to distinguish them, and once fitted to the airframe almost impossible to detect; so if you were restoring a mkI to flying std would you fit the weaker pintles, for the sake of originality, or the stronger type that might make the difference for the survivability for both airframe and pilot on a hard landing?

No, they didn’t end up in a skip.

All existing remains of P9374 were acquired by the owners and what isn’t incorporated will be retained by the owners. A surprisingly high percentage of original parts were incorporated in the re-build.

Are the original components painted a different colour to differentiate between new build ones, as done by the guys restoring Donald Cambells Bluebird? if they are, I’m guessing a small pot of Humbrol was sufficient, with maybe enough left over to paint a 1/48 spitfire…

Black? black? “oh johnny no….