Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation

The complete CAC Materials Standards catalogue has now been digitised, over 400 Standards that relate to aircraft and engines of British, French, Italian and American design. On the website only a part of these is displayed as the mind numbing task of formatting individual files to be downloadable has exceeded the budget of patience available in 2017. If you are after a copy of a particular file, use the Contact button to get in touch.

The entire collection of CAC aircraft and engine drawings, exceeding 650,000 negatives, is in the process of being digitised at ANAN Moorabbin Air Museum. It is envisaged that this process will take 5 years, but at the end of the process individual drawings for every nut and bolt of engines from the RR Merlin to 1960’s jets will be digitized, and airframes from the North American derived Wirraway to Mustang to Sabre will be available.

As a side project, based on the original drawings of the CA-15 ‘Kangaroo’ within the Archive, an accurate cockpit is being constructed for display in 2018.

https://www.facebook.com/CA15Kangaroo/

Just in time for Christmas, another 1,990 historical material standards are now available at http://www.silverbiplanes.com
In total, nearly 3,000 historical material standards have now been digitised and are available for free download, for the purpose of enabling the safe restoration of historic aircraft.

Forum members have been generous in digging out and sharing fantastic material : Cold Kiwi, Aircraft Clocks and Graham A, thank you ! If I have neglected to mention your contribution publicly, and a document of yours appears in the lists (RR Materials), it is either because my brain has boiled or because you are too valuable and special to be hung out like laundry on the forum. In all cases, thank you for your generosity !

As curator of the ANAM Moorabbin Museum Archives I was privileged in 2017 to receive an extraordinary donation from the family of the late Flt Lt Kevin Kerle (1942-2004), who spent 28 years in the RAAF. Amongst his roles was the co-ordination of technical manuals for the Air Force, which included disposals of obsolete material clogging bases and stores. Kevin was an historian and contributor to many well researched articles and publications on aviation history. One of his extraordinary contributions was to fulfill the directives of higher command to dispose off unwanted publications in large waste skips, and tick the appropriate paperwork to confirm that this was officially done. On the way home he would then back his car up to the waste skip and legally fill the boot with this material, which in the end became nearly 20 metric tonnes donated to the ANAM Moorabbin Archives ! From this extraordinary collection have come British Standards from the 1920’s to 60’s, rare English language analyses of wartime Japanese aircraft materials and structures and other gems which the hard working volunteers of the archives have sorted and continue to catalog. Flt Lt Kerle, I tip my hat, Sir.

Additional material has been sourced from the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation collection within ANAM Moorabbin Museum Archives, including an extraordinary body of historical AGS from the CAC Lidcombe engine manufacturing plant Inspection department.

Finding, sorting, scanning, file naming and configuring documents to be downloadable files on desktop and tablet computers takes many, many hundreds of hours. It is not possible to provide all the material found on the website. If you are searching for a particular material standard that does not appear in the current lists it may be in the pile waiting for scanning in 2018. If you do have any old material standards looking for a good home, they would always be gratefully received if you make use of the Contact button on the website.

Brief summaries of newly available material are given below.

Beermat, for the sake of your legacy, and for some thumb sarking infant that will be searching this thread in 25 years time, you should repeat the table here, in respect of hydromatics. The scintillating conclusions may be lost on the other thread.

This field is filled with vendor driven confusion and unhelpfulness, driven by an archaic, low cost IP protection strategy, which is to keep information out of the public domain. It goes against the spirit of the times, where youngsters today are growing up with ‘open source’ software, and cracking open closed information systems. The commerciality of aluminium props for historic piston aircraft is so marginal, you wish that someone would just open the door and let it go, but I suspect that the folks in charge now don’t really have the understanding of the topic that the 1960’s engineer did, so can’t find an informed basis to make a decision about this material. It sits in the too hard, too marginal basket. It looks like the US palmed it off to the Czechs, and USD sales to Texan oilmen with Mustangs still makes some Pilsner drinking accountant see big windfalls, so prices stay up. A few sales a year of custom jobs averages out OK. It’s a formula that suppresses the growth of the historic scene.

The lack of commerciality is driven by the tightness of 95% of wallets in historic work – the obvious preference is to adapt second hand goods rather than invest in the eye watering cost of new forgings, or even a finished product from a suitable vendor. Somewhere in here the requirement for new, sound blades, obscure LH tractor blades and ‘once offs’ needs a solution, but it will never make you a millionaire. It really is a labour of love. If you want to see more stuff in the air, some other commercial formula has to evolve.

The only weird idea that might work is to rent blades, ie use your knowledge to find/adapt suitable blades then rent them out. It’s buy cheap (your money), sell dear (over time), basically vendor finance the end user, break down the cashflow so more things can fly safely and affordably. Somebody has to stump up the risk capital and face the pressure of trying to make that capital work. It’s really a labour of love, trying to at least preserve capital, making judgement calls on what to stock, to preserve the capacity. Historic prop making is a fabulous way not to make money.

I sense this is a temporary opportunity, adapting still plentiful HS material washing around the world into custom applications. In the fullness of time Jablo type blades fitted into a universal ‘historic’ hub/prop shaft combo can keep things going for 100 years.

What I notice is a diminishing pool of aluminium blade shops with a diminishing pool of grey heads which doesn’t bode well for the next 25 years. Also some crazy, mystery grinding creating mystery profiles, albeit with the right numbers. Grinding is a thankless task and you won’t find too many aerodynamicists with a grinder in hand. The pool of experience from the 1940’s to 60’s, that you could expect an informed result from a supervised labourer, might not be there anymore. Who cares, as long as the thing is balanced. Performance doesn’t matter any more. Folks are maybe doing interesting, secret things matching Tracker and Trojan blades to WW2 types and there will be more and more of this, without any regulator having the experience to make a judgement call on it. It’s like radium dials, waiting for some catastrophe to spur a response….

In the meantime you can become to go to guy to resolve dilemas. Here’s the 1947 groups and 6127, enjoy !