FAA approvals do necessarily mean they can be used on CAA permit aircraft.

Product liability….. releasing drawings and that part failing and causing deaths would come back up haunt you..

Take Rolls Royce as an example as they built the Merlin, they no longer produce piston engines, they have moved on, why on earth would a company as such release drawings for parts that are no longer made, for engines where their expertise no longer lies, where their core business isn’t, because as the Design Authority they would be culpable? If anything went wrong, it would open them up to future litigation. Remember in the scheme of things there would be no advantage to them, financial or otherwise, just lots of risk. And in this day, an age of bad publicity and the effect on a companies share price, you can totally understand it.

Hence why without the likes of Royce’s, Marshalls and BAe onboard as Design Authorities, the Vulcan would still be sitting at Bruntingthorpe, as one would imagine the CAA would have said no chance. I’m still suprised they got onboard as it must have been a risk for the companies.

TonyT,

I apologize for reacting viscerally to your post. It is not personal. I am a Dreamer. All your points are valid and grounded in reality. I have a friend who I debate with who calls reality the “Big R”. Our debates are never won. At a distance to any particular debate, I reflect that the Big R and Dreaming are wound around each other like a helix, in any healthy state of human affairs. If one is more preponderant over the other, bad things can happen. In respect of aviation there is no progress without Dreaming, and things don’t fly without the Big R.

I sense that in historical aviation there is a shrill, protesting element to the Big R. It resents Dreamers doing things that it can’t get a handle on and pigeon hole. It’s visceral urge is to shut things down. It’s like a lorry driver looking at an upturned truck of chickens squawking and scattering over the road.

Fundamentally things in historical aviation are driven by Dreamers, who turn scrap into angels, fanatics who grind, smash and shortcut their way to the top of impossible summits. If they don’t fly headlong over a cliff they eventually tire out the “Big R”, which begrudgingly accomodates them into an expanded version of Reality. So the Big R, which swore 40 years ago that a warbird would never fly, now tolerates this. In the end the simple fact that 70 year old engine spare parts supply cannot sustain the present reality will mean that the idea of remanufacture will have to be an unremarkable reality.

How could we get there ? Let’s accept that the taxpayer funded and sustained the aerospace industry as an intrinsic feature of the industry. Without the taxpayer the industry would have failed many times over. I am impressed, in going through libraries, how many publications were funded by old industrial conglemerates, in a tacit acknowledgment of mutuality. These days it is called being a good corporate citizen. I can understand that it is not the job of a harassed manager in a modern corporation in the midst of a global recession to accomodate requests for archived engineering information and the unrenumerative supervision of some Dreamer in a garage working on an antique product. Perhaps the Dreamers should become more sophisticated in their approach? Use the tangible accounting factor of ‘good corporate citizenship’ to propose a transaction which is digestible.

One thing to do is to setup a non profit, incorporated entity to take anything to do with antique products off corporate balance sheet, off products liability exposure and off the current budget. At the same time set up a constitution for the non profit, incorporated entity that captures the essence of what it is for : making children see and hear V12s flying through the air, to be proud of their country and perhaps want to become engineers. No doubt such an entity would want products liability insurance and professional indemnity insurance for its officers. These things would cost money. Therefore it would have to charge cost recovery to any party wanting to use its archives, conditional on accepting inspection of works completed in accordance with archived procedures, again at cost. In other words a mini CAA, made up of semi retired folk, skilled in the art, excited more by a participation than a paypacket.

Properly constituted, such an entity could act as a circuit breaker between a modern conglomerate, modern inspection and approval authorities and Dreamers.

Another aspect is revitalising a collectivist ethic. As a complex mechanism aircraft and engines were products of original collectivisation, between metallurgists, metal suppliers, forges, casters, cork gasket folk, magneto folk, bakelite magneto distributor cover folk, platinum depositors on distributor breaker point folk, breaker point spring folk etc, etc. In some way responsible Dreamers must become collectivist. If you know you need 20 distributor breaker points, make 1000, get them approved by the previously described non profit incorporated entity, then make them available to the wider community. For the sake of collectivism, fix the profit on cost at 30%, as the government fixed the profit originally. The advent of the internet makes it feasible for the cork manufacturer in Portugal to make 1,000 sets of rocker cover gaskets, the engine bearing manufacturer in Australia to make 1,000 sets of big end bearings, the crankshaft forge in India (!) to make 500 crankshaft blanks and the CNC machinist in the UK to finish 1,000 fuel pump gears and be on one database. Rather than one Dreamer make 500 individual pieces over 25 years, make 500 repetitions of one part in one year and buy/trade the other 499.

As I say I am a Dreamer !

My understanding with forging crankshafts is that the skillsets/experience to forge from billet as per original method is scarce. Theoretically a forged crankshaft may be stronger on paper but the skillset to work economical numbers of ‘accepts’ is not there, whereas CNC from a billet of proven, modern metallurgy gets a result. To say that there has been no progess in steel metallurgy, viz, alloy composition, may be correct, but this does a disservice to method of manufacture. In other words the capability to produce grain structures of predictable and superior characteristics is much improved (unless it is a chuck on a Chinese manufactured drill, when it may have asphalt road inclusions). It is not strength which is wanted, more predictablity.

I do like the old engineers, they were Dreamers :

“An important feature from the design aspect is that if it is desired to use material of different characteristics, or if new metals become available, no re-design is necessary-(in respect of tubing)-merley an alteration to the gauge of the tubing.”
from Air Annual of the British Empire 1933-4 -Hawker system of Construction pg 342

God Save the Queen ! God Save the Merlin ! Sigh for a Merlin !

Brain frying

I also have this firing order plate which I think is RR Vulture?
Can anyone confirm this?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]221595[/ATTACH]

I have reached the limit of my thin competence on this one ! No doubt an X engine, looks very much like a RR Vulture, but someone with a mind that looks like an enlarged, inflatable dinghy growing out of their head will need to confirm the mathematics and engine balance probabilities to back up the punt. Or look in the AP.

Never give up, never give up, never give up.

Err I think the technologies involved would prohibit it simply on cost, one would doubt many companies have the facilities to do this at all, and that includes RRoyce. Indeed some of the machines that could have produced parts to such critical dimensions no longer exist either and haven’t for many a year, so you would be spending tens of millions simply getting the infrastructure up and running before you knocked out a single washer.
Top that off with the only people that hold the drawings are never going to ever release them and you are on a hiding to nothing.. Rocket science would be relatively easy in comparison.

Tony,
I’m gonna have a crack at you ! In order to find solace from this post modern paradigm of self defeatist, cold water pouring, lily livered, gormless, authoratative denunciation of dreaming that has assisted in seeing industry dismantled, manufacturing jobs lost and capabilities flushed down the toilet I turn to old aviation literature, which is infused with an entirely different spirit. While you hose down your neighborhood the Chinese government is doing the opposite and rapidly building up the mentality of its engineers and entrepreneurs. Go pull out your old “Bridges of England” or Aircraft Engineering to see what goals grandpa kicked with one eightieth of the resources at your disposal !

I understand that there was only one forge capable of turning out Merlin crankshafts in the UK prior to the Battle of Britain, proving conclusively that in the United Kingdom there were not “many companies (with) the facilities to do this at all”, so the UK should have just turned over and died in 1940. Today, I reckon there would be more than one machine shop capable of CNC’g a crankshaft out of modern 4130 and then heat treating it using usual techniques to come up with a short run of crankshafts equal to 1940’s forged specs. Block ? Shoot, where the city of London can come up with exchange traded derivatives, collaterised debt obligations and other algebraic financial confections then complexity is still within the wit of modern Britain. I reckon Old Harry can still put together a block casting down the road.

Can’t get drawings ? Why ? Why would the proudest manufacture of a nation be hidden ? What would it do for a younger generation to be drawn in to an OEM supervised short run ? Perhaps get them excited about engineering ? About excellence ?

The can’t be done attitude makes me want to reverse engineer a DB 605, to absolutely prove a Merlin can never be done !

I do like the boat. That’s the spirit ! I don’t have the bling or the babes to carry off a snort to Calais in a unit like that. Controls would need to be in Russian so buyers could understand which console the cocaine was stored in.

Really if you had not spent all that time hosing down dreams it should not be fitted with a 70 year old engine design. It should convert the hydrogen in seawater to generate rocket thrust at higher power to weight ratios than a crusty ‘ol IC engine.

I have just finished Nevil Shutes “Slide Rule”, a person who started Airspeed on nothing more than excitement, and he provides some considered reflections on his career in aviation development : R101 & R100, government v private industry in innovation and especially what made innovation work in the 1930’s, in the teeth of a Depression. Astonishingly, he put this down to a class of Boris Johnson like upper class twits with money, who, on the basis of real estate derived wealth, were willing to punt on high risk, new technology start ups. Death taxes wiped out this segment, and I guess this is coincidental with the decay of UK industry. It is an unusual, though not illogical observation. All that seems to be left is defeat, defeat, defeat.

I shall now retire to my drawing room to listen to some Winston Churchill broadcast recordings, as a tonic.

Firing up

This raises a point that interests me. How many different firing orders ware there for V12s. I know that there are only two common ones for a straight four though other than the most common 1342 I cannot remember the other one.

The following data has been translated from the French “gauche” = B (LH side from pilot’s view), “droit” = A (RHS) from Hispano Suiza manual for
Hispano Suiza 12 X engine (1930’s)
RH Tractor : 1A, 6B, 4A, 3B, 2A, 5B, 6A, 1B, 3A, 4B, 5A, 2B (Same as RR practice)

The following data has been translated assuming “left”= B, right =A from Curtiss manual for
Curtiss D12 engine (late 1920’s)

1B, 6A ,5B ,2A ,3B ,4A ,6B ,1A ,2B ,5A ,4B ,3A (Curtiss D12) refer below
1A, 2B, 5A, 4B, 3A, 1B, 6A, 5B, 2A, 3B, 4A, 6B (RR Eagle, RH tractor)

Which cylinder fires first is immaterial, I guess the British chose 1A at the top of the list while the Americans chose 1B, but ultimately the pattern matches.
So, at least in this random sample, British, French and US engine makers chose the same protocol for firing order, probably limited by the balancing requirements of V12 geometry. If this is right then German DB 600 firing order should be the same ? Achtung ! Was is das gersplutterblitzenorder DB 600, bitte?

In respect of HT leads I have noticed small, numbered bakelite grommets on RR Kestrel and Bristol Jupiter HT leads that would help connect things up the right way. A lot of the simplicity depended on the arrangement of leads or looms from the magneto to the plugs. Old photos show elegant looms while modern practice sometimes looks like a bowl of upturned spaghetti.

Time out

Hello:

Thank you to those who have replied to my thread in the historic aviation section yesterday. Although I am a registered user and I do “log in” before attempting to reply to posts, this site has rebuffed all attempts I’ve made at replying. The FAQs section is of no help. Every time I try to just reply by typing my message and clicking “reply”, I receive an error message stating…”You do not have permission to perform this action. Refresh your page and log in”. But I am logged in! The FAQs section is of no help. And the site has no “contact us” link to talk with the folks who run this site, to obtain assistance! So I’m hoping someone can share with me whatever black magic one must know to successfully “reply” to existing posts on this site.

Thank you in advance to anyone who responds with helpful hints to this inquiry. It’s not at all clear I’ll be able to convey thanks in reply to any information you provide.

Swifter

The computer servers hosting forums typically ‘time out’ at a predetermined period. Imagine if you are posting your reply then your kid comes up to you and complains that “all you do is sit in front of the computer on that bl*#dy forum”. So you get up to have a jump on the trampoline with your kid, then your foot goes through the springs and you go head over and snap your collarbone. The kid calls the ambulance and you go to hospital. Three days later you return to your place at the computer to complete your message. If the hosting server did not time out it would have kept a link open to your computer for three days, denying a link to other computers, or effectively slowing down the serving of information to other computers. The geek servicing the host computer reckons it takes three minutes to type a normal post, so allows three minutes of link before timing out your connection. The geek types at 234 words per minute while eating pizza, while the average forumite types 3 words a minute with their thumbs while being pecked on the back by kids or partners, so once you hit “post” you are typically no longer linked in and you get the prompt to log in again.

Because each post I do is like Michaelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, I copy the text before hitting “post”, understanding that I have probably timed out while I have been squinting at and re editing my creation, and, even if the hosting server is set up to save or cache my unposted text while I go through the re-logging procedure, SOMETIMES IT DOESN’T, particularly with high bandwith items like attached photos.

So, what works is :

Reply to post
Copy text using copy/paste function [highlight text with mouse then press Ctrl C (Copy)] before posting
Try and post, you may be lucky and not timed out.
If timed out, follow the prompt to log in again
You may be lucky and the server has cached (saved) your post, go for it !
If not Ctrl V (Paste) your text and post again.

Often I have timed out and been grateful as it has prevented me from posting mad, bad and dangerous replies, so it’s not always a bad thing !

Good luck and good posting !

Big plug is ground services plug ? Holes around the circumference allow finger holds to pull plug out rapidly, when parafrags are dropping. HT and LT stand for High Tension and Low Tension for ignition system – would there be additional booster coils in a ground services cart ? British Beaufighter ?

Welcome

[QUOTE=jhoole94;2067608]Hello All!

I’ve been a long time stalker of this forum, and have finally decided to take the jump and get stuck in!

Josh, a great post and fantastic to see your energy getting injected into historic aviation.

Like an old fashioned painter patiently copying an old master in a gallery to learn the art there are some mind numbingly boring things that you could do that might position you for the future :

1. Metallurgy.
Most historical aircraft performance development was driven by developments in metallurgy – stronger alloys to contain and direct more engine horsepower and lightweight airframe structures. You would find heat treatment shops and metal casting surprised and grateful to have interested labour in the shop. Rather than free work experience you might get paid to schlep in these environments but you will end up knowing more than most in historic aviation about what makes things work. Your career will develop at a time when replicas, by intent or the circumstance of originals shedding corroded DNA – airframes and engines- will constitute the only safe way for historic aviation to be in the sky. A good practical knowledge of metallurgy will allow you to navigate through future technical challenges. From my reading of aviation literature from 1918 – 1950, the dynamic metals industry always worked closely with aeroplane and engine designers to propose new possibilities and interpretations of aviation theory. The same dynamic will be necessary for reverse engineering antique components in the future.

2. CAD drafting.
The more fluent you are with something like solid works the more fluently you will merge into the industry. No doubt this is part of your course, but it will end up being more useful to you over future decades than anything else. To have a conversation and then output a technical drawing from it is an unsurpassed asset. You could thoroughly blow away crusty old types by showing them how to reverse engineer and rapid prototype casting molds for parts using 3D scanning, CAD software and stereo laser lithography or rapidly evolving 3D printers. To avoid egg on your face, your previous experience in a casting shop would make you understanding shrinkage factors in metal and what a useable casting pattern looks like.

3. Preservation of technical drawings.
The mind numbing task ordering boxes of old technical drawings, passing bits of paper through a scanner, labelling and indexing files is something you could do immediately that will be useful for decades to come. Both museums and collectors have boxes of stuff that will be ‘sorted some day’ but ends up inaccessible or lost. In performing this task you will find doors will open for you, but more importantly you will gain an understanding of a complete aircraft bolt by bolt and absorb by osmosis design philosophies and thought processes that put you in the mind of Geoffrey DeHavilland or Barnwell or Pollard who are the folk you really need to get to know. Do article searches on these type of names or the names on drawings you find on the Flight Global database and you will enjoy some of the greatest conversations across time, that will also inform your skills navigating through modern engineering problems in your day job. Get infected with their spirit and you will help sort out space tourism, sentient drones the size of a bee and maybe segue 1920’s aeroplane brake concepts into lightweight polymer electric vehicles.

4. Be generous. Be the opposite of everything that frustrates you. Don’t give up.

Hey, I have a job for you ! I am in Australia. I need someone in the UK to organise, collate and scan thousands of antique aviation drawings. Something to do during a semester break. It might take a few years, a few odd weeks per year. You need to walk in with a large flatbed scanner and scan. You need to be ‘in love’ with what you are scanning because otherwise the job is like breaking stones in a prison. If you are not in love with it, your curiosity will not drive you to ‘go the extra mile’ and unearth things that less excited folk say ‘don’t exist’ as code for ‘ I can’t be bothered’. It is amazing what is out there, it just needs a good digger. I will pay you a fish and chip shop holiday wage to do this, $20 Australian dollars per hour. You set up an Australian bank account under your control, email timesheets and I will pay into the Australian account. Timesheets don’t include travel time on the bus, and if you really amortized total time it’s better to get work in a garment shop in the subcontinent…there is a limited budget and this is really learning for you ! The reason for setting up an Australian account is that it works administratively here (business deduction) and that it will force you one day to come to Australia, spend the money, try and drown at a beach, get bitten by something, lager up and have a good time. Am I selling this to you ? PM for more.