Sun 29 May
An interesting day working on the jet!
First up was the usual opening up and removing covers, allowing myself, Andy and Graham (Blue_2) to get stuck in. Graham had removed the main instrument panel for cleaning, and its come back looking a treat. Not over restored either, which makes it look like its never been removed from WS788; a difficult thing to do. Its one of those things you hope to be able to achieve in order for it to fit in with the rest of the aircraft – you want her to wear the years proudly but not look derelict.
We did notice there’s some cut wires behind the panel, but there’s enough spare in the looms to be able to re attach them a task for another day – something Graham insists is my task as I seem to be able to make the ‘electric string’ do what I want for the most part.. Thankfully a couple of plugs and connecting cables are intact and can just be switched out, but there’s going to be a few little soldrring jobs to keep me busy.
One of those jobs is reconnecting the wires properly to the taxi lamps behind the nose gear door. The cable, like many others had been cut and was damaged, so working with a multimeter the damaged section was cut out and the remaining portion checked and found serviceable, losing about 2″ off the original cable length. It could be a problem during retraction of the undercarriage, but thats not happening any time soon so we can live with it until the bigger list of jobs gets sorted.
Next up was fitting a freshly charged battery into the bay on the aircraft – the idea being that we may be able to restore some limited electrical services on the old Meteor, such as the taxi lamps we’d just refitted. An analogy as to how the wiring has been cut on the aircraft is to consider WS788 as paralysed from the neck down. We have a front loom intact, a back loom intact and some really bad damage in the middle. We hoped to be able to find where the spark (hopefully not literally…) of life is hiding in the front section.
The battery went in, but a measly 13.5 volts wasn’t enough to get any signs of anything waking up. So, off we toddled into the hangar to borrow a Trolley Acc, we also found another willing victim volunteer in Sam Ward from the Victor team to help. In went the Trolley Acc plug, and armed with a suitable fire extinguisher and with a watchful eye for smoke, the switch flicked to on.
Two loud thumps from the port side as the battery relays engaged, for the first time in nearly 50 years. But, try as we might we couldn’t persuade anything to give more life than that. Power was reaching the bus bar, but not beyond it, so the next step is to trace the wires and find out if the high amp fuses are intact that feed junction boxes. JB2, 3 5 and the generator control panel. Then we’ll have another crack at waking WS788 from sleeping so long.
Stay tuned for more, we will revive this old night fighter one way or another.
Regards,
Rich
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