Hi James

good to hear from you. With the best will in the world the entire aircraft is beyond us but we’ll be leaving it such that if someone comes along and wants to extend rearwards they can do. Won’t be in my lifetime though LOL

John

Yesterday we were fortunate enough to have enough people due to an influx of new volunteers to split ourselves into 2 teams.

1st group consisting of myself, Cliff, Graham and Dave K cracked on with making aircraft progress. Graham is cannibalising useful parts from BK716, Dave was cleaning them up in the shot blaster, I finished up some more bomb beam plates and Cliff has turned detective.

As a result he has identified all the wreckage that we hold that makes up the bomb bay floor and underlying structure from fr10 to nearly fr15 across the full fuselage width. This encompasses bomb stations 4, 5 and 6. This is the first time we’ve been able to lay everything out and properly identify what we have to work with.

This leads me on to the 2nd team of Andy, Dave R and new member Dave S. We have been keeping this under our hat for a short while now but we will be on the move again. I’m pleased to reveal that we are fortunate  to be in a position to purchase an ex grain store which will finally give us our own permanent home. It needs a bit of work as you’d expect, and the 2nd group was busy yesterday clearing the site of brambles and rubbish, as well as painting the floor in Readiness for our final move. The building needs power reinstating for which we have short, medium and longer term solutions for. This is a very exciting development for us and will finally give us stability and more space to work with allowing us to take on more volunteers.

Take care

John

Thanks gents

Indeed, Jacob is a very welcome addition to the team :o)

We seem to be getting a bit of an influx of new members, which I’m sure is down to getting more advanced with the Project as a whole. Think we’ll be needing a bigger workshop soon ;o)

John

Hopefully without risk of boring you, I have a bit more progress on the manufacture of Bomb frame 11 today. As I’ve related previouslly Fr11 is one of the more complex ones to build and I think we’ve nailed it now. Yesterday was spent with myself and Jacob, fettling the parts and finally riveting the assembly together, all in all we installed about 120 solid rivets of different sizes and only had to replace one whilst we were about it :o). The only parts still to rivet are the 8 off top hat brackets in 4 positions which support the heavy bomb cradle. With any luck this will all be completed next weekend.

Aside from that, Graham carried on with recovering usable parts from the W/Op’s floor structure, and we now are getting a useful pool of spares together which will aid reassembly and act as patterns for other parts.

Cliff. busied himself with some more detailed inspection of more of the structure recovered from BK716; the result of this is that he has positively identified all of the Stbd keel girder structure from Fr6 to Fr13. We’re absolutely amazed that all of this has survived so well after such a tragic and catastrophic event. It looks like we might be getting a few more volunteers joining us so that we can start to productionise the construction of the bomb bay and people will see speedier progress moving forward.

John

Thanks Guys for the comments

It was nearly a full house at the workshop today, with myself, Cliff, Graham, Andy P and Jacob in attendance. Lots to do and not enough time as usual but we had a very productive day nonetheless. 

Graham has primed and painted the extinguisher panel and is now adding the individual items to finish it off, hopefully he’ll complete this next weekend, I just need to order some 1/16″ rivets to attach some labels.

Jacob is getting some riveting practice in by starting to assemble the first set of plates for the bomb beam at Bomb Station 2 which is on the centreline between Fr7 & 8. He’s going great guns with this and is building up his repertoire.

Cliff has finished off joggling the last keel diaphragm in preparation for building the keels. We’re not sure how to accomplish this yet but I’m sure we will find a way. He then specnt some time identifying the location of some of the larger bomb bay sections that were recoverd; we think that they are likely to be aft of the transport joint at Fr26 but the same principle applies to these as to the section we are building.

Andy P, whilst not a mechanical engineer per se, is keen to learn some of the tricks of the trade so we spent some time today showing how to successfully de-rivet usable parts from recovered structure. and a fine job he did too. The more of us that learns these skills the better. On a hunch Andy has had a go at 3D printing a tool, to form the beaded lightening holes that we will need in their hundreds. He’d read that the 3D plastic is quite robust so made a tool which he used on one of the spare Flight Engineers Panel mounts that we’d had made. Suffice it to say that the results are good enough that this part is no longer a spare and will be used in the build. The good thing about this is that we can now make a tool to any size that we require and if it wears out we just print another one…simples!

Finally, I joggled the flanges on the 16 off brackets that Jacob previously made that attach the frame to the keel members. Following that I’ve made a jig to accurately position each centre frame so that the width and height of each is repeatable. Next weekend will be spent marking the holes out and drilling to suit, so we can think about riveting centre Fr11 together as a complete assembly.

cheers

John

Hi all

Just Graham and myself on site on Saturday, so it was a case of cracking on with stripping down the wreckage I was working on last weekend and preparing the new Frame ready for assembly. I’d hoped that the wreckage portion was what I thought it was but am happy that I’ve now confirmed that it is indeed from the port side of the aircraft between Fr11 and Fr13; which equates to directly under the W/Op seat and TR1154/1155 desk. Especially pleased that I can recover many parts and relocate them into their exact positions on the relevant new build frames.

All of the reinforcing brackets required for Fr11 have now been stripped and bead blasted to remove corrosion, followed by primer. The following photos show the brackets drilled in position, removed and then primed. This is nearly ready to rivet up, however we still have to joggle and drill the 16 off side brackets that attach the frame to the keel. to assemble all of this I need to create a jig to keep it all square and ensure repetition. All in all, leaving out any rivets and attachment bolts, this frame alone requires 32 separate pieces of structure to be made or recovered!

Finally, I have to relate a recent visit that our Treasurer Andy made to Amada UK to present them with a Stirling model in recognition of their great efforts in assisting the Project with laser cutting and forming material FOC. 

best regards

John