Yup, interesting.

That balance weight is fishy alright. Going on the metal covering I am now 95% certain it’s Albacore (which I have just discovered is a member of the Tuna family). Apart from claiming it was Hurricane, did the seller give any clue as to the origin?

You beat me to it 🙁

I have 130B with the station tables (you shoulda asked!), but the 130 sounds very interesting, as it should include some earlier (and thus mostly extinct) ones. Still, the ‘families’ in 130B do indeed help a lot with making connections!

Did you spot from my spreadsheet that by doing the station shuffle (and calling in some maths, eg. realising that activity factor rate-of-change with cropping is a ‘fingerprint’ of blade shape) I have already identified the Ham Stand ‘master’ blades (6105/6353) from which almost all the DH bracket blades and many Hydromatic equivalents were derived, along with an idea of how they were tailored to applications and what the numbers mean? Also, 130B has a table for that blade – Incidentally demonstrating there was no design data implicit in HS drawing numbers.

One specific request, though.. does the 1947 vol have station data for the 6127? That’s the master for the DH 4,000 series.

You know that armed with this stuff, and knowing that twist was centred around sectional C of G, it’s possible to make accurate blades to order via CNC? I understand that Avia in CZ can make blanks sufficient to manufacture 6903’s (which are E-shank, ie 5,000 series, ie Spitfire/Hurricane/Battle/Whitley/Roc/Lysander/Lancaster/Hampden/Younameit), from their website (http://www.aviapropeller.cz/products.htm)? Nice and broad, the blanks should be sufficient to re-work to a 6105/6353, ie. lots of British props (will need checking – the main issue being the twist). They also make the 6547, a D-shank blade, which might just do for the 4,000 series as well.

However, there is the ‘handing’ question, and I am not sure about the licencing issues. We should get our heads together properly on this.

That something being a Swordfish?

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Though it might be more Barracuda – more metal on it..

Yeah, thought that through and edited at the same time as you posted.

Knowing whether the incident at West Hougham was a freakish smooth touchdown or an impact is quite important to untangling what happened.

The following explains the situation regarding recoveries in Kent during the Battle. It includes a mention of how bodies were dealt with – or not. I have left off some of the more unpleasant details that occur later on in the text, but the gist is direct identification of an individual by whatever might be visible to an intelligence officer might be near impossible. If, on the other hand, the record shows recovery of Hill’s aircraft from a tree (rather than wreckage from an impact) before the date of the funeral (even though it wasn’t struck off charge until afterwards) – then it’s straightforward enough, and just an exaggeration of timescale (which still seems an odd thing for Bartley to do, Tuck’s version notwithstanding).

From ‘Missing Believed Killed’ by Stuart Haddaway:

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Here we go. Memoir of Reg Miles, 34 MU, October 1940:

I was posted to 34 Maintenance Unit Shrewsbury in Shropshire 5-10-1940, this unit was housed in sheds on the out-skirts of Shrewsbury and was responsible for the repair on site of crashed aircraft and the recovery of crashed aircraft that could not be flown away, this included both British, German, Italian, and later on American. The Flight Sergeant in charge of the crew of about six airmen was about sixty, was an optician in civvy street, had been a driver in the 1914-18 war so had no knowledge of aircraft, the rest of the gang were ex-garage workers only about one had any experience with spanners so it was finding out the hard way how ‘planes came to bits! We also had a driver for our Chevy truck and could call on “Queen Mary” low loaders and Coles cranes to lift things, but many times we were unable to get cranes or trucks to the site and it was sheer legs and muscle that were used.

It does seem there was a mix of civilian and RAF crews/gangs doing the recovery jobs on behalf of MU’s. Just no mixed crews, as I had for some reason imagined?