That’s great thanks guys. 

Walter ours definitely are type B.

Now I am just left wondering what a/c they would have been used in out here in NZ. I had thought of the FN turrets in Sunderlands bu have read that they use a Palmer hydraulic firing mechanism. Likewise B&P turrets on our Hudsons.

Anyway here are three views of one of them that I busied myself on last week.

thanks again

Thank Nicko,

I should explain that the piece we’ve got came as part of a donation of parts years ago. Some of them were sectioned for display/tuition purposes and others were not, the sectioned ones had tags on them, all in the same handwriting, describing the function of the part and the aircraft type it was from the non-sectioned parts had no tags and this is one of those.

We had a pair of identical fuel pumps one sectioned and one not which were from the Goblin 3 and a segment of those is a scaled up version of mystery piece. I’d found that Jetartaviationshop link and that’s caused me to think we’re talking Canberra and Avon for our item and your second link pretty much nails it that ours is an early version of said same.

Now I just need find somebody who has the parts book for the model Avon fitted to our Canberra B(I)12’s or T.13’s and hopefully that will give an exact illustration as it may well be that in our collection of parts some of the other pieces lurk!

Thanks for your help.

Brilliant stuff James

That clarifies one matter in that the racks have different levers (must get used to that term rather than calling them sway arms as I was) front and rear as per images 3 and 4 above and not the same both ends as I’d assumed based on one of our complete original racks being so configured.

Having longer levers at the front makes sense given the taper of the bomb nose.

That still leaves a wee query in that the adjusting screws come in two different lengths. The longer one is as per the manual page with the knurled knob at the end away from the bulb whereas the shorter has it fixed at that end. Here’s one of the arms I’ve just cleaned up and it in fact shows a different type of quick release pin arrangement but as it’s more fiddly than the manual one it’s probably been superseded by that in the manual. We’ve got both types of these. Perhaps the different screw lengths are again a later simplification.

Thanks again I’ll trawl about and see if the AP is online anywhere as a download.

Thanks folks that gets me started.

I began to think the B suffix I got from the US manual is a red herring as the description of the unit from that manual matches AndyY’s description.

However taking the image from vacb’s post I checked with my “Air Ministry Catalogue Serial No 1 Issue 1 April 1942” (which I got from Australia and was led to believe to be a localised version of a similar UK one) I see it matches what that catalogue calls a “10A/261 Socket type 108” but which actually on the illustration is marked as 10H/261B which explains why looking in the index didn’t get me there. So now I know what I’ve got to find thanks.

All very confusing with my starting point being a circuit diagram in a US manual!

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