BluebirdBillCall it a flaw of personality but l have an over-developed sense of fair play and a lie is a lie. What should l call it? They could have baled out of their own project in a hundred ways that didn’t hurt anyone but they didn’t. They told a pack of lies and that is out of order.
I have no particular desire to wear on about it on a public forum but l do speak for the team when l say we’ve been treated in the most disgusting way.
Time will be our witness just as it has been with the Bluebird Project. That’s a given, so in the meantime do we just say, ah well, we did nothing wrong but that’s OK?
l’ll gladly go get on with other things but my sense of fair play towards the team and all we’ve worked for will keep me on this behind the scenes.
BluebirdBillConsider your views respected but I do fit into the category of having been to the museum recently (to survey and photograph the dismantling of DP872 ahead of us beginning the fuselage build, as it happens) and I know more of what is going on behind the scenes conservation-wise and politically than most so I am adequately qualified to comment. The museum has made a very poor decision for all the wrong reasons and then lied about it.
The mud-slinging is a very long way from omni-directional.
There is much mud I could sling but we are only concerned with a small number of specific points. Namely that there was no attempt to negotiate a contract for two years and that the tail was not a test piece to prove out techniques – that was the elevator. in addition, the project is not being taken back in-house for completion because they don’t have what’s required to do it.
These are blatant untruths and we do not appreciate being cast as the villains when we were just quietly building an aeroplane for them on our nights and weekends. We are due an apology but it might take a while so we’ll report when there’s news.
BluebirdBillI can’t speak for the rest of the team but if some people with common sense were to replace those who just shot off their own foot I would be willing to look at the Barra’ again because we had it nailed and that fuselage was going to go together in no time flat. As it worked out we never got to touch it. Interestingly, we’ve learned recently that one trustee hadn’t heard what was happening to the Barra’ Project and another had been given a completely false account yet the job was cancelled in the name of the trustees so there’s undoubtedly a rather large and ugly rabbit off.
And they won’t have a hope in hell of ever putting the tailwheel bulkhead thingamabob back together without us because it’s in a million unrecognisable parts that were bending our brains never mind theirs. For now I think aircraft are off our menu because we’re flat out getting our big tin boat finished so she can go home to Coniston but you never know what the future holds. The great thing about our team is that it’s less about what we’re doing in the workshop than about the camaraderie and friendship we all enjoy. We go there to relax and decompress and to be ourselves so were someone to shove a farm tractor or a steam train under our noses we’d likely mend that just the same. And we’d gladly go for a pint with you all…
BluebirdBillThey have told many untruths and they probably imagine that now they’ve taken their ball home they’re free and clear…
BluebirdBillThanks guys… The wagon with the Barra’ has just gone. Presumably it will all be unloaded at Yeovilton so that the rebuild can continue without delay.
BluebirdBillWhat is especially staggering is that the tail was a matter of weeks from completion but, worse still, the fuselage of DP872 had was substantially de-riveted having been complete since the day it was built and everything of frame-12, which is about level with the rear wing spar, was carefully packed on pallets and shipped to us. A few weeks later they pulled the plug so it’s all still in a million bits because we never got a chance to touch it.
Thanks for the words of support, by the way.
BluebirdBillSad to report that the FAAM have terminated their tenancy agreement on the workshop space, paid their dues and their hauliers are due to collect their aeroplane on Friday/Saturday.
The tailplane is short of one leading edge and the fairings to join it to the fin and the entire rear fuselage that was delivered in September for the next 18 months of rebuild remains untouched.
The only outstanding matter is the lies they told about having tried to negotiate a contract for two years when what actually happened is that the contracts lay in a drawer while we all worked perfectly well on a handshake until the FAAM was amalgamated with the NMRN whereupon they got in a panic over having a contract.
The contract they offered denied our volunteer status making us sub-contractors instead, said that we had to work with new material at their discretion and that we had to pay their insurance. I tried between September 2014 and November 2014 to negotiate something that we could work with but they chose to shut down their own project instead. It’s entirely their loss and a very sad day for the aircraft. We would have willingly seen the project through.
There’ll be an account of recent happenings on the BBP diary soon and a more detailed version on the Barra’ site in due course.
BluebirdBillI have so enjoyed following the “baddacooda” thread. (It was the reason I joined this forum).
The writing style is so interesting and clever.
Here’s hoping for the best, and the prevailing of cooler heads.
Thanks for sharing the revolutionary restoration work you and your team have been doing. (Bluebird is Okay too I guess 🙂
Please give my best to the crew.Andy Scott
Thanks, Andy, for the kind words and encouragement. I now the crew look in here too so they’ll see that you’re wishing them well. It was my six-year-old, Emily, who started the ‘Baddacooda’ thing – she was only four when she dreamt that one up. She’s just done a project at school about WWII and she took lots of Baddacooda stuff in to show her friends. The YouTube videos and the books mean a whole lot more to her because daddy has a real Badda’ in his workshop. You’d imagine this effort would be celebrated by the museum community and given every possible help because what are museum for if not to educate and inspire those who missed such things first time around? We’ll just have to wait and see what shakes loose this time.
Bill
BluebirdBillTalking last Tuesday to one of the late Vivian Bellamy’s former team at Lands End, he confirmed Bellamy’s involvement and thought the metal fabrication/restoration was done by a Mike Lamb (ex-RN) who also worked on the Albacore and Isaacs Fury projects
The shapes are good on the nose but I was surprised when I got close up that it has a lot of wheeling marks – wasn’t sure why that should be. In the meantime we got the outboard leading edge good to go today so if we ask nicely, Offshore-Rob may revert to being Aerospace-Rob early next week and get that bit on for good. I’ve now got all the patches in the inboard section too, which has been a long time coming. Some shrinking and shaping still to do but it’s coming nicely.
Still no formal request to terminate from the FAAM (their contract requires 2 months plus a ‘reasonable time for the other party to respond’ and ours is three months) so we’re good ’til the end of March even if they write to us now so that’s a bonus. Daresay we’ll write to the trustees in the new year for clarification. You never know…
BluebirdBillAhhh, we never use body filler, that’s cheating. We can afford to take the time on the metal and get it spot on. With the other leading edge we tried to do it in one big section and we should have done it in two halves so when the primer went on it took more than envisaged. We have it nailed on the other side, though. The outboard section is done now and ought to get its rivets next week. Still some to do on the inboard stretch.
And it’s still not going to be me who tells the girls what to do with their hair! They take it with them everywhere and seem to know how to look after it, especially Hayley who often can’t be seen beneath mountains of curls but if she’s not building aeroplanes with our air tools she’s usually to be found at her sewing machine and so far as I know she’s never been ingested into either.
Today, Richie and I have been welding old pieces of sponson fairing into a new one we built, we build a complete new panel, get it perfect then cut pieces out and graft in repaired original material until the new one is in the scrap bin and the old one has completely supplanted it albeit in the correct shape again, so I had a go at gluing some of it together without filler rod. Achievable but not a great weld at the end of the day so we went back to the original formula. Interesting experiment, though.
BluebirdBillPretty much anything can be made into tooling. If it’s slappers you want, old leaf springs are good. Heat and bend to shape, heat and quench then grind and polish. Bits of hardwood, old table legs, anything. As for welding without filler, you’d not gat away with it on this old material. It can be done on new stuff if it’s close-fitting but it’s still a better job with a touch of filler. Distortion should be contained before the welds go in.
BluebirdBillI use TIG exclusively on the skins – they’re just too thin and unpredictable to use MIG (way too violent) or gas (like TIG only harder to control though I was brought up on oxy-acetylene). We have a brilliant set provided by Lincoln Electric that is controllable to the point where it is just possible to weld a Coke can for a bet and the philosophy always goes that if you need filler you’ve obviously not finished working the metal.
As for your other point – I hear what you say but would you really want to be the bloke who tried to tell the girls what they should do with their hair? Rather you than me…
And, besides, they aren’t my young assistants. They are very highly skilled in their own right and it’s not uncommon for me to be assisting them!
BluebirdBillJust a quick heads-up. We’ve uploaded a short diary. Not much to report as we just got back on the tools this week so I’ve included some process for anyone who fancies welding scrap to scrap. We’ll do a better job of the January diary. http://www.Barracudaproject.co.uk
Enjoy – and thanks to everyone for your support.
BluebirdBillAll seems quiet on the western front today. No emails, no phone calls, nothing all day so I’ve been down in the engine room welding in the rest of the patches into the outboard stretch of the leading edge and I got the No.6 rib working too. That’s the tricky one where the two halves join together, a little bit more tin-bashery in the bag.
BluebirdBillWell I had a good afternoon sorting out the last of the patches for the leading edge and a few other bits and bobs. Loubie cut some of them a while back and Tom cut the rest then they left them marked up in poly bags so I could weld them in at my leisure but, in the meantime, with the Barra’ project hanging about waiting for common sense to prevail, all the tools have been nicked and stuff has been shoved this way and that and nothing is where we left it so I went in there and tidied a few things. There’s no immediate announcement regarding the longer term future of the project but at least in the short term we’re starting work again. There’s a neck-deep mire of contractual mud to wade through so we may as well bash some tin for a month or three in the meantime and get a few extra diary entries written and posted. They’re always good fun so I’ll try to get a small update on the Barra’ site by the end of the week…
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