Really glad you enjoyed it – I’ve an awful feeling we’re going to get teased to death over this one but it’s all part of the fun. We never wind each other up in the workshop at all, not ever.
When asked in the workshop tonight why she’d cut out a part about twice as long as originally suggested, Gillian immediately replied that she’d accidentally marked it out in ‘man-inches’ 🙂

Excellent blog as usual.

But, Bill – UNF? Not on a British aeroplane!

😉

Bruce

Yes, lots of it. All the bolts that hold the elevator hinges, rudder hinge and the mounts at the back are 1/4 UNF. Or, alternatively, they’re something so close that you can effortlessly put the salvaged UNF nuts on new UNF bolts. Have we missed something?

Thanks for the positive comments one and all, by the way, and we almost have a diary too. Result! 🙂

Thanks again for another super blog. The dedication going into this project is amazing, and I’m really enjoying seeing it develop, with hurdles being progressively overcome.

That steel tubing structure under the tailfin looks pretty corroded through, and presumably has to carry quite a bit of weight-so are you going to have to line it from inside or something?

We have four of those things in total plus a few scrapings from hillsides so we actually have a good set of parts when you distill out all the good bits. In point of fact, most of the weight seems to be on frame-26, which is the one that the tailwheel attaches to and that in turn is well and truly bolted to the front mounts on the fin. Everything aft of that seems pretty lightly loaded but we’ve not done one of these before so we’ll have to see. I’ll have a go at uploading a picture a little later.

Glad you enjoy the diary, by the way.

I love reading the blog, one of the best written restoration blogs on the ‘net!

Thank you very kindly, sir.

On a different matter, whats happened to the Bluebird diary?,the last one was August last year. Always an informative and amusing read.

Yes – sorry about that. All my writing time has been taken up with other matters these past few months but thankfully that’s all sorted now and I’m being pestered to death to resume the BBP diary. The little Barra’ diaries take no time at all but the BBP one can be an epic but I’m on it. Another difficulty with the BBP diary is we’ve been stuck on the sponsons for the past year and a bit so there’s nothing left to write about. Mike keeps the pic of the day pretty current and that more or less shows everything we’re doing in real time but we’re onto fitting their skins and planing surfaces now so there’s more to report. We’re putting the outer skins on our Barra’ tailplane too now too so lots of interesting things to show you there.

As for Crimond, I don’t know what went on up there but I do know there’s a hell of a lot of Barra’ lying about!

I’ll have to warn Bill not to even go near the ‘what colour is interior green?’ topic!

That’s an easy one – most of the interior green is still in there once we get to the pointy end. Maybe we should ask Humbrol for thousands of those weeny tins to paint the outside. Now who could ever argue with Humbrol?
The sea-sludge green and extra sea-sludge green both have RAL codes it’s the duck-egg-green / blue / sky colour that seems a little mysterious but we do have a couple of good surviving examples so when we get it matched and use that and some smarty-pants tells us it’s wrong we can reply with absolute conviction that it’s not us that’s wrong.
I was mainly concerned that ours might be one of the blue or white or almost entirely sky-coloured examples from the book but if it’s just the camouflage type scheme we’re laughing.

There’s lots there that we could rebuild and I’ve requested that we go and fetch it but we’d need a helicopter and a team armed with tin openers to get it into bite-size chunks.
We once wanted to go diving in Red Tarn on the top of Helvellyn for the remains of a Mosquito and it took only a half a dozen calls to find a team of army pilots staying current by flying fence posts and bags of gravel up the mountains for the Park Authority. No sooner said than done – they flew all our diving and survey kit up the hill, we went diving then they brought us down again next morning.
Now we’d like the FAA to go fetch its own plane off a hillside so we can mend it but it seems an inordinately drawn out process. Having said that, there’s no urgency, except maybe to get it in from the weather. We’re also trying to get that Norwegian one home, or the relevant parts of it anyway. We want to be selective when gathering spares and not disturb the sites unnecessarily – we don’t need any more bits of tail but we could use a second elevator.
There’s a bunch of Barra’s in the Forth too and we plan to go and have a look for one or two with our acoustic imaging kit when the summer comes. It’s doubtful that there’ll be much we can use but perhaps some plastic windows will have survived in deeper water. We’ll see.
While were here – if anyone can point us at the proper paint scheme for the tail, Elvis is going to paint it like that from the off. (He’s not really called Elvis, by the way. He’s called Alex, but anyone with a picture of Elvis Presley tattooed on his arm deserves all he gets!)

January diary is up on the Barra’ site for those interested.

http://www.BarracudaProject.co.uk