While I’m on a roll here!

The Lottery people twice turned down any funding for Bluebird, for all sorts of daft reasons. Nobody believed that K7 could be rebuilt without a ‘substantial loss of original fabric’. Well, here’s project leader Bill Smith- an absolutely top bloke that I am inordinately proud to call a friend- pictured just before Christmas, holding the project’s ‘lost original fabric’ box, representing all the bits of K7 to date that can’t be used…

Huge, isn’t it?

See, what they couldn’t grasp is that pieces of her that came out of the lake like this-

Same bit-

-could after some careful work be turned back into this-

-beyond which they’d end up as fully restored original panels, back in their rightful places in the totally original frame of the boat. Even some of her outer skins will be original where possible, too.

Plus the Lottery folk said that no one under the age of forty would be interested in Bluebird…well, see all those schoolkid’s drawings on the workshop wall in my first picture?!

The upshot is, the same ‘experts’ that ‘advised’ the Lottery people have since crept back to the project, tails between their legs, asking for reports and lectures etc about the methods being used to save every last original piece of K7, so at least future projects that need help might fare better when the ‘experts’ actually understand just what’s possible. In the meantime, The Bluebird Project is going it alone, relying on the goodwill of companies donating services and supplies, the odd bit of merchandise sale, and with a workforce of volunteers. Great, eh?

Yes, that’s the tip of her nose, looking from the front along to the cockpit opening.

The intention is to rebuild K7 to running condition, and to run her- at low demonstration speeds only of course- at least once, but hopefully as a yearly event. When not wet, she’ll live in a new hall that’s to be built at The Ruskin Museum in Coniston, which already holds all sorts of Campbell memorabilia, including (for now) her original Gnat tail fin and the original engine that came out of her when she was recovered. It’s hoped that Rolls Royce will come on board to re-certify the replacement Orpheus for yay-many hours of ground running at low thrust, which will see K7 good for power for x amount of years.

And all this is being done with no help whatsoever from the Lottery people!

Glad the video was appreciated- I made it!

I too believe Campbell just would have kept going until something happened to him- for all his successes he was dogged with poor luck, and he’d already survived one horriffic crash in his land speed car. He only wanted to get the 300mph water record to drum up interest for his proposed Mach 1 rocket car, in a world that was rapidly moving on, about to go to the moon, and just not interested in speed records anymore.

Yup, Ken Warby (whom I had the pleasure of meeting last October) has held the record at 317mph for a long time now- he’s actually built another boat, but was waiting for some of the other challengers to give it a go first. Trouble is, they’ve all proven to be full of talk and not deeds, and he actually announced that he was retiring from the world water speed record last year.

The Quicksilver thing is just a joke- they guy is just trading on it, hosting dinners with a few has-been rent-a-clebs a couple of times a year and getting absolutely nowhere with his proposed ‘craft’. Bluebird will get wet again before Quicksinker ever does!