Pete

I’m in a very similar position to you. I’ve been using an Epson 2480 to digitise slides – it cost me about £65 18 months or so back.
The results are certainly good enough for my purposes, although nowhere near what you’d get from a £500 dedicated film scanner.
I’ve attached a couple of samples. The Spitfire is from the 1968 RAF 50th anniversary show at Abingdon. I would have been using my trusty Praktica Nova then, and the film is Agfa.
The Britannia is from Cosford a fortnight ago, taken on Fujichrome with the Nikon F60 I use for what few films I shoot these days. The high contrast and slight underexposure are in the original, BTW. There are also some more slide scans towards the end of the Historic Helicopters thread on Historic Aviation, from rather underexposed originals.
All the scans have been reduced in file size to allow posting on this board, and both are from slides still in their mounts.
I was also using my Fuji S7000 at Cosford, and there are some samples on the Historic Aviation board if you look far enough back, including a composite of four images stitched together with Photomerge. It was also a chance for a reunion with an old girlfriend in the shape of Spitfire K9942, but that’s another tale…
Hope this gives you some food for thought,

William

Maybe I’m going off on a bit of a tangent, but there used to be a photograph doing the rounds of an inverted Victor, apparently in mid-loop. Can anyone quote chapter and verse?
Scuttlebut always had it that a One-Eleven was once looped. Again, can anyone throw any light on this?

William

Takes me back to 1960s B of B displays. Somehow the promised F-100 or F101 display team never became much more than dots on the horizon…
The last BBMF display I saw at Southport (2004) was five Merlins and a Griffon, anyway. And they all arrived together.

William

You could always base your model on the Cosford machine, which although a post-war Casa-built aircaft, is painted up as a 1940s BEA Jupiter-class.

William

I did actually try and get some mass flow figures for Spey and Avon from a 1967 Janes, ie roughly when our hypothetical fighter would have come into being.
In the end it all got a bit complicated. Janes quotes 206 lb/second for a civil Spey, but nothing at all for an Avon. The nearest I could get was 156 lb/sec for a roughly comparable GE J79.
I suppose I’m wide open to correction, but I think it makes the general point.
The Lightning was also compromised by its centrally-mounted radome: look at the way the sharp end of a MiG-21 had to evolve to accomodate radar and engine upgrades.
The redesign for a Spey-Lightning with a decent fuel load as well would have been so drastic that one might as well start with a clean sheet of paper.

William

Daz, I’m quite sure you’re right, but to judge from the sound that comes off the video it’s a lot more noticeable that in other, principally Rolls-Royce engines.
There again, I’ve got a copy of Gibbs-Smith’s wartime aircarft recognition manual in which he warns against identifying aircraft by the sound they make. There are, he says, one or two exeptions including the Spitfire (when it whistles). So perhaps my memory’s playing tricks after all.
Herein lies the material for a new thread – I remember from my teenage years that the Aer Lingus Carvairs had a subtly different engine note from the bog-standard Ace Freighters DC-4s that used to frequent Liverpool in 1960s. The boom of a British Eagle Britannia doing ground runs used to rattle the windows of most of south Liverpool, while the turboprops of today(748, ATP, F-50, ATR-42 and the odd Electra and An-24) all have their own sound.

William

Agreed. Could be up there with the classics very soon.
A trip to Cosford on Saturday (see separate post for pictures) reminded me just how claustrophobic the Vulcamn cockpit was…

William

Hmmm…must admit my first thought was that the wreck was an Ambassador, but then a voice at my shoulder kept on saying that I couldn’t recall an Ambassador on the Liverpool dump. C-54, Hunter, Viscount yes, but not an Ambassador.
On closer inspection, I reckon it is the Viscount, so badly burnt that the fuselage has dropped down to give the illusion of it being a mid-winged type. Marvellous puzzle pic!
The first port of call for anyone looking for Liverpool records shoukld surely be Phil Butler’s Liverpool Airport: An Illustrated History.
Published by Tempus Publishing in 2004, ISBN 0 7524 3168 4. Everything you ever wanted to know. Given that it’s probably not been reprinted, copies my be tricky to find – my first port of call would be the Liverpool airport (sorry, JLA!) bookstall, or maybe a call to the publishers: http://www.tempus-publishing.com.

Amendment: whoops, didn’t check the link from an earlier post (PaulR)!

William