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Post by ZacYates on May 20, 2022 16:24:06 GMT 12
More great updates! I always enjoy reading these.
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Post by denysjones on May 21, 2022 21:28:13 GMT 12
Somewhat quite day on site today, but at least the sun shone. The rotorary wing section were offsite collecting bits. The young team from 633Sqn, as per Agile's post last week, were on their work again. Gerry was busy on 1058 and Dag was muttering away on the lathe about parts for Hispano cannon feed chutes and Dave was on his case of bits for Sunderland cockpits. Various of them had to put up with my noise modifying a work bench donated last week to replace the venerable 45year old-made-from-recycled-timber unit I've got. This came from a member's workplace and is a much more presentable wood with steel top unit but being longer than the intended location required skillsaw and angle grinder surgery. Dean rocked in with the proceeds of a North Island business trip. Chris Cyclone McDell was in need of some bits so we supplied a piston, rings, gudgeon pins and pin caps and he provided a Hudson exhaust tailpipe and the internal feed tube for cabin heating but luck was with us as I was after the unit for the port side and by miracles of miracles what Chris had was in fact a port unit..50-50 worked out in our favour! and so life rocked on!
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Post by davidd on May 22, 2022 11:51:45 GMT 12
Terrific stuff there agile, real dedication over long periods, with NO PAY!
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Post by ZacYates on May 22, 2022 13:30:18 GMT 12
Hear hear! True passion projects.
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Post by denysjones on Jun 11, 2022 21:41:08 GMT 12
All been quiet for the last few weeks so as to not to seem too repetative, but a trio of small points today. On the on-going plumbing front a couple of pipes made their way out the port side of 2035 today and through the rubber mounts that were shown on May 14th and which are now mounted off the front face of the leading edge of the centre section. Others will follow in the next weeks and then normally onwards out to make contact with their connections through the firewall. These two being the hydraulic feeds to the undercarriage unit this side so they in fact will turn aft and back through the forward face into the undercarriage bay. Meanwhile down in the hangars installation was completed on an item which is a bit fringe but belongs with 17221 (memorise that number as it will figure in posts going forward towards the 2025-26 Operation Deepfreeze anniversary in Christchurch) the LC47H. This wee fella is one of the penguin rubbish tins that used to be on the footpaths (er sidewalks?) of the US Navy base at Harewood in the days of VXE-6 (or VX-6) support and some years after the base was demolished one of our number came across it somewhere around about and so took it into custody but now its hour has come. (Apologies to a certain chip manufacturer for the supply of the backdrop) Even more fringe you might say but last weekend the Ferrymead Trust opened its new display building for the Bill Dini Vintage Phonograph collection. So what you say? Well Bill was a foundation member of the NZ Permanent Air Force, a founder of the Aviation Historical Society, and builder of a Heath Parasol as well as collector of reputedly the finest collection of vintage phonographs in the Southern Hemisphere which he bequeathed to the Park. ttfn
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Post by Dave Homewood on Jun 11, 2022 22:31:24 GMT 12
Wow, I am so pleased to see one of the penguin rubbish bins (trash cans?) from Deep Freeze at Harewood has survived and is preserved. They always made me smile.
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Post by camtech on Jun 11, 2022 23:17:35 GMT 12
When I worked for Bill Dini back in the 60's, a lot of those phonographs were stored upstairs at the Antigua Boat Sheds. Combined with the moulds for various fibre glass canoes, raw fibre glass, the chemicals required for fibre glassing and the phonographs, it was an interesting place.
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Post by denysjones on Jun 22, 2022 14:20:43 GMT 12
While more plumbing goes on on Saturday a couple of small projects filled in the homework agenda. First up was brought about with the current plumbing runs, being for lines like the hydraulic and vacuum systems, and with the number of joints to be made the end of our stocks of the appropriate AC series unions is fast approaching. Given that finding stocks of same is akin to the proverbial rocking horse sh** I'm now exploring options for making facsimile units but haven't yet concluded the best way forward. Another wee job has been lurking on the agenda for too long and that is the electrical junction box that mounts on the arm of the control column and functions as the system safe control for the pilot's bomb jettison circuit. Amongst our assorted battered salvaged junction boxes a likely candidate lurked so after subjecting it to some tin bashing and a dab or two of body filler it came back to acceptable shape. From the stores of same a switch with guard and a lid came together. The box as found had an AirMin 5D515-5D535 plug and socket pair fitted which suggests it to be a spare from the bomb bay area but then again that makes it compatible with the bomb delivery systems as a whole so hopefully I'm right...investigations continue.
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Post by denysjones on Jul 10, 2022 21:18:41 GMT 12
Another couple of weeks fly by and more steps down the plumbing road. Yesterday the two hydraulic lines out to the port undercarriage connections were installed. To get the alignments sorted during the manufacturing process I've followed the appropriate blueprint and made a sacrificial MDF version of the fairlead that all these lines have to pass through on the wing leading edge and put it temporarily in place where ultimately the proper one will be mounted. Working on the principal that while something is fresh in the mind its recreation is easier than it would be later, I've now turned my attention to the same two lines on the starboard. This has now brought another of the "one of these days" jobs to top of queue. The walls of the fuel tank bays were all coated in a sort of uncured rubber as bullet proofing, the operation of which appears sound and simple. As the bullets passed through the rubber it adhered to them and so they pulled a tail behind them thus, hopefully, plugging the hole they have just made. When we attached the centre sections to the aircraft we removed all the "in-tank" rubber, to enable the underlying surfaces to be cleaned of corrosion, but we left the coating on the outside of the leading ledge centre section wall, between the fuselage and engine nacelle, to be attended to at a later date. The port one was dealt to a while back but this week the starboard task had to be faced up to. Despite being 80 years old and hard, cracked and dirty on the exposed face the rubber is still soft where it attaches to the metal so it is an arduous job with a scrapper to remove as much as you can in the first pass and then come back and deal to the sticky residue. The afternoon's work got about 85% of the surface through the first pass and thankfully only a small area of surface corrosion has been exposed thus far. Rob meanwhile has been busy in chopper land reducing to parts a Hughes 500 pod to yield skins and sundry bits to go towards the first 500 rebuild that team are embarking on. ttfn
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Post by Dave Homewood on Jul 10, 2022 21:52:56 GMT 12
Is there an intention to replace that rubber compound when everything is cleaned up? Or is there no real need? I guess it is possibly no longer available too.
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Post by denysjones on Jul 16, 2022 20:50:40 GMT 12
Dave, No I'm not putting the rubber back here as this will of course be hidden by the leading edges going back on, and likewise inside the tanks it wasn't reinstated for the similar reason of obscurity. I'm just cleaning, priming, and painting. Hopefully/perhaps someone sometime in the future may inspect these areas on a conservation review and so having to remove rubber again to gain visual access seems futile. I have left two sample panels refurbished in place however as in each wheel well the inboard face is so bedecked. Hence suitably visible. These were covered with fabric and when I took that off the rubber wasn't cracked etc so I've replaced it so there is at least those examples for the historically interested. Just a wee bit of passing stuff. In that shot the metal enclosure upper left is the "gubbins" box that is the transmitter from the fuel tank level float arm to the fuel contents gauge in cockpit. The other item far left is the undercarriage position switch to detect undercarriage up. You can also see how the rubber areas were margined by a metal bead strip....just saying all this fyi Today I applied a bit of experimental science to the residual rubber shown last week. On cans of paint stripper the advice on the label says not apply it to rubber...why..obviously it degrades the rubber methinks..great just what I want!. So I went into action, it softens and virtually falls off with a light scrape, and now the area shown last week is close to 100% bare. So I moved onto the area to the left of last week's photo where I had to get rid of the peripheral metal bead and then remove the upper layers of rubber so I can now use the paint stripper technique...however the end of stock in can brought things to a close for today.
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Post by Dave Homewood on Jul 16, 2022 22:26:49 GMT 12
That makes perfect sense to not replace it. Thanks.
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Post by agile on Jul 24, 2022 10:14:17 GMT 12
Down in the de Havilland facility, George and his merry minions are done with our cowl disks: And are cracking on with a new engine end rib for the radiator structure. The big hole in the original one is where the oil viscosity valve, which is integrated into the rib has been hacked out. They are also progressing work on our ailerons, which brought to light a little field repair work on one of HR339's ailerons: The weld is as per design, but the easing of this corner obviously wasn't enough to stop a crack forming. The crack has been neatly stop drilled, then rather agriculturally patched: Our tame lathe operator has changed jobs and now isn't available to help us out any more, so Dagy has been turning bits as we find them necessary. If you can drive a lathe and are free on Saturdays, apply here now! One example is the clamp for the mag leads where they pass through the rib above. We retrieved one example off the scrap pile of dreams, and from that I made a very sophisticated drawing from which Dagy could turn me a blank: A bit of drilling and cutting and voila: In the meantime we've been working on building up the missing structure on the starboard side of the nose: And continuing re-skinning that side of the fuselage: Investigating the area behind and below the cockpit door revealed more rot, and unfortunately more serious structural damage. When the fuselage was on the Clarke farm it rested on sleepers across the decidedly unstructural opening of the bomb/cannon bay, as visible in this picture from the time: Long time followers of the project will have seen the amount of repair work required at the other three corners as a consequence of this, at first glance this one didn't look too bad, but hanging the cannon door tells a tale: The plywood member that forms the door sill will need to have a new section spliced in to straighten it out. Removing the internal joining plates between the fuselage and side panel... ...revealed the usual mess of corrossion: Bugger. Thanks for looking in. Cheers A
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Post by Dave Homewood on Jul 29, 2022 21:10:46 GMT 12
So is the museum having some sort of 50th Anniversary celebration?
From The Press dated 14th of September 1972:
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Post by denysjones on Jul 30, 2022 13:10:49 GMT 12
No celebration Dave, June last year we had our 50th birthday .
It had taken us since June 1971 till September 1972 to get Jas Clarke to agree to sell us NZ2328 and once he did we pounced in case he changed his mind..again!
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Post by agile on Jul 30, 2022 17:20:35 GMT 12
Dave if you scroll back a couple of pages you'll see we had a dinner for the members on the auspicious day.
"He said he estimated it would take about three years fully to assemble a Mosquito; this would cost between $400 and $500."
Lol, the optimism of youth.
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Post by denysjones on Aug 7, 2022 15:07:27 GMT 12
Back again folks after a bit of a forced interruption by friend Covid. Before that Dean, myself and some rope-ins began work on an engineering rework of the support stand for our JT- to rectify the slight problem that the unit was too high and too wide to get through the display hangar doors to put it on public display. As such it had been lingering in the "to do job queue" but the need to improve space around Harvard 1058 for the Gerry-Barrie work crew meant it had to jump up the order. The reducing of said over dimensions then brought forward works on constructing a gantry based on the to-hand "undercarriage legs" that BXG arrived in our care on. These slight agrarian items were fitted to BXG at Wigram when AirNZ reclaimed the genuine undercarriage and we in turn replaced them with genuine items. So we had them lying around just looking for a new calling. We also wanted to de-clutter the engine's appearance for the public's viewing benefit as it was somewhat surrounded by the massiveness of the stand which was constructed with other functions in mind. So armed we reduced this, the high sided original support to this affording a clearer side view and now will carry on with the task of completing the new unit, further reducing the visual distractions, and transferring it down to the hangars. There it will be outfitted with a set of thrust reversers which were also getting in the way of team 1058 and so migrated earlier in the day. So as to not let the grass grow under its wheels, so to speak, the new gantry migrated off to the site of its next mission....but more of that next week. Meanwhile the removal of the rubber from the leading edge on 2035 continued and priming and first coat took place before said enforced lay-off but now it is fully refurb'ed. Today it received the fairlead bracket, made from parts of the original plus new bits, and the prototype fairlead to enable yet more pipe forming. cheerio
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Post by Dave Homewood on Aug 10, 2022 20:12:27 GMT 12
Old bomber to be flown to Chch
Parts of a Lockheed Hudson bomber which will one day be an exhibit at the Ferrymead Aeronautical Museum will be flown to Christchurch today in a Royal New Zealand Air Force Hercules.
Unfortunately, about 5ft is missing from each wing tip. Unless the society can find the tips elsewhere, it might have to write to the Lockheed company in California to obtain plans from which they can be made.
The society’s secretary (Mr D. Jones) said that the old wartime bomber retained its painted camouflage apart from a small area where it had been cleaned while in Blenheim. “There is certainly no galloping corrosion to worry about,” Mr Jones said.
The fuselage of the bomber, which is considered to be in fairly good order, will be moved during the afternoon from Christchurch Airport across the city to Ferrymead, where it will await the attention of Ferrymead Aeronautical Society members.
The aircraft had been given to the museum by a Blenheim farmer, said Mr Jones. It had cost the society $300 to reimburse the farmer to get it back to his property after the Marlborough aviation society, to which he originally gave it, disbanded.
Mr Jones praised the generous co-operation of the R.N.Z.A.F. in getting the bomber to Christchurch. Had it been brought by road, it could have cost the society about $300, he said. The Hercules was not coming to Christchurch specifically to deliver the Hudson, but had other commitments. Little historical background about the Hudson bomber is available, other than that it served with Nos 1, 3, and 9 Squadrons of the R.N.Z.A.F. and was shipped to New Zealand from the United States.
PRESS, 27 SEPTEMBER 1973
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Post by denysjones on Aug 11, 2022 9:26:29 GMT 12
How many pages of the old Press do you get through a day Dave? :-)
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Post by Dave Homewood on Aug 11, 2022 10:12:35 GMT 12
It varies. But it is a darn sight more interesting than reading any of today's one-sided propaganda sheets, back when newspapers were independent, neutral, actually did journalism, and actually reported on news.
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