Pic of the Day

[quicksilver-wsr]

I'll be right upfront and say I was mega-impressed when you took on the sponson build yourselves. I had assumed beforehand that you would outsource them, because building new from an ancient set of drawings is a whole different kettle of fish to restoring metal that's already there on the floor. Not harder, necessarily - but different.

That showed a lot of depth of talent in the BBP team - and big balls, too - because it was a formidable amount of extra work to take on.

If you had outsourced them, it would have been the "easier" route ... and ultimately the wrong one ... because the sheer number of weird-and-wonderful quirks in the drawings-versus-the real thing would have had a contractor tearing their hair out, then tearing the contract up, then sending you a succession of invoices for the mountains of additional, unforeseen work.

The way you did it, you kept all the hassle in one place where you could see it and deal with it, with good communications between the people involved because they were all in the same workshop.

Nigel

[Renegadenemo]

I'll be right upfront and say I was mega-impressed when you took on the sponson build yourselves. I had assumed beforehand that you would outsource them, because building new from an ancient set of drawings is a whole different kettle of fish to restoring metal that's already there on the floor. Not harder, necessarily - but different.

Thank you for the kind words...
We had two problems with outsourcing the sponsons, well, three really. Firstly we had no money and no one was going to do them FOC - no one with any sense, anyway.
Second, no one we spoke to reckoned they could do it anyway at a realistic commercial rate. They'd have all had the same set of problems we faced with unavailable materials, bespoke tooling and the like. Our sponsons would have become a compromise then perhaps they wouldn't work.
And the third thing is they just would never have been quite how we wanted them. Mike has gone to extraordinary lengths to plot every uneven pattern of screws, the sponsoneers have relentlessly chased out even tiny errors in the fabrication and as we speak, the sponson tops are being made wrong so they're right.
We couldn't outsource them in the end, we just couldn't.

[Richie]

Besides think of all that fun we would have missed out on !

However on the flip side of all that fun Bill, can you give it maybe three to six months after we finish these sponsons before you agree to do anymore for other folk

[Dominic Owen]

With the sponsons still 'unclothed', I think it might be time to get Gok Wan and the 'How to Look Good Naked' team up there - Really, darlings, purple with green??! What are you thinking??

You may have a point, but you can tell this fella then...

joker.jpg

You must be joking... *ahem*

(I'll get me coat...)

[Renegadenemo]

However on the flip side of all that fun Bill, can you give it maybe three to six months after we finish these sponsons before you agree to do anymore for other folk

It would take that long to to get the materials! The next set shouldn't take as long, though.

[Renegadenemo]

Form these words into a sentence-

Earth.

Power.

On.

This.

No.

I bet John and Richie can save you 60% on that sentence...

[Richie]

John and I were discussing it tuther week.... We have fettled out the process of making them... And have the tooling and jigs to hand.....


An insane donation to the project would need to be offered before I could stop rocking back and forth and trembling with shell shock long enough to pick up the body file, rivet gun, drawings and a rule again.

[mtskull]

......problems with outsourcing the sponsons......they just would never have been quite how we wanted them.

And there lies the crux of the matter: the difference between a visual representation of how K7's sponsons looked in period, or an exact reconstruction of the original Norris design and subsequent modification. Nice one.

[Jordangbr]

Unlike the original sponsons the new ones we have built shouldn't leak!

[Renegadenemo]

I think about the only departure from the spec that we're going to make concerns the use of captive nuts. The drawings call for about a zillion 2BA and 4BA captives inside the sponson to fix the sealing strips and sponson tops but there's simply no way to install them all because some would have to go into sealed voids and most would be inordinately difficult to fit even though there's some access.
Where screws have been fitted in the spars all they did was drill and tap the aluminium, which doesn't work too well on a fine thread, then tighten the screws carefully. The fact that it's not a great solution is borne out by the mix of sizes on the spar fairings where 4BA has stripped and been enlarged, sometimes all the way up to 0BA.
However, looking at how they worked and the obvious difficulties with accessing the insides of the sponsons, and the fact that once you get a hole through the outer skin and the extrusion beneath you're up to the same stack-up height as found on the spars, it wouldn't be at all surprising if they did the same there.
Having said that, tapping soft material is not good because as you tighten the screw the material deforms until all the load is on the top couple of threads that then tear out putting all the load on the next ones down and so on.
So I reckon what we'll do is helicoil the holes to give us all the grip we need without having to borrow Santa's elves to get the captives fitted. Will update in due course after we've experimented on some scrap.