Caddy

Could you not use a hammer on the gremlins fingers, said gremlin won't touch without asking again!

I was thinking that if I managed to catch the gremlin then a bulldog clip in a certain place might have been good, but fingers are a more practicable idea.

My mate 'M' has refaced the valves (after stripping and cleaning the armature, and then replacing the brushes in the valve refacer), and re-faced the seats.

The valves are apparently in good condition, but the seats could ideally do with replacing. Unfortunately the IWM would not be able to afford this at the moment, so the head will be built with the existing valves.

There is another option which we will look at; we have found a collection of NOS B bank heads all with brand new seats, we are going to find out how much one would cost.

Does anyone out there have any experience with getting parts for the Meteor engine? There have been rumours flying around that there are O ring kits available to make the rings for the coolant transfer ferrules; these are an oval section ring rather than a perfect circle and I have only come across kits with circle section material. Also what grade of material will be the closest match to the material used by RR for the original rings?

Cheers

It been a few weeks since I was at Duxford, but managed to catch up with my mate and found out what he's been up to:

First of all a game of guess what:

It's cast ally, very light.

If anyone can guess what it is can they tell me what it was doing in the inlet manifold of B Bank head. It had to be drilled and split to get it out so it looks like it was built into the engine.

Against our better judgement B Bank has been split and steam cleaned (huge amaounts of sandy greasy gunk coming out of the waterways), the valve have been taken out and cleaned. The inlet and exhaust ports have been de-coke'd ready to be re-faced.

All they coolant transfers removed, soaked in vinegar and then cleaned up (I did that - vey proud of myself).

We've had another visit from the gremlins: all the valves were moved around in the holding block and emery paper has been taken to some of the ports........

All fixable but blummin' annoying.

What next? Well the heads need to be checked for warping, the valves and seats for B bank need re-facing and then lapping in. A bank head definately needs skimming, and then we need a few O rings, and to steam clean the block, oil all bearings and then re-built the engine.

Then the electrics...............

Where do you live? I'll make sure I'm not there..... :-\

That's quite an increase in revs, I don't think a Merlin revs that high (I think 3,000rpm was the figure I was told by a merlin engineer). I wonder how much they've played with it to get the induction system to breathe properly.

Not me, Degsy! But out of intrest how far can you retard the timing before a petrol engine would stop? I've finally got around to checking the Timing on My WC54 Katy, initial timing showed 22 deg before TDC. Now at 7 before thanks to Phil P's advice, and it starts easy! :wow: And why would you go past TDC?

The only real military engine I can speak of is a meteor, which has a 2 pronged rotor: the main one that's fed from the mag and a starter that is fed from a coil. On our meteor the mag is setup to fire 8deg BTDC, the starter prong is about 35deg after the mag prong so it fires 27deg ATDC.

I guess they did this to reduce the amount of stress running through the con rod and into the crank. Also the starter motor only turns the engine over at 30rpm so firing BTDC might send the engine backwards.

It's a big balancing act - power against stress: the faster an engine can run the more advanced you can run the ignition.....

.... up to a point

I don't think their 'R' is in running condition, or ever likely to be. Mind you, I had to find that out by Googling as their website is uninformative to say the least. I'm also not convinced about some of their technical information - a propeller speed of 9500 rpm? At that speed it would just cavitate itself to pieces. I think they mean a 3:1 gear down from crankshaft speed, not gear up!

 

Andy

Nominal governed speed for a meteor is 2,550 rpm. That's a ratio of 1:3.725 to achieve 9,500 rpm, unless they've played with the govenor (or removed it completely). A reduction by 3 would give a propeller speed of 850, so by playing with the govenor it should give 900 - 950 rpm. Would that be a more suitable speed for a propeller?

Wouldn't a Griffon engine be a better choice? Same displacement as an 'R', roughly the same power......

Got some really sad news today - our Vice Chairman died.

RIP Paul Lacey

caddy if u are using needle guns with vib levels of 12.3m/s2 no wonder u dont like em! quite easy to find ones that have levels more around 3m/s2

Damn right! The problem with volunteering is that invariably the kit available to use isn't the best. 3.2m/s is much better.

For a living I operate and manage the use of a fair few different types of powered hand tools. At 34 I've already lost a small amount of sensation in my hands and that was just with chainsaws etc.

Add a good set of anti vibe gloves.

About as much use as a chocolate fireguard with vibration values of this level - they are not proven to work. Keeping your hands warm has been proven to help.

all these exposure levels are more related to long term exposure not one person taking paint/ rust off their mv re. needle gun hearing protection earplugs in then ear defenders over the top thick gloves help reduce vibs and keep your hands warm cause the guns run cool with all that air going thru em ! when i restored my ferret machine mart needle gun was a god send ,nitromors and similar horrible stuff.

How do you define long term exposure? Removing the paint from a whole vehicle could be classed as long term.

Quick bit of maths =

needle gun ave vibration value = 12.2m/s²

Needle gun max useage in an 8 hour period = 21 minutes

Food for thought

One of my friends had a wet blasting machine. They also used it (without the grit) to wash the cars, machinery etc.

 

A visitor used it to wash her car. The white car went very shiny, but then the windows went misty. I'm told the scream could be heard for quite some distance. She had mistaken the grit trigger for a soap dispensor (as on pressure washers).

 

Remember that wet blasting is done with water. You'll probably get rust, particularly in nooks and crannies. It sounds like there are rust inhibitors but you'd need to look at how effective they are, or sand down before priming.

 

Personally my vote is for needle gunning, but make sure you follow the vibration safety advice and take plenty of breaks.

With the vibration values I recon in a commercial setting you'll have about 2 minutes on before you reach exposure levels. It could be fun hooking up my Hand Arm Vibration Indicator from work to one of the needle guns at Duxford and see how long until it sounds off.

(I hate needle guns in case you haven't guessed - not for the task, but the noise!!!!)

So have they swapped from the original Rolls Royce 'R' type engine to a Meteor? That's one hell of a power drop.......

Originality vs Longevity?

I guess going over to a modern filter will also help prolong the life of the engine in that a (decent) modern spin on filter is so much more capable at filtering out smaller particles whilst keeping the oil flow at a decent rate.

Saying that I've cut two spin on filters apart (for my SV650 motorbike), the Suzuki one was so much better than the pattern part one.

With the Meteor engine we are working on we're looking at the feasibility of installing a spin on Champion oil filter somewhere after the Merlin boys down the other end of the airfield highly reccommending it (strange to think that is most spitfires there is a diesel engine oil filter tucked in there).

Ssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

I'm still dressing my lawns at work, the temperature isn't allowed to drop and niether are the leaves on the trees!

I don't know if this is of any help to you, but a chap called Paul Goff does a lot of work for 6v systems in classic motorcycles, and I think he has a range of 6v LED lights systems and bulbs.

http://www.norbsa02.freeuk.com/

Hope this is of help.

Paul

What a lovely thing! I'm in awe.

That is absolutely beautiful......

I think the plan is to get one running out of the two, with the second becoming a static display.

Yep, that's what I heard as well.

One is off to a MOD base somewhere as a gate guardian, and the innards from that one will be used to get the other one working

Good to see that politics and woolly thinking are still part of the Duxford scene:nut: Not much change in the 30 plus years since I was there. Keep up the good work and don't take the "bodge" route as I did. Regretted it ever since.

Hi Colin, thanks for the support,

I've not been at Duxford a year yet, but I think the reputation for politics and wooly thinking needs addressing. Yes, we have had to go through a bit of this with the engine rebuild, but only from a few people who have been at Duxford for quite a few years and have probably been through the same thing as us too many times.

A lot has changed here, and I believe that the current committee are actually bringing about a real positive change in the MVW. I do feel that if an issue is approached the right way and if a solution is presented at the same time things can be achieved.

I guess the current financial climate, the huge re-jig of IWM London, and the complexities of working on what is effectively a Rolls Royce Merlin engine without the supercharger are going to make this a very difficult and time-consuming project.

It being a bleedin' Rolls Royce engine really doesn't help either.

We will get there though.

Well, we just found it abandonned officer - honest!

(I used the "P" word originally, in the title!)

At least you didn't use the Police term:

Caravan utilising nomadic .........

.... I'll stop there

The MG45CX box is a 12V regulator for Centaur, Cromwell or Comet.

Thanks for that Adrian, next time I'm in I'll mark it up and put it in for storage. Not too sure it'll ever get used though.

Okay, so we've had a bit of an issue with what to do next. There were 3 ways forward:

1. To check the damage to A bank head

2. To start splitting B bank so that we can re-face the valves and seats.

3. Get stuck in to the charging systems.

Issues with these 3:

1. We need to get permission to use the levelling table, but the chap we need is stuck in IWM London trying dealing with all the vehicle and exhibit moves. When he is back in Duxford he's trying to catch up on the rest of his work.

2. There are enough pieces of the engine laying around and being moved all over the place already, if we pull B bank apart then there'll be even more bits to go 'walkies'. There is also a 'political' issue at the moment which I'll go through later.

3. We got our hands slapped when we touched the Aux Gen by several people telling us that it works and should be left alone, also there is a lot of pressure on us to get the Meteor working.

SSSooooooo:

Last week was spent being told what we could do, and that we should 'bodge' more. Not too sure if I want to 'bodge' a 650bhp, 1500ft/lb engine. So this week we spent a lot of time thinking what to do. We were then ask if we really need to split A bank to re-face the valve, we said "Yes", they said "Are you sure?", so we tried to lap the valves in.

Luckily our chairman was about so after we lapped in B3 cylinder we asked his opinion, which was "Rough as a bears bum!", so we were told to do it properly.

We have now started to split B bank (against our better judgement), all the skirt nuts are off and the waterways are soaking in diesel to loosen the transfer ferrules.

We've got a bit of work to do to the B bank Head; things have been bouncing around in it:

Won't be going to Duxford for a few weeks, but I'll keep all up to date with what has been achieved by the rest of the motley crew....

This always makes me laugh:

Lucky boys! Nowt like new toys

To be fair it had been sat rotting in one of the stores at Duxford. If it's going to a new home where it will be given a new lease of life then that can only be a good thing.