Hi all,
I thought I'd post a little update into progress over the past couple of weeks. As always its two steps forward, one back as the run up on 2nd May did not go at all according to plan.
The event itself? Fantastic from our point of view. The crowd must have easily been a couple of thousand people despite the slightly grey and cold conditions, and the queue to get on board WR963 for a look around stretched out towards the wingtip most of the day. We made a lot of new friends, met a few old ones, and made a lot of people aware of what our intent is for the Shackleton.
So you can imagine our frustration when No 3 just turned on the starter, peed fuel out the priming drain and refused to do so much as cough! We believed the problem to be in the booster coil connection to the magneto or the mag itself, as while there was plenty of fuel there wasn't even a hint of life in the engine, it felt as if we were turning it over with the switches off.
The rest of the run-up went fairly well, and with careful management of the brake pressures (only one compressor available because No 3 was U/S) we still managed to exercise things and blow out the cobwebs after a fairly lengthy quiet period over winter. Then came the bigger problem. After settling the engines down and bringing them to a halt, the starboard undercarriage indicator flickered then went from a 'green' indication to a 'red'. Never has that tiny little light looked so evil or so bright...
We got off the aircraft fairly carefully and thanks to the crowd barriers were able to keep everyone away. Tentative checking of all the ground locks was done before venturing into the undercarriage bay to see what the problem was, as none of us wanted to see WR963 take up a reclining position, or for one of us to get intimate with a mainwheel. A quick check of the jacks and the downlocks showed the inboard hydraulic ram had crept back just enough to set the switch to open and show the red. With persuasion the ram would come out to its full extent, but soon crept back again. The decision was taken to manually adjust the lock to prevent any creep from the ram inadvertantly unlocking the leg, and unfortunately to limit access to the aircraft for the time being.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks later and the team were on site from just before 10am to just after 9pm; determined to get to the bottom of things.
The intent of the day's work was to try and trace the problem that caused the red light on the Starboard undercarriage and if possible fix it, it was thought that one of the valves was not properly selecting 'down' and preventing hydraulic pressure to the rams. So out came the multimeters and they started getting pushed into various places on WR963 and the problem was slowly traced back to the wire from the undercarriage selector switch in the cockpit to the 'down' selector valve in the starboard undercarriage bay. It appears to have a short to earth in the starboard wing leading edge area. Normally one side of it is always live - so you have either an up selection, or a down selection. In this case both sides are unpowered so the hydraulics are 'free'.
The complete undercarriage system on that side is not being supplied with hydraulic pressure to ensure the gear stays down and locked, and because of this, the starboard inboard ram was allowed to retract in an uncommanded fashion - unlocking the leg. Because we haven't managed to replace the damaged/shorted wire yet, WR963 is still closed to the public for the time being, meanwhile we're getting stuck into the manuals and planning the best course of action for getting to and repairing it.
As this work was going on, so were other bits around the aircraft.
While working in the undercarriage bays, Mark Ward and his son Curtis have been making amazing progress. This is a before and after shot of one of the undercarriage locks. As we're overhauling things there will be a retraction test at some point, and the locks have had precious little attention in the last 25 years other than making sure that they are positively engaged..
As mentioned, work was also being carried out on No 3 engine, and as predicted the problem seemed to be related to the boost coil. Initally there was some head scratching as there seemed to be no output from the booster coil despite it buzzing away merrily. Investigation slowly narrowed things down and it was found that while the primary coil was doing its job, the secondary coil had failed. A replacement was fitted from our stock and once the undercarriage issue is sorted we will be able to try and test run the engine.
Time was taken during the day to have a look at our latest acquisition, a hydraulic servicing rig.
As its been stood for some time it was suffering from stale petrol, a seized clutch and a few other issues, but by the end of the day it was turning over freely with good oil pressure. Would it start? No. As often with WR963, a magneto fault of all things...
Last but by no means least, some work in the drawing archive, which is slowly coming back into some kind of order due to the efforts of SPT team member Michelle Mclaughlin. We had to dig out some more drawings for use in a certain plastic model project, and these will be dispatched shortly. When looking through the manifest, once again we were reminded how much Avro DNA is within the Shackleton.
All in all a fairly productive day, and we'll be back on the 30th.
Regards,
Rich
(Photos courtesy of Mark Ward, Michelle Mclaughlin and Phil Woods)
