It’s been a while since I posted here, and that’s mostly because it’s been so infernally busy.
We seem to have been hit by a series of unexpected hitches for the last fifteen months, and the we’re not out of the woods yet.
But first, the good news.
The doping was finished and on the Friday afternoon we packed her into the trailer in pouring rain and took her back to Ludlow. Thankfully there was sufficient ventilation in the trailer to dry the wings out after their soaking and I had a week off to get some work done and finish off bits on both trailer and airframe.
But on my way home from one of these days, the trusty Hilux simply stopped. I was coasting downhill and the engine simply died. It wouldn’t start again, and it had to be towed to my local garage.
Since then they’ve diagnosed the fuel pump as the problem, but it’s too much of a job for them to do, and they’ve sent it to the nearest Toyota agent, who say that they will have to remove the whole engine to fix it…
Of all the bits of kit we use, the Toyota was the one I never expected to have problems with, and it’s caused huge disruption, as the time for the season opener at Shuttleworth was drawing perilously close, and we had decided to get them to check on the piston rings which were replaced last year.
Theo came up and refitting the engine went fine, so we hauled her outside, put a bit of petrol in the tank and pulled her over. We’d put half a litre of oil into the crankcase via one of the inlet ports and it fired, but coughed and spluttered for ages while it got rid of the oil.
Eventually it fired up, but never sounded happy and only reached 900rpm, which isn’t enough. We changed plugs and re-checked the timing, but this made no difference, and we had to admit defeat.
We also did a spot of redecorating. We’d originally thought 1264 had had Union flags on the fuselage sides which we subsequently overpainted with cockades, (this was certainly the case with one other Scout at No. 2 Wing – probably 1262), and that’s what we’d done. Now, however, we’ve found photographic evidence that she only ever had cockades, and that’s how she’s finished this time.
But we hated having to overpaint the Union flags, and so we’ve bought vinyl on which we’ve painted Union flags, and stuck them over the top, and we’ll hope to be able to remove them at a later date to return to historic accuracy. In fact this is how 1263 was marked. What do you think?
We were still without the Hilux, and time was getting extremely short, but thankfully, however, Dave Garrett, who’d towed us to Bicester for the unveiling ceremony, stepped in once again with his Discovery and on Thursday we arrived, safe and sound, (despite a suicidal car transporter who nearly veered into Dave on the motorway) and unpacked 1264 and rigged her in the engineering hangar. All good, and by 1700 on Thursday, we were just starting to relax and think that finally we might be out of the woods.
Until Friday, when Jean-Michel Munn emailed to say that they’d found another cracked piston ring…
You have to wonder when things are going to get sorted out and we can just enjoy displaying her and flying her.
In the last fifteen months, we’ve had cracked rings (unexpected, but probable cause identified), the head of a wheel retaining bolt fall off (unexplained) which caused £11,000 damage, a one month delay in delivery of dope (not fully explained), failure of the Toyota Hilux (unexplained and utterly unexpected) and now loss of rpm (unexplained) and failure of more piston rings (unexplained).
The honeymoon is definitely over!
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