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Did anyone else see last night’s documentary? I was a schoolboy during the war and like most of my peers, was thoroughly au fait with all the main warplanes of the time. The British plane that most impressed me was the one I came nearest to. I was walking along a wall of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in about 1941 when a beautiful plane came bursting over my head, shot up like a rocket and banked out of sight. It was some time later that I found it was a Mosquito. I don’t know what it was doing there.
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Good heavens rambo, you must be older than I am. Perhaps the Mosquito was still being developed in 1941?
It is a beautiful aircraft, powerful and predatory looking, wolf-like. Its two Merlin engines made it the fastest military aircraft of its day, but only by a few mph... quite a large machine too.
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In 1941 my father was in the middle of an accelerated science degree, prior to starting work at Farnborough the following year.
They rushed through relevant science courses in 2 years by abolishing vacations.
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>>you must be older than I am
Or anybody, really. I'm what is described in The Simpsons as "predeceased".
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>>Did anyone else see last night’s documentary?
What channel/time was that on then rambo?
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C4 @ 2000 ie head to head with Top Gear... On my PVR, haven't watched it yet.
Before they crashed it, the last UK airworthy Mosquito was kept at BAE Hatfield and I lived under the final approach so saw it fly quite often. I used to jest it was kept up by the noise as it was a tad loud, even throttled back.
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>> I was a schoolboy during the war ............
ambo, you probably shared my experience of having to take a gas mask with you wherever you went. Fortunately the Germans never used their poison gas on us. tinyurl.com/lgj4f5x
Last edited by: L'escargot on Mon 22 Jul 13 at 13:50
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I was going to school by the end of the war.
I hated the red and blue 'Mickey Mouse' gas masks children were given. It seemed discriminatory and patronising not to give us grown-up black ones, since we were being threatened by the Nazis in a grown-up way.
Just as well we never had to use the things in anger because they probably wouldn't have worked.
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>> ........... since we were being threatened
>> by the Nazis in a grown-up way.
The German armed forces weren't all members of the Nazi party.
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>> The German armed forces weren't all members of the Nazi party.
As any fule kno Gastropod. The Nazis were the government and the armed forces were just obeying orders. The threat, aggression or whatever you call it, came from the government. Will that do?
Sheeesh...
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>> >> The German armed forces weren't all members of the Nazi party.
>>
>> As any fule kno Gastropod. The Nazis were the government and the armed forces were
>> just obeying orders. The threat, aggression or whatever you call it, came from the government.
>> Will that do?
No, it won't do. A lot of younger people refer to them all as being Nazis, as if they were a different race from Germans. They were Germans.
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>> I hated the red and blue 'Mickey Mouse' gas masks children were given.
My Mickey Mouse gas mask was red. When you blew out, the "nose" used to flap up and down. Babies were put into an all-enveloping gas mask. tinyurl.com/lbowrch Apparently my parents never managed to get me into one, because of my kicking and screaming.
Last edited by: L'escargot on Tue 23 Jul 13 at 07:23
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Yes. Dad, having been gassed in WWI, was very sharp on this. I doubt it would have been much cop and the contraption for babies was surely quite useless. Unless there was someone to pump it the infant would have suffocated anyway.
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Didn't watch it as I've seen so many VHS and DVDs on them. And heard tales from the (very sadly) late FIL who serviced/repaired them during the war and after the war tarted them up to sell abroad.
We've a really atmospheric B&W photo of him standing by one in the hangar.
Did the programme mention the quote...
"In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy.
The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that?
There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set - then at least I'll own something that has always worked."
Hermann Göring, January 1943
Last edited by: Fenlander on Mon 22 Jul 13 at 15:19
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It could scarcely not have mentioned the late Herr Goering's unpatriotic outburst. I wonder what his Fuhrer made of it?
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>> It could scarcely not have mentioned the late Herr Goering's unpatriotic outburst. I wonder what
>> his Fuhrer made of it?
>>
Contrast the patriotic pride displayed by Albert Speer in praising the Mercedes' ability to drive flat out for hours on end on the new autobahns, unlike non-German cars, he claimed.
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>> ....ability to drive flat out for hours on end on the new autobahns, unlike non-German cars, he claimed.
Judging by the numbers of cars which boiled or blew up in the early days of the M1 in the UK in the late 50's, he may have been right, or at least close to the truth.
I suppose a lot of the failures were badly maintained and thrashed without mercy, but ISTR a least one car which the cooling wouldn't work with a following wind (or something like that).
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>> ISTR a least one car which the cooling wouldn't work with a following wind (or something like that).
I recall some research that showed maximum cooling occurred when airspeed through the radiator was 12MPH.
Even if the cooling fan wasn't working it would need a howling gale blowing behind a car that couldn't achieve 12MPH headwind.
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>> Even if the cooling fan wasn't working it would need a howling gale blowing behind a car
>> that couldn't achieve 12MPH headwind.
I can't argue with your figures, and no amount of googling finds anything to support my "seem to recall".
The nearest I've found is this old nostalge from the AA, which mentions cars which "were simply not designed for sustained high speed driving", but isn't specific:
www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/news/50-years-of-the-m1-motorway.html
While I'm on about ISTR's, my feeling about the AC Cobra's doing 150 mph is that they were on the A1 - I expect that's wrong too :-(
Isn't getting old/defective a drag?
Last edited by: AnotherJohnH on Tue 23 Jul 13 at 13:41
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>>and no amount of googling finds anything to support my "seem to recall".
Wasn't it something to do with rear-engined. I'm sure I recall something dim and distant about my Hillman Imp along these lines.
'Course, could have just been pub drivel..
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>> I'm sure I recall something dim and distant about my Hillman Imp along these lines.
My recollection of Imps is a friend seemingly forever having to do the head gasket - him and one of his friends each had one, and it got to the stage they were quite slick at the job: trolley jack under the transaxle and the whole lump wheeled out (or is that the beetle?)
Where's dog when you need him?
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>> a friend seemingly forever having to do the head gasket
Prezackly, me too. Although I used to do it engine-in with a wire tied around the timing chain.
Mind you, the head warped which is why the HG needed doing repeatedly.
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>>Where's dog when you need him?
I tuned an awful lot of Imps & Beetles from 78-92, the Imp did suffer from overheating problems, but the Vee Dub being air-cooled fared better in that respect.
The main problem I found on the Imp, from a tuning aspect, was that being the air filter was a tad awkward to replace, it hardly ever got done.
So I would turn up with my all-singing-all-dancing Crypton analyser, spend about an hour drinking tea and chatting to the punters wife, change the air filter and present them with a transformed car (and a bill for £50)
With the Beetle, changing the spark plugs was a PITA, and the heating element in the auto choke used to go nipples up fairly regularly - more tea and another *£50 ;)
*That included new plugs, points, condenser, and even the air filter in the Imp, so I wasn't a total crook.
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>>my all-singing-all-dancing Crypton analyser
pah! *Real* men used a colourtune plug.
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>>pah! *Real* men used a colourtune plug.
And you know where you can stick that, sunshine!
:o)
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>> And you know where you can stick that, sunshine!
What colour would you expect?
50 shades of brown?
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>> >>my all-singing-all-dancing Crypton analyser
>>
>> pah! *Real* men used a colourtune plug.
>>
I used to use two. Twin SU carb setup and got fed up with burned fingers from handling hot plugs and colortune while moving it from #1 to #4 to set the mix on the rear carb.
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>>Wasn't it something to do with rear-engined. I'm sure I recall something dim and distant about my Hillman Imp along these lines.
Imps are dependant for cooling on their fan blowing air through the radiator. They have a propensity to suck up anything light enough to be blown and block the radiator, particularly grass, crisp packets etc.
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>> I wonder what his Fuhrer made of it?
>>
Well Hitler was addicted to the idea of the "Schellbomber", the idea being that if you had bombers that fighters couldn't catch, you didn't need a fighter escort. This is why the Luftwaffe was lumbered with a vast array of light, twin-engined bombers and lacked the four engined heavy job they really needed.
This included his delaying of the ME262 project while it was evaluated as a bomber. A Very Good Thing for us, as it would have been decidely unfunny had those shown up considerably earlier when fuel was available for them and handed the Germans air superiority on an uncontested plate.
I like to think that when the Mossie showed up he called all his staff in and subjected them to a good hour of expletive-peppered ranting, centered around how thoroughly right he'd been all along and how useless they all were not to have listened to him.
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But Goering was really just trying to scare his aerospace people into inventing long-range guided missiles and getting to work on a nuclear fission bomb.
If Hitler hadn't been a gibbering lunatic God knows where we'd all be by now.
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Haven't looked out the imagae of FIL in a while but just done so. I'd never really noticed the mosquito he's standing under has an ugly almost DIY radome which ruins the normally elegant lines.
I guess that picture would have been kept very private at the time as he worked at Defford and the radar installation, even to this day, is not that well documented in contemporary photos.
Looking at the image has jogged my memory that they were tarting them up post war (complete with radar) for sale to Sweden in the main.
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>> I'd never really noticed the mosquito he's standing under has an ugly almost DIY radome which ruins the normally elegant lines.
I guess that picture would have been kept very private at the time as he worked at Defford and the radar installation, even to this day, is not that well documented in contemporary photos.
Worth checking that the museums have such a photo?
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That had crossed my mind. He was a very private guy and these photos were never shown to anyone until the 1990s.
I know all the repair slip counterfoils he kept for aircraft worked on were keenly accepted by some body in the old aircraft field as they had dates and tail numbers so could be added to aircraft history records.
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>>
>> The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden
>> aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed
>> which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that?
>> Hermann Göring, January 1943
Oh - the german wooden-wonder...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_162
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A little disappointed at no mention where the current mosquito was constructed.
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Moi aussi. There are a few videos on YouTube, but it would have been nice to have given some credit to the skilled craftsmen, not just the chequebook.
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I've just remembered something about the Mosquito's radical wooden construction: the fuselage was made in two halves, front and back, united at the join by a ring of bolts.
Aeronautical engineers shook their heads... but it worked fine.
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Wasn't it the Morgan Car Company that did the engineering work or did I dream that ?
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They might have been able to give good advice on precise wood construction, gluing and so on...
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It's starting to irritate me now -can't find anything on line or in my books to confirm it !
We were discussing the spiritual successor to the Mossie here a few days ago - The Canberra was seen as a very similar concept, very fast - lightly armoured and armed.
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>> They might have been able to give good advice on precise wood construction, gluing and so on...
I was told epoxy resins came about because when Mosquitoes were used in the humid environment of the Pacific the lactose based glues were dissolved by bacteria........
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Some remarkable progress in technologies during wartime. The current conflict in Afghanistan has progressed the "art" in leaps and bounds.
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>> >> They might have been able to give good advice on precise wood construction, gluing
>> and so on...
>>
>> I was told epoxy resins came about because when Mosquitoes were used in the humid
>> environment of the Pacific the lactose based glues were dissolved by bacteria........
The glue thing was a blind, to excuse the fact these things were actually very badly put together.
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I heard the major woodworking advice came from furniture makers in High Wycombe.
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>> woodworking advice came from furniture makers in High Wycombe.
That sounds more than likely. Furniture skeletons look rough, but they're spot on where it matters. And chairs in particular get such a drubbing that furniture makers know all there is to know about lightweight strength.
The second world war was quite good for the British in some ways, although not in others. One can only hesitate to recommend another one.
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I thought they were only ever fitted with Merlin engines, but some shots on the program appear to show only five exhaust stubs, as some pictures here: tinyurl.com/m6cf3xm
What's going on?
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That was an experimental TD5 diesel engined variant ! Seriously the Mosquito was fitted with Griffon engines as well.
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Does anyone know why Merlin rocker arm pivots sit on a rotating shaft?
They're arranged such that the cam operates midway between the pivot and the valve, so why doe the pivot shaft need to rotate?
tinyurl.com/n8wy8x8
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>> Does anyone know why Merlin rocker arm pivots sit on a rotating shaft?
>>
>> They're arranged such that the cam operates midway between the pivot and the valve, so
>> why doe the pivot shaft need to rotate?
Darn good question.....
Found this.. www.thunderboats.org/history/history0324.html don't think it gives an answer, but it looks interesting (will read properly after work....)
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>>Does anyone know why Merlin rocker arm pivots sit on a rotating shaft?
Found an answer:
It does appear that the rocker pivot shafts rotate, but they don't. These spur gears are driven by the camshaft gear-train but rotate freely on the rocker shaft, ie the shaft doesn't rotate. They are used to provide a drive to accessories such as a Heywood compressor or engine rpm pick-off. You can see a small cover plate held on with 4 bolts in-line with the rotation axis where these are fitted.
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>> I thought they were only ever fitted with Merlin engines, but some shots on the
>> program appear to show only five exhaust stubs, as some pictures here: tinyurl.com/m6cf3xm
Think I found an answer:
On the early Mosquito there is not a lot of space at the back of the engine where the sixth stack would normally go. When the Mosquito adopted longer Merlin engines with two-stage superchargers, the exhausts were further forward in relation to the wing structure, and the engines reverted to individual stacks for all six cylinders on each bank.
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>> >> woodworking advice came from furniture makers in High Wycombe.
>>
>> That sounds more than likely. Furniture skeletons look rough, but they're spot on where it
>> matters. And chairs in particular get such a drubbing that furniture makers know all there
>> is to know about lightweight strength.
>>
>> The second world war was quite good for the British in some ways, although not
>> in others. One can only hesitate to recommend another one.
>>
I have a TV show where the issue of the Wycombe carpenters is discussed at length.
Also featured - liberty ships, the sten gun (made by Triang!), T34 etc etc etc
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>> >> woodworking advice came from furniture makers in High Wycombe.
I doubt Ercol would have had much to say on plywood. They hated the stuff, as being incompatible with their "solid timber" ethos.
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>> >> >> woodworking advice came from furniture makers in High Wycombe.
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>> I doubt Ercol would have had much to say on plywood. They hated the stuff, as being incompatible with their "solid timber" ethos.
>>
Very true, and I believe they still have that ethos.
Good job then, that there were many furniture makers in High Wycombe...
There still is a number here, but not as many, or as large, as in the past.
Ercol itself is no longer in HW... it moved a few miles to Princes Risborough in 2002.
As an aside I was privileged enough to have met Lucian Ercolani a few times.
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Ercol is no longer the Ercol it used to be. Another diluted brand now.
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>> Ercol is no longer the Ercol it used to be. Another diluted brand now.
>>
Sadly.... True.
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>>met Lucian Ercolani a few times.
So did I, about twice and in passing. I was doing a holiday job at the HW site about 1970 and was in the sales office, so had more contact with his brother Barry, a far more choleric individual. Working conditions in the office were appalling but the wage slaves loved it there and no-one ever seemed to leave their jobs if they could help it.
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Mosquito Fighter/Bomber - Armel Coussine
