A Suitable Piece of Wood

[Martin_H]

Way back in my aircraft maintenance days one of the checks we had to carry out on the GAF Nomad undercarriage was a torque check of the clutch on the undercarriage electric actuator.

 

This entailed disconnecting the chain drive from the actuator, fitting an arm with a spring scale attached then loading up the clutch by driving the actuator, reading the clutch torque on the spring scale...

 

Part of the maintenance instruction was to 'place a suitable piece of wood' under the arm to prevent accidental damage to the skin of the aircraft.

 

Being Military and having strict tool control in the workshop meant we manufactured 'A Suitable Piece Of Wood', catalogued it, painted it GSE Yellow and found a place for it on the workshop toolboard.

 

For modelling I have found 'a suitable piece of wood' very handy. Mine is a piece of finnish ply, 25 mm thick, about 300 X 600 mm in size and covered on one side with a piece of 'caneite' (a soft pin up board material made from sugar cane waste).

 

It gives me a soft side for pinning out and assembling small parts, a hard size for cutting and working on and is light enough to carry around and work from a lounge chair or the kitchen table.

Edited By Martin_H on 31/03/2010 05:09:14

[Peter Miller]

Always thought that the Nomad has great potential as a model. I have good 3-views in my "one day possibly " file.

 

I remember when we were doing major modifications to the Scottish Aviation Twin Pioneer in Aden there was one rivet that needed a really strange shaped rivetting block. I made one up, it looked a bit like the old SS symbol. That lived in my tool box and  was borrowed by every team in the hangar.

 

When they sent out a team from the UK to show us how it should be done they were not informed about this special block. Nor were they given any other help...they went home with their tails between their legs. after all, we had been doing the mods for ages.

 

The Twin Pin was diabolical. it wasn't even jig built and the frames in the nacelles could vary as much as two inches  between the nacelles on one aircraft. The model kt=its never fitted.

[Martin_H]

I rebuilt a Grumman Widgeon amphib in 1988 that had been sliced in two through the rear fuselage when lifted by a wire rope by an unsupervised crane operator. No drawings so I took a guess that the rear fuselage skin would have been manufactured from a standard 4' wide sheet of alclad. I eyeballed everything into position and filled the gap between centre fuselage and tail as best as I could and when we finally did get drawings from Grumman we were dead centre of their factory drawing, which gave a tolerance of plus or minus 1 inch for the fuselage length...

 

I would LOVE to model this plane!

[Peter Miller]

 Nice job! I bet jigging it all up took some time.

 

I have looked at the Widgeon several times as a subject , Another in my "one Day" file.

 

Back in the late 50s at St mawgan  we had a Shackleton suffer a nose wheel collapse on landing. (This was such a common fault that they cut ahole in the floor and provided the crew with a broomstick to push the leg down)

 

The aircraft landed on a carpet of foam and slid off the end of the runway onto the grass/ Very little damage doen.

 

Then the officer recovering the aircraft put a cable round the nose and told the crane diver to lift so they could get a trolly under the nose....crushed every stringer in the nose.

 

Another Shack did the same thing a couple of days later. I am prtty sure they were a bit more careful then.

[Martin_H]

Reminds me of Chuck Yeagers Suitable Piece of Wood - a cut down broomstick so he could operate the overcentre lock on the cockpit door of the X-1 after breaking his ribs falling off a horse!

[Phil Claridge]

a suitable peice of wood is my hammer handle when things dont fit as they should

if in doubt hit it, if it breaks, it was knackered anyway