Sea Vixen FAW.1x2

[Pete in Lincs]

Who was that Lady I saw you with last night?

That was no Lady, that was our Monica.

No one mentioned Max (Conk) Geldray of Goon Show fame. Tsk.

 

Anyway, erm, I just did a catchup and am suitably impressed. Of course, the names of the guilty have been noted and passed to the authorities.

[71chally]

12 hours ago, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

...but at the time of that Air Day at Ford (now a prison) DH had got as far as the first ‘semi-Navalised’ prototype (XF828) doing limited carrier trials (‘limited’ as in no arrested landings; not exactly imminent for front line work).

 

So the chances of seeing a DH110 at Ford’s show that year weren’t high. 

Don't forget WG240.

 

On the 17th June 1953 when DH110 WG240 re-emerged from the modification and repair shops, making it's first flight since returning from Farnborough in that terrible week in the previous September, it was as a naval trials aircraft to Admiralty spec N.139D, complete with it's dashing new colours of Extra dark Sea Grey over Sky.

ADDLs were conducted at RNAS Ford and Boscombe Down by Lt Cdr 'Jock' Elliott and Flight-Test Observer Ronald Ashford from 14 September 1954, and twelve touch and gos were conducted to the carrier HMS Albion on the 23rd of the month.

 

WG240 conducted many ADDLs and mirror practices at RNAS Ford, on the 23 July 1955 Chris Capper and Ronald Ashford demonstrated WG240 at the RNAS Ford air show. 

The DH110 was by now well and truly a Naval aeroplane, reflected in its new designation Mk20X.

 

 

Edited August 28, 2020 by 71chally

[Terry1954]

36 minutes ago, 71chally said:

from 14 September 1954

Well I'll be ..... a Tuesday you know, the day after I was born to this earth. Does that make me a Vixen child?

 

Wonderful historical aviation facts as ever James.

 

Terry

[71chally]

2 minutes ago, Terry1954 said:

Well I'll be ..... a Tuesday you know, the day after I was born to this earth. Does that make me a Vixen child?

 

Terry

well Terry if you were in Dorset then, not. a million miles away 'Jock' Elliott remarked,

"Canopy opening was tried at 130 knots. The view with the seat raised was considered very good, though considerable pulling at the flying overalls on the pilot's left shoulder was found inconvenient". 

He then goes on about some other minor stuff, like a smell of burning in the cockpit and the failure of the VHF radio!

[Terry1954]

7 minutes ago, 71chally said:

well Terry if you were in Dorset then, not. a million miles away 'Jock' Elliott remarked,

I missed that I guess James, I was born in Croydon ....... "Surrey don't you know" said in definitely NOT a Croydon accent! Dorset is my adopted home, now that I'm retired.

 

Those aviation pioneers were such a casual bunch in their everyday pursuit of excellence, much respect.

 

Terry

[71chally]

I'm still not sure what to say about the plastic magic going on, staggering stuff, especially being able to visualise the external and the internal structures.

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

11 hours ago, 71chally said:

WG240 conducted many ADDLs and mirror practices at RNAS Ford, on the 23 July 1955 Chris Capper and Ronald Ashford demonstrated WG240 at the RNAS Ford air show. 

 

 

Ah!  In that case the appearance on Ford’s Air Day poster is only natural, & to be fair the Freudian picture is clearly a prototype 110, not a full-on Vixen; different nose shape (and I’m not talking about the Wren!).  Different world, though; imagine Yeovilton asking about the chances of an F-35B ‘demonstration’ at Air Day in 2014 (a similar 4 years before the first front-line squadron formed...)

[71chally]

3 hours ago, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

and I’m not talking about the Wren!

I must admit, I thought all Wrens looked like that!

 

I think in those days there was more pride in getting new machines to show to the public, test-pilots were household names and people were genuinely keen to see these new dramatic shapes, I think DH and the FAA both gained from getting the aircraft known, this was a huge step forward in British Naval aviation

WG240 had also appeared at the Lee-on-Solent show that year, I guess it helped that they were both relatively near to Ford and Christchurch.

 

WG240 actually did more for Sea Vixen development than XF828, even though it started out as one of the two RAF night fighter prototypes, it spent the vast majority of its time in naval and type development.  Even its look changed, from that dramatic 'Dan Dare' all black night-fighter, to the pointy almost Sea Vixen look with Blue Jay missiles by the time it was grounded in the late 1950s.  It ended up in the Royal Naval Engineering College engineering shops at Manadon before being scrapped there in the mid 1960s.

BTW, XF828 could land and take from carriers, it was hook equipped, it just lacked folding wings.

 

@TheBaron Just  a word of caution with weathering, the example you show is a very late service 899 Sea Vixen FAW.2, and they were dirty and beaten, the FAW.1s were a bit better treated so I would try and find period underside shots to work from.

 

[TheBaron]

A quick duck in at lunchtime as was meant to be clearing out the garden shed this morning but somehow got sidetracked by an Avon 208 bangsucker...

 

First order of business was to build the front firewall section of the engine bay along with the ducting that the nose of the Avon sits into:

That and the rear spectacle beam then give the necessary extents to work to for what follows:

Crucial thing to get right before drafting the outer profile of the engine is to ensure that the central axis of the engine is correctly aligned inside the aircraft in relation to its surroundings:

Yesterday's sketch overlaid onto the existing forms in Fusion (as an an aide memoire rather than an accurate outline to trace around), which, along with the Avon mood board up on the second monitor beside me provided a useful slew of views from multiple angles in order to begin drafting the outer profile of the various engine sections. After about an hour or so of squinting and sighing a set of shapes eventually emerged that bore some semblance to reality:

Switching the surrounding aircraft back on around it and:

Lots of bolts and pumps and things to have fun encrusting the engine with with next time but I think that will do for now:

Right.

About that shed....

Tony

 

Ooh, this just popped into the feed as I was about to submit:

18 minutes ago, 71chally said:

@TheBaron Just  a word of caution with weathering, the example you show is a very late service 899 Sea Vixen FAW.2, and they were dirty and beaten, the FAW.1s were a bit better treated so I would try and find period underside shots to work from.

Fear nought James, I noted a while back how much cleaner the FAW.1 seemed to be in the references I have andwill be avoiding Motorhead roadie levels of gunge on either of the two I'm building. I'm also conscious that many shots online showing such staining look to have quite high levels of tonal contrast to me (either due to the original darkroom printing, or subsequently in digital reproduction by unknown hands online) Visually dramatic but optically misleading.

 

[giemme]

Those last renders look like a super secret, highly engineered kind of magical fluid valve of some sort.... impressive!  

Ciao 

[bigbadbadge]

Great technical update Tony.  Love the shiny looking renderings  they look absolutely lovely. 

Chris 

[Space Ranger]

I don't know if it will help, but I found this illustration of an Avon sans casing:

 

 

[bbudde]

On 8/29/2020 at 2:00 PM, TheBaron said:

Yesterday's sketch overlaid onto the existing forms in Fusion (as an an aide memoire rather than an accurate outline to trace around), which, along with the Avon mood board up on the second monitor beside me provided a useful slew of views from multiple angles in order to begin drafting the outer profile of the various engine sections. After about an hour or so of squinting and sighing a set of shapes eventually emerged that bore some semblance to reality:

Switching the surrounding aircraft back on around it and:

 

Ahh Tony maybe you should fib us with this one on the intakes. Much easier to handle and worth the effect:

https://www.facebook.com/102701418100421/videos/757632738303536/

 

Edited August 31, 2020 by bbudde

[TheBaron]

On 8/29/2020 at 3:31 PM, giemme said:

a super secret, highly engineered kind of magical fluid valve of some sort

Best-ever explanation of how a jet engine works as far as I'm concerned Giorgio!

On 8/29/2020 at 10:18 PM, bigbadbadge said:

Great technical update Tony.  Love the shiny looking renderings  they look absolutely lovely. 

Kind of your Chris (as always).  I always have to keep reminding myself that although the renders can look handsome enough onscreen, the real test comes when it gets turned into a physical object.

On 8/29/2020 at 11:19 PM, Space Ranger said:

I don't know if it will help, but I found this illustration of an Avon sans casing:

Michael - my thanks for that.

From the shape and proportions I suspect that to be a different mark of Avon than that used by the Sea Vixen - poss. one from a Canberra, but wiser heads than mine will know for sure...

Or is it Luna 9....

5 hours ago, bbudde said:

Ahh Tony maybe you should fib us with this one on the intakes. Much easier to handle and worth the effect:

I love such optical illusions Benedikt!

The marble floor of Florence cathedral is particularly mind-blowing in scale:

 

 

It must be an ancestral henge/mandala kind of thing but I really enjoy building stuff in circles.

 

Front starter unit and supporting vanes:

The visuals are all very well but it's important not to neglect the fact that all these parts have to to fit together in sequence as physical parts:

As you can see above, the proboscis of the starter unit protrudes quite a way into the duct tunnel as well as fitting flush against the spectacle beam at the rear, so any solution has to allow it to be angled into place in a manner not much different to removing/replacing an actual engine on the real thing. Note also above that I've added supports under the main engine tunnel at front and mid sections to support it in place within the fuselage. These will be part of the fuselage itself but I'm going to move each of those back by about 3-4mm so that they sit under purely cylindrical sections for ease of mounting (as shown here they coincide with  mounting rings on the engine that enclose sections of rubber tubing: the more complicated profiles of these will make it too fiddly to mate the engine into the mounting during assembly if I don't alter this arrangement).

 

I've decided to print the front and rear sections that have blades and hubs in them separately so that:

1. The fan blades will have a strong base-plate behind them as a support for printing and mounting,
2. The front section can have a full-length assembly (for external display with the engine removed) or one with the front lip removed so that it fits flush with the firewall during internal assembly. Two possible display options therefore.

Front fan array sans surrounding tunnel section by way of illustration:

Blade count of 44 on that which is close enough to the the actual number to pass visual muster at this scale. Blade thickness at 0.24mm should print ok given that it has the support of that rear plate as well as having a cylinder around the sides to support the tips as well:

Seen from the side, I think the the starter assembly sticks out from the tunnel to a correct amount when compared with similar views in the Navy Wings engine removal video:

 

The multiple angles in that video have been by far the most valuable resource in terms of eyeballing shape and proportion.

 

Later of course a lot of this will be only partially discernible looking in throgh the intake in the leading edge:

Another issue to be resolved is how to include have starter/compressor visible on '481, which doesn't have open engine bays to provide access for fitting such detail. I'm mulling over a couple of options at present to see how they might integrate into both printing and assembly of parts.

 

More henge/mandala activity at the rear for the turbine assembly:

As at the front, the blade array supported by a 0.8mm baseplate:

The tips pf the blades similarly supported by the tunnel wall enclosing it:

For printing purposes therefore, the tunnel will be sliced immediately behind that front base-plate and immediately in front of the rear one, forming two completely enclosed sections that can be fitted back on to the main tunnel during subsequent assembly.

 

A final snapshot of how the rear aspect is coming together, inside and out:

More towards the end of the week but a busy couple of days of meetings and filming loom to pull me away from this for a while.

 

Thanks for looking in as frequently as you do. It is continually appreciated.

Tony

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Space Ranger]

Gobsmacked again! Those renderings are superb. I wasn't sure about that Avon illustration either. I suspect it's the version of Avon used in the Commonwealth Sabre, but most of what I know about Avons is that they are named for a river than runs through a certain Mr. W. Shakespeare's home town, and I learned that many years ago in high school!

[Space Ranger]

2 hours ago, TheBaron said:

The marble floor of Florence cathedral is particularly mind-blowing in scale:

 

Aha! Now we know where Kubrick got the idea for this:

 

 

 

[JosephLalor]

1 hour ago, Space Ranger said:

Gobsmacked again! Those renderings are superb. I wasn't sure about that Avon illustration either. I suspect it's the version of Avon used in the Commonwealth Sabre, but most of what I know about Avons is that they are named for a river than runs through a certain Mr. W. Shakespeare's home town, and I learned that many years ago in high school!

I believe there are something like 5 River Avons in the UK and that the name's basically the Brythonic word for river, cognates being Abhann in Irish and Afon in Welsh.  As usual I'll stand corrected!

[CedB]

More stunning work Tony. I especially like the shiny cone!  

[71chally]

The Rolls Royce Avon axial-flow turbojet, where does one start, it truly was the Merlin of the jet age.

It was used in so many post-war aircraft, military and civil, and licence produced by a handful of oversees manufacturers.  Wiki quotes over 11,000 built.

 

The Avon family can be broken down into three basic aviation variants, very simply put the first version had the distinctive individual 'can-annular' combustion chambers, then came the far more efficient and powerful annular combustion type, and the last version was really the reheat development of that type.

The version that @Space Ranger shows is a Mk100 series used in the Australian built Sabres, it's not missing casings, that's how they look.

 

From the start in 1946 Avons were known by an AJ number, and the first version was the AJ65 (Axial Jet 6,500Ibs thrust). 

Very soon on an RA (Rolls Avon) number was established by the constructor, a Mk number for military use, and a 500 Series number for civil applications.

So, the popular Avon RA7, Mk100, 500 family included Mk109 for the Canberra B.6 and the 503 for the Comet 2.  The basic engines were similar within an RA series, but there would be differences in installation parts and ancillaries for the aircraft type it was designed for, for example the Mk101 & 115 had cartridge start, the 503 electric start.

 

de Havilland worked very closely with RR on the Avon and the DH110s contributed to the engines' development.  First prototype WG236 was powered by the AJ65 or RA3 as it had become, this was the low power version very similar to what was powering Canberra B.2s (Mk101) etc.

Second prototype WG240 featured the more developed 7,500Ib power RA7s, this was similar to Mk100s used in later Canberras (Mk109 )and early Hunters (Mk115).

 

By the mid 1950s Rolls Royce had developed the far superior RA28, Mk200, 520 onwards version, the main visual difference was by doing away with the individual combustion chambers and and combining them in an annular combustion system within the engine casing, and a longer compressor body to house the extra compressor stages.

This was the version used by the production Sea Vixen, namely the Mk208, this was broadly equivalent to what was used in the Hunter F.6 on (Mk203 & 207), Canberra PR.9 (Mk206), and Comet 4 (524).  It was also very similar to the early Lightning engines, but without the reheat.

One way that these engines differed was in their starter systems, the 208 used air, 206 Avpin, and the 203 & 524 electric.

The 208 in the Sea Vixen was considered the ultimate version of the non-reheated Avon, kicking out 11,500Ibs of thrust.

 

The radial spokes that you mention @TheBaron, apart from supporting the shaft front bearing also supply hot air from the middle of the engine across the intake area and into the starter bullet.

 

These are examples of an RA7 series, namely Mk122s from Hunter T.7s

Rolls Royce Avon 122 on removal trolley by James Thomas, on Flickr

 

Rolls Royce Avon 100 Series by James Thomas, on Flickr

 

and a RA28, Mk207 Hunter F.58

Hawker Hunter F.58A G-PSST Rolls Royce Avon 207 engine by James Thomas, on Flickr

 

Rolls Royce Avon 207 engine by James Thomas, on Flickr

 

 

Superb renderings Tony, I even wish that I could buy your engines, and sections of the airframe with engines in, Impressive stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 1, 2020 by 71chally

[Pete in Lincs]

22 hours ago, TheBaron said:

so that they sit under purely cylindrical sections for ease of mounting

F'nar, snort, and possibly, Suits you, Sir!

 

Lovely whizz bang engine stuff, Sir!

[Terry1954]

Superb rendering on that Avon Tony. Marvellous stuff>

 

Terry

[perdu]

The burning question now, snigger snigger, is whether Jameses lovely fotofile will induce poor Tony to lay in a stock of assembly nuts and bolts on the upper and lower halves.

Cruel? Who's cruel? Not I says I 

 

 

[TheBaron]

22 hours ago, Space Ranger said:

Aha! Now we know where Kubrick got the idea for this:

We must be on the same wavelength Michael - exactly the shot I thought of upon first seeing that floor from above! 

22 hours ago, JosephLalor said:

I believe there are something like 5 River Avons in the UK and that the name's basically the Brythonic word for river, cognates being Abhann in Irish and Afon in Welsh. 

Like many in their youth I think I was about 16 when I first got intoxicated by the Brythonic/Goidelic labyrinths of Graves' The White Goddess. Despite coming later to realize that it was really a covert account of his poetic instincts rather than anything reliable to do with history or proto-languages, it did at the time open my eyes beyond the pale confines of the 'English Literature' like wot the state wanted us to learn in school.

13 hours ago, CedB said:

More stunning work Tony. I especially like the shiny cone!  

Thanking you for that Ced.

Get yourself one of these, pop it on your head, and you too can be @Navy Bird 's avatar! 😁

8 hours ago, 71chally said:

The Rolls Royce Avon axial-flow turbojet, where does one start,

Start by publishing a monograph on it and I'll be your first subscriber! Thanks for that mini-essay - especially:

8 hours ago, 71chally said:

The radial spokes that you mention @TheBaron, apart from supporting the shaft front bearing also supply hot air from the middle of the engine across the intake area and into the starter bullet.

 I mean, how elegant is that - the anti-icing  pipe feeding the air forward into the front manifold from the rear of the compressor outlet:

3 hours ago, Pete in Lincs said:

Lovely whizz bang engine stuff

Kind of you Pete. Thanks.

(I'd send you one but fear you'd succumb to temptation and stick a conning tower, some tank treads and an Action Man's head to it and convince me it was a Vizbangmenscher or something of that ilk...)

3 hours ago, Terry1954 said:

Superb rendering on that Avon Tony. Marvellous stuff>

Gracious of you Terry.

Tell that son of yours to get a shift on with his tutoring so that we can get to see some native Dorset renders from your stable!

2 hours ago, perdu said:

The burning question now, snigger snigger, is whether Jameses lovely fotofile will induce poor Tony to lay in a stock of assembly nuts and bolts on the upper and lower halves.

I'm no historian as you well know Bill but was it not Horatio 'Finbar' Nelson himself who opined:

'No captain can do very wrong if he places his nuts alongside a prominent tunnel...'

 

I can indeed promise that there will be no skimping on external details where RR's finest are concerned.

 

[TheBaron]

(Late) Morning all. Another week gone, another update in amidst the whirlwind.

I  must say that the engine is in danger of becoming an WIP in its own right !

In a variation of Richardson's 'coastline effect', the longer you stare at photographs and videos of an Avon, the more complex and expansive the terrain appears....

 

To bring some kind of method to adding external features, it made sense to focus in the first instance upon adding the various species of fastenings to the main sections of the exterior:

These vary in size and shape, from those fixing the upper and lower halves of the compressor casing together at the sides:

 

 - to those holding the various tunnels of the turbine and combustion chamber sections at the rear:

That panel on the compressor casing  just behind the hot air manifold?

 - I couldn't resist adding the manufacturer's plate.... 😁

Other jobs tackled over the week included completing a more accurate shape forthat rubber ring (shock-absorber?) that runs around the engine in front of the manifold, complete with variations in profile to match fuselage contours:

Plus the front and mid mountings under the engine that I mentioned in the previous post have ow been move rearwards slightly so that for construction purposes later, the Avons can be firmly seated into place at the correct height/angle to meet the  front ducting and rear exhaust outlets in the spectacle beam:

That should keep the nut and bolt counters happy for a while anyway.

I can see why scuttleur sans pareil @Ex-FAAWAFU gets such satisfaction with the scuttles on his Ark* - something weirdly soothing about forming arrays of small things...

 

Off to an actual cinema later this afternoon to see an actual film on an actual big screen.

Life just gets weirder....

Tony

 

*Royal, not Golgafrincham.

 

 

 

[bbudde]

That looks great Tony. Maybe A " Tony Barony Modelworks Ltd" in the near future?  Looks like that a bit. Have a nice day at the cinema.

Cheers