I shall address the most pressing business first if I may Gentlemen. The Jaffa Cake. Yes, fuel of any discerning restoration team, it has long been a thing of furious debate and controversy. Indeed civil wars have been waged over lesser matters... I believe my learned friend WebPilot has pretty much nailed it with his answer; I'm happy to take that as Gospel.
Any other flavour is just plain wrong; were someone to bring us such an abomination as an offering, they would be taken behind the hangar and dealt with appropriately!
Now, Key forum. Yes, for the last 3 years and 11 months it has been a good and fruitful home for the project's updates. Good in that it was a well used forum, with many aircraft minded visitors, who took an active interest in our project. Fruitful in that it not only brought many great contacts our way in the form of people with parts, manuals, or knowledge to share, but also people who flew our aircraft during her career. The project is to us as much about 788's people as it is the aircraft, and that is why we ask her former aircrew who visit us to sign the JB door. One day these fine chaps will no longer be with us, but their mark will be on their jet. These people wouldn't have known about the project had it not been for the Key forum. Then one day, they decided to do an update, which they made a colossal @rse of, and we noticed 'trade' falling off considerably. Then, the latest abortion hit our screens, and apart from a few loyal die-hard fans (thankyou!) we had nobody commenting, and no idea if anyone was even bothering to look in. It's had a fair crack of the whip, but the time comes you just have to pull the yellow and black handle. One of these updates takes a bit of my time to compile, and I'd rather spend that time writing something a good number of people are likely to read than something nobody will visit or read.
I hope the forum doesn't get killed; if nothing else it will serve as an archive of work to date. I may just be better off printing the old thread off, just in case I ever get round to writing "the book"...
So, 788. For those of you who don't know her, she is an A-W Meteor NF.14, built at Baginton in 1953. She entered service with 152sqn in 1954, before conversion to NF(T).14 status. Then as a navigation trainer she served with 2 Air Navigation School at Thorney Island, then 1ANS at Stradishall, before retirement. Her final flight was to RAF Kemble for disposal on January 6th, 1966.
This wasn't the end for her. After parts reclamation, 788 was allocated to RAF Patrington for gate guard duties in 1967, and has stayed in God's own county ever since. When Patrington closed, she was reallocated to RAF Leeming, where she stayed until the early 90's when, after a restoration, she was demobbed and moved to YAM. In the mid-2000's she had some work done on her tail, then about 6 years ago she was partly dismantled and moved in for an abortive restoration. Just under 4 years ago, I was looking for a project to really get my teeth into, and found 788 in the corner looking very sad.
That scruffy old thing was the project for me! First job was to unwrap her, then retrieve from the various corners of the site whatever parts we had of her
Most of a cockpit, most of an airframe, a cut up wiring loom... and that was it. Challenge accepted. For the first 2 1/2 years we were outside. First job was to shift her out of that lake in the corner,and start learning our way round her
In mid-2016 we refitted her wings, making her look like a Meteor once more
Progress was still painfully slow as we were nowhere near electric. A move closer to power helped, but we were still outside. Then a move to outside the workshop happened, giving us way better facilities. We were still losing great bits of the day unbuttoning then buttoning up the jet, but it was better than nothing.
In the background, we were busily beavering away finding all the missing parts we could. Every bit of the control runs had been removed, new wingtips were sourced, many replacement panels came from the barn of Mike Davey, we were building up our knowledge and AP libraries on the type, and even having to journey to South Wales to pick over the bones of F.8 VZ568!
Then, we got to move 788 indoors. Finally hangar space was allocated, so in she came
We could now start stripping the jet down panel by panel, and begin getting the paint off!
Also, stuff started to come back to life...
And we could really start getting into the metalwork. More restored and done items were appearing on and around the jet...
Then we made our final move to date, into what we call the naughty corner
This year has seen a lot of metalwork; rudder, upper fin, ailerons, tailcone all rebuilt, lots of rot removed, and currently we are in the process of replacing the 2 lower nacelle skins.
Next year we hope to reinstate the 1ANS silver/dayglo colour scheme, and really start bringing the jet to life. There is a new centre loom being made, we have one engine and hopefully a second in the pipeline, so watch this space...
