WIX Archives
Re: Ex Tallichet Sea Fury Project Sold
Posted by Ron Henry on Fri Feb 21, 2003 06:21:55 AM
In reply top Re: Ex Tallichet Sea Fury Project Sold posted by Jim Bates on Thu Feb 20, 2003 03:13:48 PM
: : The Iraqi Fury project is now listed as sold on the Cour
: ts
: : ey Website. Was anyone able to pin an ID on it?
: : Incoming Inventory includes a P-39 and P-63 projects. An
: y
: : ideas as to which ones these might be?
:
: We had one of the Tallichet Fury projects here in Akron fo
: r a while. It was sold and is now with Sanders. The reas
: on I bring this up, is that it appeared to me that our pro
: ject had parts from four different airplanes. Each outer
: wing panel, the center wing, and the fuselage had differen
: t IDs. This made me question if the Iraqi projects were s
: old as complete lots of parts and not as complete planes.
: Anyone know for sure?
:
: Jim
My memory might be playing tricks, but I think I found this Sea Fury (or was it another, similiar, project?!) on some website, and the writeup admitted that it was a collection of parts.
IIRC, Tallichet and Jurist (it was them wasn't it?) brought out of Iraq (what chance now?!!!) a number of aircraft that was close to the number that was originally sold to Iraq, maybe plus some spares(?). Therefore it seems to me that, logically, most of those sold would be "as built".
Even into the 1960s, the UK aircraft industry was very labour intensive and used a large amount of "hand fitting" of components. Much of this effort went into making fabricated components from the production lines just fit together accurately.
This is a current topic of great embarrassment to BAE Systems, who have a major UK defence contract to convert the RAF's Nimrod MR2 ASW aircraft into a much modified new mark, the Nimrod MRA4. The fuselage of the Nimrod is basically that of the Comet airliner, and these fuselges were built in the first half of the 1960s. The MRA4 has new engines and hence requires a new wing centre section. The new wings are built using modern CAD/CAM techniques, and it's been found that because the Nimrod fuselages used so much hand fitting, they are very individual; considerable differences in fuselage dimensions mean that the new, consistently dimensioned, wings won't fit. Allegedly, Nimrod fuselages differ by up to 4 inches in length!
The moral of this story is that it is best not to mix-and-match major components from old Brit aircraft !