My girlfriend & I are collecting Concordes, not to keep you understand, that would be - inconvenient. It started when we went to Brooklands on our first date & we have now been aboard four.
To accomplish this we went to "Aerospace Bristol", it looked a bit "corporate" to me from the website, but it was actually very good, telling the story of the Bristol aircraft company from before it made aeroplanes (under a different name obviously) until we as a nation gave up on making stuff & just bought it from other countries.
The first "room" covers up to the end of the first world war & has - as you can see a Bristol Fighter & hanging above it, the wooden structure of a Bristol Fighter for comparison, there are lots of displays on making wooden propellers & the other paraphernalia of aircraft production, then as you walk through to the second room there is a model showing the flying controls of an aircraft which is animated as you move them. What I found interesting was that the plane looks like a '30s model of a plane called "Britain First". It was designed for the then owner of the Daily Mail who could see that other countries were developing monoplanes & the UK didn't seem to be, so he asked Bristol to design him a six seater airliner - it was faster than the RAF's fastest fighter & was developed into the Blenheim.
In the second section it's all about the '30s to the '60s, so we have this. In the thirties an awful lot of the worlds planes flew with a Bristol Jupiter, the tubes running from the centre casing to the end of each cylinder house two push rods, each of which operates two valves - four valves per cylinder - the mechanism is exquisite.
We think we're clever these days? Try designing that with only a pencil & slide rule. You'll have to compensate for heat expansion in different materials, different cooling, design in a mechanism for adjustment, while keeping the engine diameter as small as possible.
Moving on from the Jupiter, we come to this, it's a Bristol Hercules (all the Bristol engines were named after Greek or Roman myths), the thing about air cooled radial engines is that their diameter tends to control the shape of the aircraft, so how to get more power when you can't just make the engine bigger? Well for a start there's two rows of cylinders, but also, no push rod tube up the front, because this is a sleeve valve engine.
Sleeve valve engines put the piston inside a sleeve inside the cylinder, then move that sleeve such that holes in the sleeve uncover & close holes in the cylinder, letting the exhaust out & a new charge in, a little like a two-stroke. To do this the sleeve moves both up & down & rotates around the piston. As you can imagine, this is quite complicated when the cylinders are arranged in a circle & there's two rows.
In this photo of a sectioned engine the timing wheels that move the sleeves are in a ring just ahead of the removed cylinder - the sleeves are painted yellow.
Why do all this? As I said, a radial engine tends to control the shape of the aircraft. Taking the valves off the top of each cylinder means the cylinder itself can be bigger with no increase in the overall engine diameter.
The 1920s-30s designed Jupiter would make around 500 bhp, the 1930-40ss Hercules around 1,700. There's also a supercharger built in the middle of that & as I said, designed with pencil & slide rule. No wonder they knighted Roy Fedden the designer.
In the far corner is a cut away front fuselage of a Bristol Beaufighter. I can't imaging this is recent, surely no-one's cutting chunks out of a Beaufighter these days.
We then went for a short tour of the restoration hanger where they are rebuilding a Bristol Bolingbroke (Canadian built Blenheim) & a Bristol Freighter. These were used to fly cars two at a time with their passengers from the south coast to France.
Surely you'd have to suffer
very badly from seasickness to even consider that?
Back in the main area, was this Bristol 173, there was only ever one of it, intended to be a "heliliner" for moving people between cities. None were sold, but it led to the Belvedere which was operated by the RAF.
There is also an example of the finest aircraft known to man.
I used to work in there installing all that stuff.
But onto the main event, The Concorde (G-BOAF) sits in it's own hangar with commendably little stuff around it. The website had promised a video playing on the aircraft side, which sounded disappointing, but in fact was technical stuff about the aircraft, so when talking about the aero-heating around the nose, the nose was coloured yellow, fading to red, fading to blue to demonstrate & every few minutes it stopped so I could take photos.
Analogue. I like analogue, this is the flight engineer's station, looking forward to the pilot's positions.
So, Aerospace Bristol - it's a good thing, there's lots of toys to learn how stuff works & it's well laid out.
