Nothing is ever as easy as it first appears......

That was my working life mantra for a long time.  I should have remembered it this time round.....

I thought it would be an interesting idea to fit the Nieuport with Le Prieur rockets (dummies to start with but who knows what we might come up with in future!).  Bearing in mind the need for as little weight as possible I thought I would merely screw the required tubes to the interplane struts.  This was not met with approval! The revised suggestion was that we have a piece of aluminium strip anchored to the top and bottom screws of each of the 'V'-shaped interplane struts which hold them in place and then weld the tubes to these strips.  OK, that sounds fine, but how do you do that when the strips are not fitted on the struts?  After all, there is a distinct possibility that the struts would catch fire if they were fitted.  And the strips have to be held in a certain position to get the angle of the tubes right.

An idea!  Make up a jig which will hold the tops and bottoms of the strips in the right places and angles to match up with the strut bolt holes.  To do that I firstly managed to dismantle a large cardboard box and pressed it firmly on the ends of the bolts; that gets the relative positions of the bolt holes in their correct places. I then made up two jigs, one for the bottom pair of holes and one for the top.  All seems to be OK so I hand the job over to another new 'volunteer' (Ryan Southern) to do the actual welding. Having completed the first set (just as well!), I returned to trial fit the completed arrangement, only to find that the holes don't line up! Various words were vocalised 'sotto voce': consultations are needed.

How this happened is now unknown so the proposed solution is to fill in 3 of those predrilled holes in the strips (the fourth one being the 'anchor') and then drill new holes in the correct places.  This I have yet to do, the first matter being how to determine where the new holes need to be drilled.  Clamps and a punch come to mind.  Watch this space!

Meantime we await the painting of the wings, wheels, ailerons and part of the cowling.  Once the wheels have been done we can refit them and wheel it round to the other hangar to repossess our engine which has been on loan to Graham for at least a year and which he has nicely run in for us! So the hope now is that we can get the machine readied for at least a static display at the upcoming Classic Fighters Air Show at Easter. Whilst it would be nice to think that it had flown by then I think that the title of this piece says it all....