Early anxiety

It takes a special type of thinking to put your hand up in front of a group of people you don't know and state in no uncertain terms that you can build a museum display grade replica of a 100 year old engine. After the initial, "he didn't just say that... did he?!' shock, the excitment took over and my mind went drifting in to all the details of the project, after several suggestions of a suitable method of making the replica, the reality of the task crept back in again. Making an engine isn't a daily event for many people and theres a good reason why, still worse things happen at sea...

Its a bit of cheat really that the engine will only be a statis model, so all we have to do is make an accruate visual interpretation.... thats all, just make it look like an engine. Another bit of good fortune, or not depending how you look at it, is that the engine is the only known surviving piece of that originial aircraft the Cody Flier 1a, so we can actually measure and compare against the engine in the Scienec Museum in South Kensington, London. The bad side of that is that any inaccuracies can be picked out, but hey the point is to make something to be proud of, so i'm aiming for accuracy anyway.

The first time that i went to see the engine, my initial reaction was one of relief. Although it looks very complicated, when you start to break it down into its individual components its actually a collection of simple shapes. When you think about it, the anxiety i was having about building the replica, Antoinette would have had 100 years ago building the original. When i started to break the components down to design my own parts it become obvious that alot of the measurements used were more out of convenience than any science. The length of a curve on a component was decided by its intersection with another piece, rather the need of it being a certain length.

When we started batting about construction methods, the most obvious one was wood, easy to use, no specialst tooling needed to create a good surface finish, but one nagging thought bothered me about the idea of a wooden engine, authenticity. I wanted the engine to look like the real engine, having done quite a bit of wood work previously i know how hard it can be to get 'that' finish. Sure you can spray it in 'Aluminium' coloured spray bought off the shelf of your local hardware store, but this project is going to be unveilled before the worlds avaiation press, i didn't want to be the guy that brought the duff triffle to the dinner party.

The most obvious method to recreate the engine faithfully was to cast the engine bits, this brought newer, deeper anxieties. The only thing i knew about casting was that it was possible, people had done it, so therefore it had to be able to be replicated its not like i was reinventing physics. So several hours of internet research, "homage to the Google", i had discovered it was alot easier than i had thought it might be. When i doscovered the flowerpot furnace and no thats not a type error, i realised it was very possible.