Avro Lancaster's weapons

 Now as these engines are Meteors, which is the detuned Merlin, I had a bit of a chat to the boss and after a couple of calls to a mate that owned his own Warbirds Museum, the promise of a donation to Range Control composite mess funds and a couple of cartons, I got the job of lifting the engines and the donkeys as a training exercise.

 Now as you can imagine, this blew out into a he!! of a job, the time requirement was tight due to a live firing exercise slotted in the next 30 hrs. Now the good book tells us that this job takes so many hours/days.......bugger, fast forward, we had them out in a fraction of the time, but the bloody armourers wanted the new barrel and breechblock to,I managed to scrape them out of there just as the crap started to whiz around.

 Back to the point of the story, my mate Col. Pay had a Spitty amongst his collection, so the bottom ends were good for spares, he had also just slotted a merlin into his mustang, more oomph he reckoned, but the best part about it all, it wasn't too long before one of his crop dusters started to make some very interesting sounds, it looked like that old airframe became a test bed for just about everything, it eventually ended up as a water bomber, it had that much power, and he was running the standard  low compression meteor heads.

 Col's dead now, went the way good pilots go, quick. His son keeps the planes flying, they tear up the sky over the town, you can pick them all just from the sound, just need to remember it may not be a warbird, but still the same merlin sound.  To absent comrades.  

Mostly it was non-supercharged & compression was lowered so you didn't need avgas 115/130 to run 'em on. God help a mechanic who dropped something in the Vee, the ignition HT wiring, top end oil feeds & fuel injection piping in there was a complete rats nest. Smart Merlin tech's had a belt made of string with every tool attached to it by a short length of string only a couple of inchec longer than the arm. If you did drop something you could just fish it back out again.

There used to be a guy in the U.K. who had one in a panel van! It took up most of the internal cargo space & he used it for demos as a warm up at race tracks. I once asked him how fast is was & he said he didn't know because after 110 MPH the aerodynaics of a Ford Transit induced uncontrollable rear end wobble!

 But you never forget the beat of a big radial or a V12 or the harmonising sounds of twins and fours. 

Theres a team comprised of collectors that fly lots of different versions do airshows round here. Noisy as all get out when they do a group takeoff with all the props at max revs & in fine pitch!

 We started at the tail and now we're at the prop, might need to talk about wingtips to have the subject fully covered.