Aloha everyone --
All the best intentions here in Hawaii to get back rolling with my Radial. Just having to knock a little Reality back into line.
Lantain82, whoever you are, that's a magnificent piece of work. Brian's a lucky lad to have you as a neighbor. I've marveled at those Bentleys for a while, trying to imagine just what they must sound like...also trying to picture what must be going on with all those gases flowing around inside, with all that centrifugal force going on. Don't they mind at all?
Brian, thanks so much for the step-by-step of the pipe-bending. As you may recall I got one of those bending machine kits from Hemingway, but it's still in the box, and will be until it's bending-time.
As things are I'm happy enough now with the bottom-end assembly to move on to the Cylinder Heads. Of course I hadn't ordered enough material to follow Brian's sensible example and make a sacrificial head, just to get the hang of things, so of course I trashed one immediately (by over-turning the combustion chamber) so now I'm waiting for a re-supply of 2" 7075. In the meanwhile I've been fabricating the head-milling fixture so successfully developed by the original LAD (founder of this thread):
It's made per The LAD, just 1/4" aluminium plate screwed to a small angle fixture, with a nub turned on its face the same diameter as the recess cut into the bottom of the heads and some tapped holes to correspond to the head/cylinder screws. So of course now I'm really excited about getting all those fancy angles cut on the head blanks using this device, but I shan't start that part of it till my new supplies arrive, and I can get a couple more blanks cut. That's maybe the biggest drawback of living out here, where shipping doubles the price of stock, and quadruples the time it takes to get ahold of. Not that I'm complaining mark you -- I've been painfully aware of the extremes endured lately by HMEM correspondents in, say, chilly Ontario and warmish New South Wales. Honolulu may be a scruffy sort of place (road maintenance is as yet an undiscovered art, for example) but we're not too often inconvenienced by weather.
Brian, whatever became of that radial-powered plane that landed in your 'hood?
Happy chipping, everyone.