It has been quite an exciting for the Parnall Aircraft Company this week, with the arrival of new workshop equipment and the inaugural christening of our new crew room.
A great one for us engineers is the arrival of a lovely little 1950s Myford ML7 lathe. This has been provided by Simon from the Panther Project, through his uncle, and will be used to machine components such as spacers and bushes for both the Spitfire and Panther aircraft projects. This will help to save lots of time and money that we have previously spent contracting out these tasks to local machine shops. It really is a cracking little lathe that has had all of us drooling over and keen to get our hands on it!
Moving to more modern equipment, the second arrival is our new Clarke air compressor which will provide compressed air to both the wing shed and the Panther shed. It has been positioned outside of the wing shed in its own dedicated unit again, sourced by Simon. As soon as this is electrically connected, we will be seeing some big leaps forward in the construction of the wings.
Whilst on the subject of the wings, Chris and Murphy have been carrying on fabricating components, with Murphy finishing off this spar spacer channels and Chris forming the upper and lower leading edge spar angles. These angles serve to help in locating the nose ribs and also provide a frame for the leading edge skins to attach to.
Over on the fuselage, Laurent has continued to fabricate skin panels. He has been busy drilling holes in the intercostals for these skin panels to rivet to and meanwhile Lawrence has been finishing the radio mounting structure that sits immediately behind the cockpit.