Trying to keep an eye on what projects people are up to is always interesting, is there a new Aerobatic beauty or some cutting edge Horizon technology about to emerge from the Poots Garage? Is Paul going to maiden the pusher propjet he bought at the Nats or do a circuit with the heli!! And will Sean ever finish the twin??
Then Alistair says he’s building a B31. Now that will be different, something scale, a bomber, probably World War II.
Looking to see what a B31 looks like causes some confusion, because it never actually existed, it lost out in a competition to design a long range bomber to the B29 in 1938.
So what was Alistair on about, had he been sniffing some strange agrochemical, had the thin air at the high altitude of Ballynafoy finally got to him?
Then the next message says he can’t make a committee meeting because he has to take the B31 for an MOT!
Yep he’s definitely cracked, could be helicopter exhaust fumes, or spending too long in an inverted hover has fried his brain!
Then he sends the pictures and it all becomes clear. Those of you who know Alistair will know he has another affliction besides Aeromodelling, and that is engineering, particularly vintage things, and I don’t just mean the annual service of the club’s Westwood Mower. Alistair has a great talent for taking what looks like it should have died & gone to the scrapyard in the sky donkeys years ago and bringing it back to life, looking like it came out of the factory yesterday.
It turns out BSA made a motorbike, in this case in 1950, called the B31, which as you can see from the pictures had gotten into a sorry state. In the second picture you can see that Alistair has been doing more than planting Barley & helicopters up theBallynafoy Rd.Apparently the only bit of the re-furb not undertaken by Alistair was the re-spoking of the wheels. It looks like a first class job and I’m glad to say it passed the MOT first time!
