Originally Posted by
Krystal n chips
Succinctly put....and accurate as was the post that preceded yours.
A stand was as much a hindrance as a help to be frank. The Spey was designed by Rolls with the blissful illusion all maintenance would be carried out in a warm well lit bay in Derby. I know a few people who were involved with the development and testing of the heap of junk, one in particular with the above mentioned unit, and as he diplomatically concedes, RR couldn't be entirely to blame for supplier's design, ahem, "concept ".
Going off on a slight tangent here:
on the RB199, the Dry FCU was a nightmare to change on an Engine installed in the Left Hand Slot. A pipe had to come off that was impossible to get to at the forward end , as the fire wall was in the way, so we just used to "bend it slightly" out of the way. Did that for about ten years on Tornado Sqns.
Fast Forward to my last tour in the the RAF at the RAF Marham Engine Bay: A team from RR arrived to have a look at some ongoing engine faults and one of the issues they were looking into was the fairly frequent cracking of the aforementioned pipe. They had a look on the Engine I was working on and made some comments about easy access (hardly surprising with it on the maintenance stand). So my diplomatic self asked them if they'd ever seen one of these installed in a Tonka and then see how "Easy" it was to access ??
Turns out none of them ever had ! so they were dispatched over the road to ASF to have a look.