Originally Posted by
First_Principal
... it seems I had (miss) remembered the number as 365, one for each day of the year but, having just checked out
here, it appears to be 328. While unverified I do have the service bulletins etc stacked away somewhere and could check, but that seems like rather too much work - although not as much as inserting and tightening every one of these, even after all these years I still well remember the arm ache from working overhead on that particular job!
Some engineering tasks indeed just go on seemingly for ever !
I recall a BOAC station engineer from the 1950s writing that the Stratocruiser required all the sparking plugs to be changed on the engines every 100 hours. The R-4360 had 28 cylinders, there were four engines, and each cylinder had two sparking plugs. 224 overall to be changed. Heathrow dispatched it with insufficient hours to get back, so they had to be changed downroute, all done on paid overtime, just one station engineer. And it happened again and again. Set spark gap precisely, torque to right value, etc, etc, on to the next one. He wrote it allowed him to put down a significant deposit on a house when he returned to the UK. But meanwhile, what a muscle-tearing task to perform.