I've read that a good coat of wax on the
PR Spitfire's duck-egg blue cellulose finish could add up to 20 mph on top speed, by improving the boundary layer flow. It reminds me of the quest to improve production in which the engineers stuck split peas over the countersunk flush rivets on the upper wing, gradually removing them from the rear. They found that the rear two-thirds of the wing could be built with ordinary dome-heads, leaving the time-consuming countersinks for the critical front aerofoil ahead of the mainspar. This enabled significant savings in production time.
Fellow vintage Pruners will remember Seccotine, the evil-smelling brown glue in a tube. It was based on animal hoof/bone and would give today's Health Police the vapours. Seccotine being all they had, it was used to stick the peas on the Spitfire wing. Fortunately it was dry as Seccotine wasn't waterproof. Ah, the gems we find on this thread ...
Danny, the landcrabs were all over Khormaksar and normal wingspan was about 3ins claw to claw. However, we prized the big ones for racing and Abdul was about twice normal size. And I plead not guilty, mine was called Ahmed and was safe in his stable under my bed when the Church Parade outrage took place. My father threw him out shortly afterwards but to the day we left we hadn't a cockroach about the house, which still stands with the rest of the Patch. I like to think of today's residents still cockroach free courtesy of Ahmed's fearsome descendants, cockroach crunchers every one.
Some of the airmen kept racing stables as well, remember they were only a few years older than us, and Dad said some had even less wit if that was possible. Technically, Graham's crab was forbidden as his family was Jewish and crabs were unclean but he arrived home several times to catch his mother talking to Abdul, who seemed to like humankind ... the heat did strange things to people in Khormaksar.