Nutty,
Sorry for the delay in responding. The repairs that we carried out at Abingdnon when I was the gang boss entailed work on the mainplanes only. I became aware of the fact that 474 had the Lincoln undercarriage as we had to remove it to carry out the planned work. Not sure if I made it clear before but that repair basically replaced everything of the mainplanes, less the Main and rear spars, which were suitably blended and cleared for many more years of flight. I also recall that there was discussion, when we had the mighty beast down to bare spars, whether to replace the outer spars with some "in store" Shackleton spars, which would have significantly increased the aircrafts in service fatigue life. This was not done on "my" repair. It might be of interest that as we stripped the original material from the wings we found two, very interesting items. A pristine 2BA/4BA spanner left on the rear spar and a Threepenny bit, also in good nick inside the Right wingtip. I'm not sure where they disappeared to, but they would have been left in the original wings as the areas that we found them in were full closure sections. I believe that the refurbishment of the aft fuselage and tailplane was done after my time, and may well have been done at somewhere like Marshalls of Cambridge, I'm not sure. And I was not aware that the rudders were Lincoln as well as the Undercarriage. I wonder if it really matters ? I have an ex C130 GE mate who has two steel hips, and various other plastic bits, he is still my mate (if you see what I mean).
Smudge
