Ride in a Sea Fury...?!
 

You can now... From £2550...

Well it's cheaper than a Spitfire. Just...

This one has an R2800 and a Grumman Guardian prop - sadly from the purist point of view - but it sounds brilliant and doesn't half go; and I suspect the R2800 is less troublesome than a Centaurus...

There's a hell of a lot of cogs in a Centaurus, and double the usual number of bits of metal sliding against each other. Troublesome might be an understatement... It's like Bristol asked themselves, "How can we make it more complicated? How can we make it harder to fix?" and gave out bonuses to anyone who came up with answers. Lovely engine though. A mighty power plant in comparison to that tinny little Merlin lawnmower engine :}

I don't care what kind of engine it has - I would love a ride in one - preferably a twin-stick one. I'm lucky enough to have had a ride in a Spitfire and a Mustang. While the Mustang ride was exhilarating - "Do you want to go for a buzz around the harbour?", it doesn't compare with actually poling a Spitfire around for a few minutes!

In the museum in Calgary, they have a cut-away Centaurus cylinder which is hooked up to a geared electric motor, so that you can watch the sleeve valve in action. I hadn't realized that the sleeve rotates in the cylinder as well as reciprocating! It hurts my head to imagine all that going on at a few thousand RPM!

There's a cutaway Napier Sabre at Duxford which would give you a heart attack!

Quite right "fareastdriver". I've looked at it many times and wondered how on earth they used to maintain them "in the field" in WW2.

Napier were apparently not shy of adding extra bits - not an aero engine but this one seemed to work very well. The superchargers (pumps) are essential to its operation.
9 and 18 cylinder versions were produced. 3 banks and 6 banks respectively. Assembly and maintenance looks like fun!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._Animation.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3bj47TAYiU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic

Ah, the Deltic (sigh). Not a paradigm of reliability in BR days but nothing on earth sounded like it. Utterly gorgeous. Wonder whether the ones in 'Dark' class minesweepers sounded the same?

Or even the pair they put in a captured E-Boat test bed!

The Napier Sabre had nothing to do with the Deltic. It was a twenty-four cylinder horizontally opposed jobbo.


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....379e00a5aa.jpg

On the subject of Napier engines, when I was at London Queen Mary College in the early 1970s we had a Napier Nomad E145 compound turbo-diesel aero engine on the ground floor of the Aero Eng department. A very complex beast - and HUGE!

And was intended to be used in the Shackleton BEagle, reengined.Mk.1 and proposed Mk. 4 & 5, the 5 being a reengined Mk. 2.

There are four Napier Sabre airworthy restorations underway, two Typhoons from parts collections in the UK and Canada, and two Tempest Vs, one by Kermit Weekes in Florida (much of the work has been done by PPS at Booker) and one by Richard Grace at Sywell - if anyone can get one in the air Richard can! The UK Typhoon will incorporate a Tempest II fuselage.

Back in the 1950s, the RAF used to have a few 'naughty boy' postings. Not as bad as OC GD Flt Machrihanish, but one of them was target towing at Sylt...

...flying the RAF's last Tempest Vs - from a popular German tourist resort island. That must have been pure hell!

Cheers Bagheera S!

Looks like it's from Doug Arnold's Indian cache and the rear fuselage will be attached to a Typhoon cockpit section. Hope all of these efforts attain fruition, also the various Tempest II projects around the planet - sure I saw a pic of one of them looking almost complete in a hangar at Tollerton some years ago?