621 VGS Historic Flight
Historic Flight Fleet

Historic Flight News

Posted on: April 22nd, 2014 by admin

After two consecutive Fridays, we had the luxury of the airfield for Good Friday and Easter Saturday and managed 60 launches over those two days.

Welcome to the syndicate to Luke, Toby, Andy, Ian and Paul. We’ve had many people converting to new types, there are some excellent pictures on the 621 Historic Flight Facebook page, including this one:

Al and Rebeka in Mk3

Posted on: March 29th, 2014 by nimbus

A small group braved the heavy showers yesterday and our new season has started. Fortunately the not forecast 180 wind allowed rapid retrieves to the hanger to protect the Sedbergh from torrential downpours. Everybody had a couple of flights and all agree the Sedbergh is flying beautifully.

At the pub after it was decided to rest the MKIII this year and put the Swallow, Prefect and Grasshopper on 3rd party insurance. Hopefully throughout the summer Al’s restored Cadet MKII will make an appearance.

We will be flying again next Friday. At present both the Sedberth and Swallow are airworthy.

Posted on: July 15th, 2013 by nimbus

IMG_0446

Posted on: March 20th, 2013 by nimbus

Things are progressing well. With input from Geofff, Vicky and myself the fuselage is almost completely covered in fabric and has its first coat of dope.

 

Dave masked up the remaining wing to do the roundels top and bottom. This is where you get some idea of the hours involved, with extensive masking operations required to achieve the 3 colours both roundels took the best part of a days work to complete ! Both wings, however, now complete.

 

 

Posted on: March 1st, 2013 by nimbus

Another successful 2 days this week which has seen the culmination of the fuselage prep. The broken bits discovered have been patched, glued and sanded, finally the cockpit is now ready for paint – this took most of day one to finish. Geoff has worked tirelessly stripping paint from the tail area and the wing mounts.

All the internal steelwork ( control rods etc ) is now at the sandblasters getting prepped for powder coating, Geoff and I have taken the remaining woodwork and aluminium home for stripping prior to paint.

Once the fuselage was covered in thinned adhesive

we were able to start attaching fabric and have now achieved both sides from the cockpit back to the fin.

we are hoping that by spending 2 days again next week we should see the covering finished then it will be over to Dave for spraying. As they say 90% finished 90% to go !

 

 

 

Posted on: February 6th, 2013 by nimbus

After being somewhat stalled, progress on the Sedbergh is once again gathering pace. Many hands definitely make light work and the fuselage exterior is now sanded with the rear section coated in thinned adhesive ready to take the first of the fabric.

 

Geoff, Vicky and I took it in turns to be buried in the cockpit stripping paint, we tried sanding initially but it took the best part of a day to remove a couple of paint layers from one cockpit wall and we need to get back to bare wood. We then progressed on to an Al Stacey supplied paint stripper which is properly nasty stuff but has speeded up the process to about 6″ square cleared every 30 mins !

Unfortunately progress to the front fuselage was hampered as we discovered damage to the wheel box, nose and internal cockpit wall ( caused by squashing the QRF between the pilot and the cockpit). All this damage is being repaired and we are going to have the cockpit sides covered with a layer of glass fibre to hopefully prevent future damage.

I did take a quick snap of one of the wings ( minus aileron ) as it came out of the spray booth to show some idea of things to come !

 

 

 

 

Posted on: June 16th, 2011 by nimbus

Another Grasshopper has found its way into the hangar. WZ798 has been rescued from storage at the Bournemouth Aviation Museum and it has been permanently loaned to the Al Stacey collection. It will be stored for a short time with the Historic Flight whereby it will be assessed if it can be returned to airworthy status.

Posted on: March 3rd, 2011 by nimbus

Significant progress last week, with Vicky, Adam, Nick J, Andy T, Gav and Webby providing the workforce. The wing is almost ready for fabric, it is slow going as we are strengthening the trailing edge ( to prevent the well known Slingsby warping!). There are 4 glueing operations involved with 24hrs drying required between each, it takes a couple of hours just to remove the staples that have been holding the glued surfaces together. The repairs to the holes in the leading edge have been finished, and the remainder of the wing has been sanded, sanded again and more sanding just to make sure!!

This photo shows Andy trimming the supports for the new ply trailing edge, another tricky ( oops – bad pun!) and time consuming job.

And of couse the endless sanding. Lucky to catch Nick in this one, if he wasn’t on tea break then it was the 15min hand cleaning time prior to tea break!

With plenty of manpower we were able to get the fuselage outside and start stripping the fabric and removing everything from the cockpit area.

Posted on: February 21st, 2011 by PhilW

John and myself were at Biscester on Friday. We moved some of the aircraft Dave has and will be working on around and assisted in rigged a Ventus 2c, very nice aircraft, in order to make space in the workshop for a Sedbergh wing. You don’t appreciate just how large they are when it’s rigged, or since Vicky and Oli stripped the wing last week, just how little the individual wooden components are that construct it.

Once the heavy “manly” work was complete – we moved on to making some see-through patches for the manufacturers date labels are on each of the wings, tail, rudder etc. Sewing the section of see through plastic to a piece of Ceconite fabric was only made less “girlie” by having to drill holes into the plastic! We made two, which we then fixed to the rudder and tailplane.

After lunch Dave handed us a stanley knife and pointed at the three cracks in the leading edge. After a detailed explaination of the repair process, handed John a power tool (always a risk) and left us two it. It felt wrong to start with, slicing at the leading edge, but we cut out the cracked sections of the 3 ply, 1/16th of an inch wood and shaped some timber to put behind in order to fix the new sections to.

Posted on: February 19th, 2011 by admin

Oli Bourton and myself spent a few days at Bicester. We have now re-covered the rudder and the tailplane, although the conversation of the week was as follows: Me-‘Dave, I think I’ve cocked up!’ Dave-‘What have you done now?!?’ I must admit I never thought I’d ever have to iron an aircraft….

At this point oli is high on dope....

At this point oli is high on dope....

One of the wings has now been stripped ready for sanding, and we only found 3 holes in the leading edge!

)

We managed to save some of it 🙂

Naked!

Naked!

Bicester curry nights on Thursdays are good 🙂 Meet in the bar around 7, depart 7.15-7.30 ish. Anyone planning on staying over the bunkroom is available.