JohnnoK

Or, the spreader plates as Stephen says, and an anchor point on the outer one for a shackle. Then some cribbing to stand off from the cross member at the chassis rails point and an I beam across the cribbing onto a come-along attached to the shackle and pull it straight. In hindsight, a BFH would be quicker....

Blimey! At night, too, that's impressive. All my flying has been civvy, I was a Pongo in my military days, and served an apprenticeship into aviation. I was rear crew hoist operator and loadie in the S61s doing ship resupply, salvage and general cargo work like planting aircon towers on buildings etc for a few hundred hours before the change to oil and gas and that was some great work. Putting a genset the size of a small car on the bridge wing of a bulker to try and restore power and then pumps, shoring timbers, welding bottles, salvage guys etc over the next day or so really sharpened the focus. I once winched a guy into the sea alongside a yacht that was floundering so he could swim over and (try to) climb onboard to attempt to sail it into Cape Town after the owners abandoned her....that was scary. I've been waist deep in the Atlantic 200 miles due south of Cape Agulhas as the "dope on the rope" for a medevac before making it onboard in 7 to 10 meter seas. That water was COLD!!!

High precision tape measure...

The Chinooks had a very bad crash off Sumbugh which killed 45 people and put paid to the Chinook flying offshore. The forward transmission had a catastrophic failure and the 2 rotor systems came out of synch and the blades hit each other, dropping the machine in the sea. Those machines are still flying for Columbia Helicopters mostly doing fire work in various parts of the world. A mate of mine hit a Cormorant with a Bell Jet Ranger and it came in the lower chin bubble window and splattered itself on the tail rotor pedals before depositing itself all over the interior. Gave him a massive bruise on his feet from the impact, too. Wasn't fun cleaning that out....

There were 2 suppliers of the planetary gear system that failed and all the failures were traced to the one supplier. There was an emergency airworthiness directive to remove the parts and swap out the planetary gearbox section with the identified parts in it. We had a 225 parked up in Yangon that had the bad parts in it and once the replacement parts were fitted, we flew it to Singapore for storage and then it went back to the Head Orifice in France and is now a test and development machine for Airbus on a military project. We landed a contract in Namibia for 2 225s and had to lease one in from Bond in Australia and the other was a machine we had in a heavy maintenance check that were sent down to Luderitz. I've been doing maintenance on choppers since 1990, started on the S61 as my first type rating, then Bell 206 Series and the S76 Series. Got the Bell 212 after my time with Bristow in Nigeria and added the 412 a few years ago. I've recently done the AW139 course and am getting my paperwork together to add the rating to my license now. I've been mostly in West Africa...Angola, Nigeria, Gabon, Ivory Coast, and Namibia & Mozambique on the southern end, but had 2 stints in South America, Brazil for 18 moths and Venezuela for 2 years, plus a year in Thailand and 4 years in Myanmar. I'm in Gabon now after 2 years in PNG. Fun times!!!😀

The old Bell was likely a 212, lovely old machines, but they were sloooow. I had an S76 slice and dice a Cattle Egret on the apron outside the hangar in Port Harcourt, 2 come back at different times with birds wedged into the barrier filters and one with an electrical short that cooked the paint off the horizontal stabiliser. More than a few chip lights over the years, one or two of which required a boat trip and that damnable Billy Pugh object of terror to get on board the platform to fix the fault. The 225s are fixed now, but strangely, they never stopped flying them in Brazil and never had any issues with them, plus, all the ex oil and gas machines are flying in SAR, fire fighting, heavy utility work all over the world and without incident since the problem was addressed. Sikorsky is struggling with their supply chain and there are over 30 S92s grounded for main transmission overhauls and many others being cannibalised for spares to keep the fleet in the air until Lockheed wakes up to the fact that Sikorsky also does civilian machines apart from the military stuff they wanted to get their hands on when they bought Sikorsky. All in all, my 34 years fixing choppers has been interesting and thoroughly enjoyable, I've learned 3 new languages and seen parts of the world I'd maybe only have seen on TV.

Ask someone who does to show you, it is some of the most remarkable out the box thinking I've seen.

It certainly ticks a lot of the "Fugly" boxes.

How will the system know it's not a regular 4X4? All the 6WD is is an extra diff connected to the normal one.

Try this for an idea......😬 https://www.facebook.com/share/r/xrmd8kNvoCMg2ju9/?mibextid=oFDknk Disclaimer, don't hold me responsible for other people's silliness....😂

They'd hardly admit he was soused, though.... I spent a while in Mozambique on contract to supply helicopters to the UN operation there and had the misfortune of flying from Maputo to Beira in an Antonov 24 with around a dozen fellow unfortunates. It has seats down the sides of the plane and the cargo is placed on the floor at your feet. No seatbelts, because it is an ex-military machine and no net over the cargo, which caused the UN aviation guy to blow a fuse at that so they fitted belts and supplied a net. The seatbelts were a random collection of stuff scavenged from the various aircraft scattered around the airfield in different stages of disrepair/dismantling, but each seat had a belt, some even had a pair of belts, and the lucky few had a matching belt that actually clipped together, but they had belts.... the cargo net was ceremoniously thrown over the cargo and not tied down. The pre-take off briefing was to the point... "You sit, put seatbelt. Don't get up, and if we crash, you do this" with the pilot simulating the brace position and getting in the cockpit, but I digress.... We load up around 6am and trundle off to the end of the runway where the pilot lines up and winds the donks up to full chat and holds them for a few minutes to let the blades creep and give maximum power before we set sail into the yonder. As the pilot rotates, the door to the cockpit swings open and we are left with the view of a bottle being handed to and fro between the pilots as we climb out en route to Beira....😬🥴 That same company elected to do a short take off with an Antonov 32, the over-engined brother of the An-24 and did a taxi-way take off from Maputo, just as they got airborne and tucked the landing gear and flaps, up the tailwind caught up with them and they plonked back onto the runway and skidded off into the grass, closing Maputo International for the rest of the day while the UN got a big forklift to lift one wing at a time to drop the gear so they could drag it off to the boneyard with the rest of the Russian gear. Russians and planes are not necessarily a good mix....

It was all very thoroughly cleaned this time around. I watched him assemble it, quite a procedure. I have it home again and will hopefully get a moment to start getting it back in this weekend, certainly on Monday if the weather holds. Right now, it's warnings of high winds and probable rain.

Lovely stuff, congrats to the AOG team!

It happens embarrassingly often, to be honest. I still maintain the driver of that particular prang had been at the deicing fluid, though. Ordinarily, you'd have a ding in a situation like that, but to be so solidly wedged in took some determination.

OK, update... Stripped the box yesterday and the 5th/reverse pair had picked up badly at some point with a nice pair of grooves in the one gear and a few healthy deposits of metal on the other. Fortunately I have the parts from my original box that ran the input bearing to replace those parts. 2nd gear synchros are showing signs of wear after 16000 kms so new ones going in there, this is thanks to a bit of swarf in the hub mechanism that was making sticktion and resulted in the synchro wearing from having to shove the gear to engage. All the bearings and the other synchros look good, so it's getting a good clean and going back together today for the Haynes "assembly is the reverse of disassembly" re-installation mission.

Good luck with that exemption. You may need to "add" a few other bits to the order to smooth things over..... Know what I mean, know what I mean?....😁

Some shed you've got....😀

The 380 is not going to be easy though with the composite skins they use. Is the plan to fix it on site or do a temporary repair and no-pax ferry it to home base?

So, the diff is definitely NOT locked, much to my disgust, 'cos now it's time to drop the whole shebang out and go off to open it all up for a shufti inside. Borrox!

Welding is a stressful procedure from a structural point of view because aluminium doesn't like concentrated heat, and requires some specialised gear. Rivets are better from a structural point of view as rivets are structurally stronger than welds. Inspecting of skins and structures is generally simpler for riveted construction as is is normally just a visual check without eddy current/ultrasonic or dye penetrant required. Mass production is also a lot simpler with rivets, particularly with the rib and stringer construction of most planes. There is a shift towards composites these days, but they often pose some major headaches for the maintenance crews due to the specialised requirements for repairing the parts. If carbon fiber is used for example, then you need titanium rivets and they are a bugger to work even before the issues of corrosion come into the picture from electrolysis between carbon/titanium/aluminium/stainless at junctions of parts. The standard "bible" for non EASA aircraft is probably AC43.13-2B which lays out the standard practices for basic procedures that don't require a specific Repair Scheme from the manufacturer. Stuff that is more complex is sent to the manufacturer for their exact requirements which will come in the form of a document with detailed drawings showing rivet specs/placing and material requirements for skins and adhesives etc etc.

I'm an aircraft mechanic and if you presented that to me as a completed job I'd make you eat it, piece by piece with no sauce. Here's a decent repair patch in progress.

That's well knackered.

I didn't get to checking the difflock yesterday, it was 33 degrees outside, so I cuffed over it. Today's slated to be around 24, so I'm going to crack on with it. As an aside, if the difflock is on, how will that suddenly cause the shifts to go to the dogs? I can understand it messing with the transfer case, but why the R380's shifting? Oil is Castrol BOT 402 SAE75W/85 fully synthetic manual trans fluid. It's all I've ever used and the oil recommended by the guy who rebuilt the box for me.

Thank you, I'll do that this morning. I've got to open the hole in the tunnel to disconnect the gubbins and that will be a good time to check.

I think all the Discoveries got the same harness with plugs connected to stuff as per the specification of the vehicle, so finding unused connectors is not unusual, however confusing it may be.