Re: Curious Engineering

Drop tanks to increase the operational range of aircraft have been around for decades. Once empty, or if the pilot needed to get out of trouble at the hurry up, the tanks would be ditched.

When drop tanks were first fitted to the English Electric Lightning interceptor, a strange phenomenon occurred. Instead of falling away when released, the tanks stayed alongside and eventually bashed into the fuselage due to some peculiarity of the aircraft aerodynamics.

To get round this, the drop tanks were subsequently fitted to the top of the wings where the slipstream would whip them away from the 'plane when released.

I think this is the later BAC Lightning variant with the bigger belly tank, but the over-wing tanks can clearly be seen.

Re: Curious Engineering

Some lovely example so far. Thanks. Keep 'em coming

Re: Curious Engineering

Having been on Qwerty keyboards since the 1980s and trained to touch-type I was interested to find out more about this. It was necessity that first meant I had to learn the Qwerty keyboard. My trade of printing and publishing took up the new technology so it was retrain or out of work, a stark choice so I retrained and have not stopped learning in some way ever since. A website I found has some interesting information about the Qwerty keyboard:

"There's an old legend about the QWERTY keyboard, dating back to at least 1977: It "probably would have been chosen if the objective was to find the least efficient...character arrangement.

In fact, the layout was designed to help people type faster."

https://www.cnet.com/news/a-brief-hi...erty-keyboard/


There's also more information on this website if anyone is interested:

https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question458.htm

Re: Curious Engineering

There's one of those in Manchester, where a slip lane seems to have been put in the wrong direction. https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/...8383093209.jpg

Re: Curious Engineering

During an upgrade of the Tornado Fighter/Bomber (my all time favourite aircraft) a new improved Radar was fitted into the ray-dome (the black pointy bit at the front that could be swung open on hinges).

This radar was lighter in weight than the previous version. Now you might think this was a good thing, but it upset the balance of the aircraft in flight, especially at supersonic speeds. To counter this, a lead block was fitted inside the ray-dome to ensure the aircraft trim stayed as it had done before.

Re: Curious Engineering

UMIST had a swimming pool built on it's roof, but they hadn't taken into account the weight of the water so it never got filled

https://umistcampus.wordpress.com/20...sunny-weekend/

Re: Curious Engineering

At least they didn't find out the hard way that water might weigh heavy on the minds of students below.

Re: Curious Engineering

There is a whole set of four dead-end slip roads on the M4, East of Bristol.
It was somewhere around that location that it was supposed to be the junction with the M5.
The latter was originally supposed to pass east and south of Bristol instead of its now north and west position. This was (allegedly) because a very wealthy MP realised it would pass near or perhaps through his private land, so lobbied hard to get it moved.

The original route made much more sense because it would have run past Bristol International Airport making transport links much better.

The Tiverton Canal has huge loop due to a similar reason. Once digging started, one of the local landowners realised how close to his house the canal traffic would be, he pulled the plug on his original agreement for it to run across his land, and insisted it go round the outermost edge of his property.

Re: Curious Engineering

I just like the irony that this was on the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology