TRX made reference to Neville Shute's 'Trustee from the Toolroom'
http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/shuten-t ... -00-h.htmlin Limykid's build log. It had been 25 or 30 years since I'd read that book so I settled right down to it again last night, until my wife threw me off the computer. I went to my laptop and turned it into a one-night read. Yes, it is an 'old-fashioned' read, but a good one.
Shute was of the same era as other noted UK authors such as Alistair MacLean (Ice Station Zebra or Guns of Navarone) or Hammond Innes (Wreck of the Mary Deare). Shute had his own success having novels adapted to film (On the Beach) but my favourite read is his autobiography, 'Slide Rule.' Shute (actually Neville Shute Norway) was an aeronautical engineer in the UK, first with deHaviland, then Vickers, and finally as a partner in Airspeed, which produced the Airspeed Anson, the most widely used multiengine trainer in the Commonwealth Air Training Program of WWII. He became a full time author after WWII.
With Vickers, Shute (as Norway) was the structural engineer for the R100 dirigible, one of two (the R101 was produced by a competing government effort) built in the UK in the thirties. Those of you who regard FEA as the norm would be fascinated by the R100's structural design philosophy, which was based on a desire for a simplified but reliable design analysis. The R100 employed fewer ring frames than any other dirigible, largely to reduce the structural loads calculation to a 64 by 64 matrix (as I recall). This was solved by a team of calculators (young ladies with Facit calculators) who worked the solution in parallel until they all got the same answer. Then the scantlings would be revised based on the calculated stresses and they'd do it all over again. A different age ...
_________________
Warren
Isuzu Pickup/SR20DE, +401 COLD frame
Build Log:
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=11601