Engineering news
A project to restore a Hawker Typhoon aircraft from World War Two is using 3D laser scanning and additive manufacturing machinery to reproduce obsolete parts.
Only 3,317 of the Typhoon single-seater fighter-bombers were ever made by the Gloster Aircraft Company. Today, few still exist and none are flying.
A corroded Typhoon cockpit structure was obtained in 1996 from a scrapyard in Chippenham, Wiltshire. Work to rebuild the aircraft has been progressing since 2012 at the Jet Age Museum in Gloucester, with half of the rebuild using new parts.
But the replacement of a set of brackets which attach the cockpit to the first main frame of the fuselage proved problematic for the museum’s workshop. Ian Mowat, engineering manager at the museum, said: “We couldn’t produce them and there are no surviving drawings – there are very few surviving at all for the Typhoon. So we obtained similar brackets and approached Renishaw for help.”
Engineers from local firm Renishaw were able to scan and then model the brackets in Siemens NX 7.5 CAD software. The company’s engineers then conducted parametric and direct surface modelling to produce exact digital replicas of the parts.
After prototyping in plastic polycarbonate, the final parts were produced using a Renishaw AM250 additive manufacturing machine. Like the original brackets, they were recreated in an aluminium alloy. The parts were finished by bead blasting and hand finishing.
Joshua Whitmore, development technician at Renishaw, said: “The design flexibility of additive manufacturing allowed us to create and produce the cockpit brackets quickly and efficiently. It was inspiring to see the latest technology being used to recreate a part of history.”
Trevor Davies, sponsor coordinator at the museum, said: “We would not have been able to reproduce these brackets without additive manufacturing – the parts are too unconventional, a little bit like the Typhoon itself.”