Fascinating James! Thank you so much for remembering the article and looking that up.
One could possibly substitute a similar material accounting for strength differences (titanium spar caps anyone?). You could either find the mechanical property specifications for the old material or do some mechanical properties testing to characterize them from a small piece of the original material. THE UK CAA seems to be more of a stickler for using original materials compared to the US FAA and their Designated Engineering Representative (DER) process.
Assemblies made like this tend to suffer from dissimilar metals corrosion due to their different galvanic properties. The farther apart you are on the galvanic scale the more your assembly acts like a battery, especially in the presence of moisture (the electrolyte).
JDK wrote:
G'Day bdk - long time no speak! I remembered some stuff in the late Graham Warner's books, that answer your question, so I thought I'd take a look. Though he doesn't quote the tech numbers for the material, I decided to post the full pages here as it tells a great story of the restorations challenges many know, but we should never forget.
While there's nothing significantly different as a design in the Blenheim's wing spars, it's important to remember MOST non-US types of restorations will be dealing with airworthy rebuilds of one, two or less than five of a type, from often few or no airworthy part donor survivors. RELATIVELY speaking, US types are well provided for in spares and survivors, particularly those common-as-muck NAA types.
https://vintageaerowriter.wordpress.com ... par-steel/Also bonus young John Romain image...
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