Today three members of the Society; Mike Rouse, Ed Copcutt and David Griffiths had their first experience of dismantling the Featherstone Kite for transportation. There is a planned appearance of the Kite on Blue Peter in April and the machine will need to be taken apart, packed, transported and re-assembled. However, few people have the knowledge how to do this. Today we now have three more.
The process is fairly straightforward and re-assembly took only about ten minutes but then we looked at the purpose-built cases that Emett designed to safely transport the machine when it travelled the world. There are three cases for the kite. Each has a series of purpose made brackets and clamps designed to take the parts of the machine and each has a profile of the relevant part painted over it so there can be no mistake. Even the order that the parts should be inserted into the cases is painted on the doors. As with the Nottingham Clock, he left nothing to chance.
What became apparent is that our stripping down didn't go far enough to allow all three cases to be used. The Kite breaks down into much smaller components, obviously designed to give it the best chance of surviving the rigours of handling at airports and sea terminals. For transport within the UK the parts can probably be left in bigger assemblies so long as care is exercised in handling them.
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