de Havilland memories of Mikael Radford

The last 50 years

After apprenticeship completion I worked in the DO at Hatfield, latterly on the 125, until 1963 when I left to seek my fortune elsewhere. Needless to say I did not find a fortune, but looking back some of the work was very interesting even if it was a bit specialised.

I joined a small company then called Cementation Muffelite, a specialist company within the Cementation group of companies. This was intended to be “for a short while” and then the plan was to move on. I ended up staying with the company and its successor Barry Controls Ltd until my retirement in 2001 !

The specialisation of Muffelite was the control of shock and vibration in all applications, civil engineering, vehicles, marine and aircraft. They initially manufactured a range of vibration and shock isolators under licence from Barry Controls in the U.S. and marketed as Barrymounts. This may be a familiar name to some folks who have been involved with the details of installing equipment in dynamically hostile environments. I concentrated on aircraft applications for most of the time, working on TSR2, Harrier, Tornado and many others, but also became involved with marine and transport work. I became responsible for all of the engineering, including design and development of new products, and environmental testing carried out at the factory, which was situated near Walton. on Thames in Surrey.

My main involvement of note was the design of the main equipment rack in the rear fuselage of some versions of the Harrier. This was an integrated two tier shelf structure situated in the rear fuselage just aft of the rear jet nozzles and carried about 16 “Black Boxes” on two levels, the boxes being accessed through a door on each side of the rear fuselage. This concept provided a compact and efficient method of installing and protecting many pieces of equipment in a small space. The rack was attached to the front and rear bulkheads of the bay via integrated custom designed spring mounts and carried all of the important electronics, protecting them from the effects of the intense vibration environment in that area, providing an integrated air cooling function for each box according to it’s needs, and all electrical connections for the boxes via internal wiring fed from below the rack. The name Cementation caused a bit of a scene when Sir Sidney Camm saw the name on the rack and realised that Cementation were digging the road up outside the factory, however it was smoothed over during an urgently convened meeting. John Fozard, who at that time was Designer in Charge went into writing to state that without our rack the electronics of that time would not have survived the Harrier dynamic environment. My involvement with Harrier started in 1966, progressed through the development and testing of many iterations for different equipment fits, and finished at my retirement in 2001, which just shows how long some projects last.

The most sobering aspect which I have experienced since retirement is seeing my modest efforts in aircraft applications preserved in various museums! It makes one feel even older.