Avro Vulcan XM655 Official Site, Loxley Lane, Wellesbourne (2026)

19/07/2025

Saturday 19th July 2025

Well that was a surprise! After all this dry weather reinforced by a hose pipe ban in my area the last thing I expected today was persistent rain, but rain it did, and apart from the temperature it was beginning to feel like a Winter weekend. By lunchtime I thought I was going to return home without achieving anything but the weather steadily improved after lunch and we made some reasonable progress with things.

There were no planned visits today...thank goodness, and with RIAT in full swing at Fairford we had lost most of our volunteers who were keen to see aircraft in the sky, I just hope they did.

As we came to terms with the situation people steadily formed into groups and managed to either work under cover of the aircraft or inside. We have been steadily tidying up our stock of seals, O rings and all things considered consumable and one volunteer had uncovered a stock of igniter plugs. We had attempted to test them a few weeks back but were surprised that they were a slightly larger diameter than our fitted igniters. Our test rig was modified to accept these new larger igniters and I am pleased to report that they all worked. So our spares holdings have increased by 5.

On the aircraft we inspected the engine fuel filters a couple of weeks back and were surprised by the poor state of them. Today the investigation of the fuel system continued with samples of fuel being taken from our No2 fuel tanks. You’ll see the results in some of this weeks pics as the tanks were first pumped to unusable before a fuel pipe was disconnected to remove any residual fuel. The buckets are orange in colour ( wonder where we bought those !?) and you will see all the debris in the bottom. One of the fuel drains was also dismantled as there was no fuel flowing from it. Needless to say that was blocked so this is proving an extremely worthwhile exercise so far.

The fuel system was reassembled before close of play and fuel pumped around the fuel tanks to balance the load.

You may recall we tested the electrics on our trailer last week. We resolved some minor issues but we needed a new pair of marker lights which were causing problems to our towing vehicle. These were purchased midweek and fitted then tested this afternoon. I’m pleased to report that all the lights work and the trailer could now be used on the open road once more. I may have some news about that in the coming weeks.

We didn’t quite make up for the lost morning as it was deemed too damp to carry out some repairs to our facilities this afternoon. We have all the parts and and it is Summer after all so as long as we return with our tools next week we hope to pick up the thread next Saturday.

So all in all, despite a wet morning and a shortage of volunteers we had quite a good day really. We seemed to have lots of drop in visitors once the Sun came out and I must thank them for their generous contributions. The summer hols seem to have started now so our visitors came from far and wide. It was great to meet you all and thanks for coming. We’ll be back next Saturday, hoping for the return of the dry weather, fingers crossed!

13/07/2025

We’re back for day 2 of the sunny 😎 Wings & Wheels event here at Avro Heritage Museum - back in the best position in between the delicious pizza from Jacob Pizza, the Greater Manchester Police and the cool flight sim experiences from Runway Flight Simulators Ltd
We can’t wait to welcome you, chat to you about XM655 and give you the last chance to grab a Woodford merch deal! 😎

12/07/2025

Saturday 12th July 2025

That was a different sort of a day. Firstly it was hot….and I mean HOT! 🥵☀️☀️ We’re on an airfield for goodness sake, acclimatised to something a bit cooler, windier and often wetter. But I am not going to complain!

Also, we had no planned visits as it was an engineering day.

Finally, we had a definite reduction in our usual band of volunteers. I never saw any leave passes but there’s definitely a trend to enjoy this weather doing other things for once!

Undaunted, we cracked on with our ‘to do’ list which started with a quarterly committee meeting. I think our committee’s priority was to find somewhere with aircon which luckily we can easily provide. I’ll write the minutes tomorrow but I can report that all is well in MaPS and there’s plenty to keep us occupied. The merch team were at Woodford today which explained one absence from the committee meeting. I hear they pitched next to the pizza stall so that’s any hope of profit gone! 🤔😆🍕

Back at Wellesbourne the first job after the meeting was to fix the lighting on our trailer. It all boiled down to a dodgy connection on a brake light and corrosion on a side light. They caused a problem on our test towing vehicle but no lasting damage done so once we receive our replacement side lights we’ll declare the trailer serviceable.

On the aircraft we were left with a hydraulic leak from the filler valve last week. Some of the team removed and stripped the valve today. A quick visual check didn’t reveal any real problem so it was reassembled and refitted followed by oil replenishment. No leaks so far so we’ll cycle the bomb doors next Saturday in order to fully test the system…..I’m confident.

With a hydraulic leak there’s usually a mess and ours was under the stbd landing gear tyres. So the only way to mop it up is jack up the rear wheels on the bogie then the front. Its a great clean up so lets hope it stays that way for a week.

We often say there’s a diverse list of jobs to stay on top of and our buildings also take a hammering from the weather. On that basis we need to fix up a couple of doors and door frames. We measured everything today so next week we’ll get the materials ordered and get on with some woodwork.

So that pretty much sums up today. Needless to say we had quite a few drop in visitors which was surprising on such a hot day and at least one chose the Vulcan over Charlecote House ….good choice! I hope you enjoyed your visit.

In summary a hot and worthwhile day and we’ve sown the seeds for more good work next Saturday. Thanks to our visitors and their donations its your generosity that keeps us going. See you next week!

12/07/2025

Some of our Merch Team have a stall at the Avro Heritage Museum Wings & Wheels Weekend 😎☀️We’re in between Runway Flight Simulators Ltd and Jacob Pizza! Pop along to have a chat, show your support and grab a bargain! 🙌😎

05/07/2025

Saturday 5th July 2025

I returned to Wellesbourne today after a short break so it was a bit of a learning curve trying to get back up to speed. Considering this aircraft doesn’t fly its amazing how much is going on.

Firstly we had a booked visit in the morning from an MG owners group. You can tell when you look at this weeks pics…...you’d think we were at the MG factory there are so many cars parked up in front of the a/c. As always we hope you enjoyed your visit and found it informative.

For my part I had to bring in a piece of test equipment manufactured by one of our volunteers to measure the delays in some of the aircraft timing circuits. Its hard to believe but some of systems require delays of 2 seconds or less which is difficult to measure with a stopwatch. This new tester is triggered by the circuit components which makes it a lot easier to measure. To improve things a bit more the tester received a software upgrade and it worked a treat.

In my absence the team had tested the a/c power generation system a few weeks back and whilst it checked out fine the No1 engine start seemed a bit sluggish. Never ones to sit idly by the team were keen to get to the bottom of things to see if there is a gremlin lurking in the wings. Hence you’ll see our GTC positioned to the rear of the a/c ready to supply air to the starting system following our group visit. You’ll also see one of volunteers crawling up the jetpipe to listen for any leaks from the air start system. We think there's a leak in there somewhere but it won’t be easy to get to without an engine drop so I think they’ll be a bit more investigation yet.

You’ll also see some pics of our team checking the engine fuel filters. I’m not sure what triggered this but you’ll see from the state of the filters (they’re red in the photos) that the check wasn’t before time. One of them looks damaged too so we’re not sure if it was dropped at some point. You’ll also notice a corroded circlip which was successfully removed but I think they’ll be a bit of homework for someone now as they investigate whether anyone still supplies replacements. Luckily we have some spare engines so supplies in the short term won’t be an issue.

The next big job of the day was the investigation into the lack of hydraulic fluid in our EHPP system which operates the brakes and the bomb doors. There are a number of theories kicking around and to assist in the diagnosis we modified a valve attached to the EHPP in order to see how it behaves without its NRV. This entailed draining, then refilling the hydraulic fluid from the a/c. More testing to be carried out next week so I’ll report back then.

Needless to say the a/c was still being painted…….it always is! With this weeks effort focussing on the fin as you’ll see. I think the grey is finished on the Stbd side so just the green left to do . As you will appreciate its a bit more tricky than a wing but our painter just presses on regardless….he enjoys the challenge!

I think that just about sums things up. As always there’s plenty going on and I never mentioned the ‘drop in’ visitors who were treated to plenty of noise once the GTC was fired up. I enjoyed my first day back and hopefully everyone else did to. See you next week? We’ll be there.

28/06/2025

Saturday 28th June 2025

Another blisteringly hot day at Wellesbourne ☀️😎 but nothing stops our wonderful (mad?!) volunteers. 😆

First on the list today was completing the ground clearance work for the forthcoming extension to our storage facilities.
We also completed the rebuild of our high pressure compressor after its routine service, and recharged the starboard rapid start system as a test run.
Our afternoon visitors were from the Luton MG Car Club – we hope they enjoyed their visit and the pics of their cars with our wonderful aircraft.
Painting has continued as always, with the Giraffe access platform positioned against the tail of the aircraft for access to the fin where the badges and symbols have been getting some attention.
The afternoon job for the engineering crew was fuel system sampling, with samples being taken from all ten wing tanks. The fuel filters on the nos.1 and 4 engines were also removed, examined and replaced. The four fuselage tanks and the nos.2 and 3 engine filters are next on the list.

21/06/2025

Saturday 21st June 2025

The hottest Saturday of the year so far at Wellesbourne but it didn’t stop us making good progress. 😎☀️
No large booked visits today – what we call an engineering day – so we took the opportunity to test some of our recent work. With the aircraft pulled forward to the edge of our Aircraft Servicing Pan, we were able to run one engine at a time up to idle speed without risking damage to our adjacent buildings. Each engine alternator was loaded to the maximum load we could apply which is all the flying controls plus motoring the air brakes. We are pleased to report that each engine carried the whole load without problems, so we can be confident the repairs we carried out recently to the Merz-Price system are all “good to go”, and the aircraft was back in the normal position by mid morning.
No booked visits doesn’t mean no visitors, of course, and our visits team was kept busy by a steady stream of casual visitors – we hope you all enjoyed yourselves.
We were also able to complete the rebuild of our high pressure compressor, which will be tested next week, we carried out some initial ground clearance for the next extension to our storage facilities, and further prep work was completed on the radome cradle.
In the shop, our latest keyrings arrived, made for us by Runway25, and proved very popular!
👇****UPDATE: They're available on our webstore now! https://xm655.com/webstore-badges/ 🤩****
All things considered, a very successful day despite the heat.

16/06/2025

XM655 closed on Saturday 21st June
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XM655 will be closed to all visitors on Saturday 21st June for essential engineering work. We apologise for any inconvenience this causes. We will be open again as usual on Saturday 28th June.

14/06/2025

Saturday 14th June 2025

A warm, humid and sunny day with no showers at Wellesbourne today - considerably better than forecast! 😎

There were 3 booked visits: Oakley Motocycles, followed by a family group visit around lunchtime. Then a group visit by Great Days Out. Coupled with our ‘drop ins’ (one who used to work for Rolls Royce and it was great to chat with him about the Vulcan’s engines!) 😊Overall, it made for a busy day on the pan. We apologise for the short delay around lunchtime but we felt it was prudent to reinstall our air con unit. Its not easy but it definitely makes life more comfortable in the cockpit, particularly for our guides who spend most of their day up there. Hopefully our visitors were more comfortable too.

It wasn’t an engineering day for us but we can usually keep ourselves occupied and today was no exception. Having set up to give the aircraft demo to our Oakley Motorcycles group we emptied our ‘blue cupboards’. These are normally locked up and contain all those small items that you collect whilst maintaining anything. We’ve all got a place like this at home and an old metal biscuit tin is the favoured container. We’re the same but we have a lot of biscuit tins. The problem is knowing whats in them! So today we documented everything and I’ll print off the list midweek. For those ex RAF engineers out there these would have been known as ‘C’ stores…..very useful!

The second type of stuff in our blue cupboards is unique tooling, sometimes manufactured by our volunteers. The difficulty with this category is knowing what its for. So as you can imagine there was a steady stream of questions being fired at our more experienced staff. I think we got there in the end.

In the background to all this activity was the steady buzz of our compressor which was undergoing testing following its recent service. It’s fair to say it’s not performing as well as it should but the team are on the case and at present we think there is a leak from one of the cylinders providing the compression. I’m sure the team will resolve the issue soon, they usually do.

You can see a pic of a mini SABT in our gallery today. Some of the team have made a 3D print of our SABT and then manufactured a scale carrier to support the bombs and bomb rack. It’s all clever stuff and once I understand how they created the 3D model I might explain how they did it. 🫣😆Unfortunatly our expert wasn’t here today, so that’s going to have to wait for a while. Our next challenge is to scale our model up to full size to produce the cradle. That’s a ‘Summer job’ if ever there was one.

Around the site work continues on the refurb of one of our PFCU’s, there’s more paint being applied to the upper wing and in the office we went through a list of outstanding jobs on the a/c. Now to start working on them. It never ends, but its all good fun. We love it and hopefully we conveyed that to today’s visitors. Time to start thinking about next Saturday, we might see you there. Thanks to all that came today volunteers and visitors alike.

07/06/2025

7th June 2025

The weather at Wellesbourne today was decidedly unfriendly. As you can see in the pictures, the best we had was glowering skies and the worst was pretty torrential rain ☔️but it didn’t deter our visitors! We hosted a group from the Friends of the Tank Museum in the morning and a Series 2 Land Rover Club in the afternoon, plus numerous casual visitors. In the dry spells before torrential rain stopped play, the painting team managed a decent amount of prep topside. 👍

On the engineering side of things, some of us stayed out of the rain rebuilding the high pressure air compressor which we use to charge the rapid start system. The four air intake transition pieces which we removed last week to install the refurbished Merz-Price boxes were all replaced, and we made a start on a suitable trestle to allow us to remove the aircraft radome for access to the radar scanner. That will be an ongoing project during the summer, so watch this space.

31/05/2025

Saturday 31st May 2025

The way the weather is going I’ll be happy if this continues all Summer! 😎 It was a bit overcast when I set out this morning but it wasn’t long before it warmed up which was perfect for being out in the open most of the day.

For my part it was a matter of wrapping up our Merz Price issues. The boxes were removed last week and after discovering corroded cable joints the wiring was stripped out last Saturday and the boxes were rewired mid week. One of our other volunteers took the old contacts home and, using his lathe, bored out the old cables, allowing us to solder the new cables into the contacts first thing then rebuild the connectors before others took on the task of refitting the boxes back in place adjacent to each engine. Once fitted the team set to and refitted the engine transition pieces which can prove fiddly. They managed to fit all 4 by close of play so we’ll need to think about scheduling a test run to prove all the alternators v.soon.

Needless to say our painters got cracking early doors, prepping the port wing which needs to catch up with with the work done on the stbd. To be honest they’re itching to get on with painting the fin but they’re being held back as our access equipment won’t reach at present. Rumour has it that one of our volunteers has fabricated an extension to our steps. This is a similar modification that was fitted to some of the steps used in the RAF but we need to make arrangements to collect and fit the extension. We have a trailer so it shouldn’t take too long to get things organised.

On the subject of our trailer, it doesn’t go out on the road often and it remains mainly confined to the airfield. On that basis we decided to check out the lights as we’ll need to take it on the road to collect the new fabrication. We persuaded one of our volunteers to donate his car for 10 minutes but just like every trailer or caravan I’ve ever checked it misbehaved and didn’t do the car much good either. Luckily the faults were soon diagnosed and fixed with a replacement fuse. Not so sure about the trailer…….a new set of lights wouldn’t go amiss!

So back to the aircraft. We needed to check our nose wheel steering following comments from our aircrew after our public event. We would have done it last weekend but we had 2 visits. Today was an engineering day so we set up the hydraulic rig and the grease plates and set to. I’m pleased to report we were unable to reproduce the fault and with our team making great progress on the brakes we seem to have cured that problem too. All in all not bad progress so far although we think we need to make some adjustments to our air brakes which could be rubbing on the airframe as they extend. There’s bound to be something to keep us guessing but if this is the only problem encountered today I’m not complaining.

The only other task going on in the background was the major service of our compressor used to charge the bottles used for rapid starts. This has never had a service to this depth before. The service is complete but I think there’s a slight issue with a leak. I’m sure the team will locate it next weekend and cure it and the noise of that compressor will soon be heard once more buzzing in the background. 🫨

In summary - as usual we made some good progress on a great day and we hosted loads of visitors too. I think everyone was a winner, long may it continue! 🙌

24/05/2025

Saturday 24th May 2025

Another Bank Holiday Saturday with a change in weather to prove it! To be fair - it wasn’t cold and it didn’t rain, so we were able to host our visitors without too much trouble and also get on with our engineering stuff too.

We were hosting 2 visits today, both from the Nordic Riders Car Club so plenty of Volvos - old and new - to admire. As always we hope you enjoyed your visit…...I bet it was warm when you were having your cockpit tours from our resident Nav, Terry!

From an engineering perspective, we had plenty to keep us occupied but we didn’t want to pile in and jeopardise the systems demo for our visitors, so some jobs will have to wait until next weekend.

We soon decided what we could achieve, so the first task was to continue the diagnosis of the no.4 alternator system which failed a couple of weeks ago during an engine run to prove things prior to our p***c event last weekend. Ironically, we had just fixed the no.2 alternator and before we could give ourselves a pat on the back the no.4 failed with exactly the same fault! Fortunately we had manufactured a test cable based on our experience from the no.2 so we installed it and adjusted things to look for the same fault. The test lead worked, so not only did we confirm the fault, but we were able to deliver power from the no.4 but without one of our protection systems in service. So today was about carrying out an inspection of the no.4 Mertz Price Box. It didn’t take long to access the box and after opening the lid our suspicions were confirmed. Moisture had attacked the bare copper connections and caused the joint to fail. Based upon our findings we’ve removed all the Mertz Price boxes and we’ll have them all rewired by next Saturday. You’ll see the box being worked on in some of today’s pics.

We bought some more paint in the week so you’ll see the painters making a start on the port wing. The stbd. wing was pretty much finished before the event last week as it was on the crowd side. The port wing is more about preservation and it’s on the north side of the aircraft during the winter months so it suffers a bit more….and it goes green, too so a good wash was called for before we started sanding. I am sure this’ll be a work in progress for a few weeks now.

Elsewhere around the pan work continues on piecing together the parts that will enable the build of a spare PFCU. Some of the parts are a bit corroded, but the repair strategy seems to be coming together nicely.

Another ongoing ni**le is our braking system and the jury remains out on the actual problem. There are only 2 components in this portion of the system and today has focussed on the slave unit. I know the parts were still being looked at until close of play, but I suspect this work will continue next Saturday. Hopefully I can give you an update then …….and the cure too!

There’s another of our time delay units in the pics. This was rebuilt onto a Wellesbourne designed and built PCB this week so it was tested during our demonstrations. I’m pleased to report it worked OK so that’ll be another spare added to the collection.

Finally, it’s time for the SABT to make a re-appearance. We were contacted and offered another SABT a few weeks back. It’s been parked up at the back of a garage for 30 years having spent it’s first working days as a boat trailer in Totnes!! It was a bit rusty to say the least but we spent a day on site yesterday and salvaged most of the useful parts. Some were actually in better condition than ours, so they were swapped today and for the first time in years our SABT hydraulic system was pressurised allowing the chassis to be raised as designed. That’s a feather in the cap of the volunteer who’s been refurbishing it and I never thought anything we removed yesterday would be used so soon. Result!

So that ends another Wellesbourne Super Saturday. Never a dull moment and I never mentioned our compressor. I’ll save that for next week.

Thinking ahead to next Saturday: Top priority goes to our nose wheel steering system. If you want to see how it works, drop in, it’s an engineering day.

Thanks as always to the photographers. Thanks also to our visitors…..good to see you.

Avro Vulcan XM655 Official Site

19/07/2025

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05/07/2025

28/06/2025

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