Were the Blueprints digitised?

[Fastship]

When the aircraft were converted for military service, did BAe digitise the original blueprints for engineering purposes?

[Jelle Hieminga]

That's an interesting question, I have never heard of them doing this although a lot of material was most likely converted to digital for use in the 21st century. I suspect they only digitised the manuals, but that's just a guess I'm afraid.

[Fastship]

I know for the Nimrod MRA4 the fitters discovered that the data never conformed to actual airframes, each seemed to be built differently so that the digital data of the new components didn't fit, each airframe was different dimensionally so nothing they designed fitted.

[Jelle Hieminga]

Indeed, the mounting points for the new-built wings needed to be adjusted to each specific fuselage. Tony Blackman wrote this in 'Nimrod Rise and Fall':

Computer-aided design was used for the new wing but the practical difficulty was that though the fuselage keels were jig built, some of the frames were not quite‘square’with the fuselage. After the mating of the first aircraft, the attachment points of the wing were specified as ‘drill to fit’and at the time of cancellation ten of the eleven wings had been attached successfully.

When the Victors were converted to K.2 tankers, they were careful to keep the fuselage and wing sets together so that they didn't have any of these problems. It was something that was quite normal with airframes from those days, the VC10 was no exception: Interchangeability on the VC10. I don't know how this was dealt with during the tanker conversions for the VC10s, but fortunately they didn't have to take the entire aircraft apart.