Jeff H- I guess that's possible although they seem a little thick to me to be ignition leads. Without an indication of scale it is hard to guess. I work with old automobiles and not aircraft. Are the ignition leads firmly attached to a coil with the other end clipped to a spark plug on a radial engine or are both ends clipped. I'm thinking that if one end is firmly attached to the ignition source and that was pulled free then I could see all leads pulling from the spark plugs and the group staying together. If, like a car, one end is plugged into the distributor cap and the other to the plugs, I think it less likely that they stay as a group. LTM- John
John, from what info I have been able to gather so far they were bolted to the spark plugs and were quite chunky but flexible enough to route them around a radial engine. The twisted copper strands used to make the conductor were fairly hefty, possibly enough to retain the shape of the routing. The insulation properties were extremely high obviously because of the high voltage so, again, possibly insulated enough to remain intact. Plus, they must be fairly robust to survive their location on the engine itself. I requested a photo of some ignition leads recently removed from an engine to see if they retain the shape of the routing they took in and around the engine when it was in service. Plus am searching through patents re ignition leads circa 1930- 1937 to get some specs for them.
In the object ROV footage there are a couple of frames where the ROVer isn't in full flight and, the black squiggly thing looks a bit thinner. A bit like the problem with the wire/rope/ cable in the same named ROVer footage. It's the same diameter all the way down but, when ROVer is
in full flight it looks a lot thicker due to motion blurring effects.