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[Ric Gillespie]

Subscribers to TIGHARNews emails will have seen the following notice sent out yesterday:

ARTIFACT IDENTIFIED

Subscriber responses to the October issue of TIGHAR Tracks and recent TIGHARNews emails inspired new research that has identified an artifact recovered during TIGHAR’s first visit to Gull Pond thirty-one years ago.

TIGHAR Artifact 1-21-P-1 was found with a metal detector and pulled from the mud just off the southern tip of the rocky island in
Gull Pond in October 1992.

TIGHAR Artifact 1-28-P-2, the small steel disk found
in 2021, remains unidentified.

Now preserved at The Rooms cultural and historical center in St. John’s, Newfoundland, TIGHAR Artifact 1-21-P-1 can now be reliably identified as a segment of a cylinder wall from a liquid-cooled internal combustion engine that pre-dated the first use of machines of any kind on the Cape Shore barrens.

The materials, properties, and dimensions of the artifact match a specific section of a cylinder from a 450 hp Lorraine Dietrich W12 engine like the one that powered l’Oiseau Blanc.

Exciting as these findings are, a word of caution is in order. Until the rest of the engine is found, the identification of the artifact must remain tentative.
The November issue of TIGHAR Tracks will detail the case for 1-21-P-1 being from l’Oiseau Blanc and how the new findings affect TIGHAR’s hypothesis and plans for the 2024 search.

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I'm currently writing the paper to be published in the upcoming TIGHAR Tracks and there's an historical question I'm hoping someone will be able to help answer.
XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) analysis shows the artifact to be made of "12L14" steel.  It's easy to find the properties of 12L14 steel but, so far, I haven't been able to find out when that alloy was first produced. 
in testing hypotheses, we're always looking for disqualifiers. If 12L14 steel wasn't used until after 1927, either the XRF analysis is wrong (unlikely) or the artifact is disqualified as as being from l'Oiseau Blanc.

[Karen Hoy]

Have you tried contacting the American Iron and Steel Institute? 

https://www.steel.org/

Karen Hoy #2610

[Dale O. Beethe]

Looking forward to seeing how the research on that came about.

[Ric Gillespie]

I've connected with the Steel Institute.  The guy I talked to was fascinated by our project.  He'll try to find out when 12L14 steel was first used and call me back.

[Dale O. Beethe]

I've always felt the metal in that artifact is too thin to be a cylinder wall.  Could it be from the water cooling jacket around the cylinder wall?  (Assuming it had such a thing.)

[Ric Gillespie]

I've always felt the metal in that artifact is too thin to be a cylinder wall.  Could it be from the water cooling jacket around the cylinder wall?  (Assuming it had such a thing.)

Yes, there were water jackets around the cylinders, but they're still too thick and a fragment of a water jacket shouldn't have oil on it.

[Dale O. Beethe]

It's always seemed more like part of an oil sump or some such to me.

[Ric Gillespie]

It's always seemed more like part of an oil sump or some such to me.

My earliest idea when we first found it was that it might be part of the oil tank.  There was a 60 gallon oil tank immediately behind the engine, as shown in this photo of the aircraft under construction.  We don't know whether the tank was aluminum or steel, but the photo looks like either unpainted aluminum or painted steel.

[Don White]

I thought it looked a bit like a cylinder wall, but i could not come up with a very convincing theory of how it would blow up like that. It's just not a common kind of failure. This was a proven design and engineers knew how to build engines that would resist pressure. I came up with two rather weak ideas: 1) that the engine was forcibly stopped at the exact moment of ignition, so the full force of combustion had nowhere to go but through the cylinder wall; 2) that the overheated engine hit the cold water with enough temperature differential to cause the metal to crack (why you don't add cold water to a hot cast iron engine, or put your hot cast iron pans in cold water).

Has anyone tried taking this bit to the actual engine on display to see if it matches anyplace?

As for the type of metal, 12L14 appears to be the current American designation for a very old kind of steel, which has had other names in other times and places. In England it is classed as Bright Mild Steel, which is a common variety for machining. Knowing when it started to be called 12L14 may not answer when it was first made.

Don W.

[Don Yee]

I think that if the artifact is indeed an internal component of the engine then this changes the search in a meaningful way. How? There is likely no large chunk of metal lying around on the bottom of the pond to be identified by magnetometer (i.e., the engine came apart in a catastrophic way). Instead, there may be several smaller bits widely distributed that each need to be investigated. Although having a single large chunk of metal is likely easier to find in the broad sense, having multiple smaller bits (any one of which would possibly confirm the crash) actually raises the odds.

Don....

[Don White]

Early on in discussions of this artifact, I suggested it was part of the engine oiling system, which was largely external. That still doesn't seem to explain explosive damage. If I had my druthers, I'd take it to Paris and hold it up next to the engine on display looking for a match to some part there.

Were the cylinders cast with water jackets, or were the water jackets made separately and added around the cylinders? It appears the engine had individual cylinders rather than a cylinder block. The cylinders might not even be castings.

Don W.