Kay Gyroplanes

[hesham]

Hi,

Mr. David Kay was a small British designer,he created the 32/1 gyroplane in 1932 which powered by one ABC Scorpion
piston engine,but it was damaged,followed by 33/1,also a single seat gyroplane,powered by one Pobjoy R piston engine
in 1933,and first flown in 1935.

 

[Apophenia]

The first autogiro - to a design by Kay and John Grieve - was built by Shield’s Garage in Blackford, Perth. The 32/1 was of wooden construction.

The second autogiro - which Flight referred to as the Kay Gyroplane - was built by autogiro rotor blade specialists, Oddie, Bradbury and Cull, Ltd., of Eastleigh (Southampton). [1] The 33/1 was of cloth-covered metal construction - steel-tube fuselage and duralumin tailplane. The sole 33/1, G-ACVA, is preserved at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

If the 33/1 prototype was successful, series production was intended to take place in Perth.

"A Scots inventor, Mr. David Kay, worked quietly for some years on his gyroplane, in which not only could the head be tilted to rock the rotor system, but the incidence of the blades could be changed by means of Z-shaped cranks and a screwed shaft which ran up through the head."

Flight, 25 March 1943, pg.309
https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1943/1943%20-%200771.html
__________________________________

[1] In Scottish Contributions to Rotary Wing Flight, Prof Cameron and Dr. Thomson claim that the 33/1 was "designed and built ... in Perth in 1934." They obviously confused G-ACVA with the 32/1.
In: AHS 64th Annual Forum, 29 April-1 May 2008, Montreal, Canada, unpaginated.

2-view: http://aviadejavu.ru/Images6/FT/FT1934/12/1374-1.jpg
http://forum.keypublishing.com/archive/index.php/t-86026.html
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/4973/1/4973.pdf
https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1935/1935%20-%200193.html
https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1937/1937%20-%200696.html
https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1939/1939%20-%200040.html
https://www.flightglobal.com/FlightPDFArchive/1953/1953%20-%200098.PDF

 

[hesham]

Excellent work my dear Apophenia.

 

[Stargazer]

The complete list of Kay gyroplanes and helicopters, from Cierva Autogiros; The Development of Rotary-Wing Flight, by Peter W. Brooks (Smithsonian Press, 1988). It is too short a list to justify a topic in the "Designation Systems" section, so I'm leaving it here:

 

[TsrJoe]

Kay 33/1 Gyroplane, G-ACVA, Royal Aero Club Jubilee display, Hendon, 1951

 

[TsrJoe]

Royal Scottish Museum, East Fortune, 2015 & at Chambers St., Edinburgh ('artistic object wall arrangement') 2018 -current