Designing a bespoke Spitfire Table!

I recently had the good fortune to find about some Spitfire propeller blades that were being sold.

Being a massive fan of the Spitfire this was a no-brainer to get involved and buy one. Deciding must have taken all of 30 seconds and was very much the easy bit. The more tricky part was that they were located at an airfield near Stockholm!  Luckily the person who found them was my best friend in Sweden, Peter, who also planned to buy one and kindly offered to drive up and collect them both.

And so begun the story of the repatriation  of a propeller blade that had been most likely manufactured just up the road from me near Brooklands around 70 years ago. This blade had been part of one of the fifty Griffon engined PR Mk XIX Spitfires that were sold to Sweden in 1948.  Sweden needed spotter planes to keep an eye on the Russians whilst their jet program was underway.

Once Peter had bought the 2 blades quickly before the seller could change his mind, we set about getting mine back to good old Blighty. Peter’s exceptional DIY skills came in handy as he made up a wooden crate/coffin and then the courier company did the rest (a spitfire blade is pretty heavy by the way!)

Once it had safely arrived home  the tricky decision had to be made… what on earth do you do with a Spitfire propeller blade?!  It is undoubtedly a cool thing but where do you put it. I did some research and most people mount propeller blades on stands as a form of sculpture.  This was perhaps too obvious a solution.

We’d been planning to buy a table for our lounge for some time and so a creative plan came together for a display case/Spitfire table!  My business partner in my Agency day job is also a shareholder of a Flight Case construction business, Case Design Ltd.

So I sketched a brief for them to look at and they created a fantastic bespoke glass topped table/case to display the propeller blade. It fits snugly inside in bespoke cut-out foam but you can open the glass top and remove it if you wish. They also incorporated a shelf underneath in aluminium for magazines and books.

I’m over the moon with the end result and have recently purchased a Spitfire cockpit switch with the plan of putting some lighting inside the case at some point in the future.

Whilst on the subject of Spitfire furniture check out the video of this amazing Spitfire table! Exceptional craftsmanship by Huw Edwards-Jones