Engine Punk

I am very interested in Infra Red photography and the haunting images it provides once converted to black and white  Engine Punk began as a means of promoting my writing but this blog has grown a life of its own. The Vintage Things and Fire Drakes that I've happened across are noteworthy and I want to share my enthusiasm about them at a very personal level.  Steamers at Boconnoc. I believe we will one day come to think of the internal combustion engine as fondly as we do those that are external. They are even making new steam engines sixty years after destroying so many! There simply aren't enough to go round. Engine Punk is also a record of my low budget motorsport activities. There have been so many of them, they become a blur, a blur not through speed but from confused memories over a surprising length of time. I discovered across the Pontsarn viaduct one frosty moonlit night, appearing across the valley as I crested the hill. Actually, it was late summer but you get the pi...

It took at least two generations of family members several years to find this article so you can imagine how pleased we were to see this - the top half of the title page. I am very excited about this because a very long search has just ended successfully. Various family members have been looking for this for years and now my Uncle David and I have found our little Holy Grail. Great Uncle Walter's duplex boat- a kind of early catamaran - has been revealed at last and in a most unexpected way. World famous among out family members, this odd vessel is mentioned in an unpublished biography of my great great grandmother, Susanna, written by her grand daughter, Winifred Scott. It's been a cause celebre across more than three generations because it's remained out of reach for so long. Regular readers may remember Great Uncle Walter . He was uncle to my grandfather and to my mother's Auntie Winnie. He was a war artist, entrepreneur, photographer, writer and inventor an...

Mad Max and the last of the V8 Interceptors Somebody asked me about this the other day. A sound bite response would've been good but I couldn't think of one.  So... Engine Punk is the joy of making, expressed in metal, composites and tyre smoke - a tribute to accessible technology - an indulgence of finely engineered excitement - high-octane works of imagination, fantasy and mech-anarchy. What a beauty! Marcel Sylvand's Zoomster. Photo : Nitro Engine Punk is nostalgia for the twentieth century and a celebrations of all the freedoms we had. Note past tense (unfortunately) Engine Punk is Steam Punk with a go-faster stripe.  Engine Punks talk the torque and race the race.  Form over function - a motorcycle conception by Zero Engineering (like there's a lot of engineering actually, actually) Photo : Zero Engineering Engine Punks are openly retro-sexual, speed celebrants with a chequered eroticism (but not that bloke who has sex with his car) The fast...

Steam Punk is a close but older relative of Engine Punk. I don’t want to get bogged down in defining differences right now - I aspire to breakdown barriers not reinforce them - but with the exciting prospect of the Steampunk Kernow party in Falmouth , with its nautical theme and evocation of the age of exploration, I’ve indulged in some ancestral delving into the first generation steam punk activities of my grandfather's favourite uncle. From an ancient scrapbook, I am fortunate to have this watercolour self-portrait of Great Uncle Walter. On the same page were very small photos of gondolas and heavily flooded streets. Great Uncle Walter is world famous in my family. Like me, he was a man of many parts, except that most of mine are old car and bike parts. Great Uncle Walter was an artist, a photographer, sailor, entrepreneur, founder member of the Falmouth volunteer fire brigade and inventor. His portrait of the Mayor of Falmouth still hangs in the civic chambers. Among his sur...

This is a little old-fashioned for my usual taste but I'm hailing it as a Vintage Thing as I think it's another fine example of the internal combustion engine as Steam Punk and it's at completely the opposite end of the design spectrum from the monstrous Austin Hall-Scott ( Vintage Thing No.66 ). I like little cars as well as big cars - not to mention any in between - and admire the Carden cyclecar's flowing wings and obvious wooden construction that make it look like a portly aeroplane. It's also received an honorary mention on Engine Punk before now because it arrived at the 2010 VSCC Wiscombe Park hillclimb in the back of a Citroen Berlingo. Unlike the Austin Hall-Scott, which is a relatively recent creation, the Carden dates from 1921. It was designed by Sir John Valentine Carden who is better known for his work on armoured tracked vehicles, subsequently becoming  a director of Vickers. That was all later - for his cyclecar, Sir John used a monocoque ...

If anyone doubts that an internal combustion engine can ever be steam punk then here's the proof. Ladies & gentlemen, brothers & sisters, fiends & frankensteins, I give you the 10-litre Austin Hall-Scott of Edward Way. Engine and chassis were only recently introduced to each other by Oliver Way who was also responsible for Vintage Thing No.18 the Salamanda special, as well as the rejuvenated Mrs Jo Jo . I'm now thinking that when there is another Steam Punk exhibition, one of Oliver Way's creations ought to be included. The trick, of course, is to make it look like everything had been bolted together in one of the garages at Brooklands and used and appreciated every since. The Austin Hall-Scott has just the right amount of patina and epitomises one of the steam punk aims to recreate what a gentleman amateur scientist might have invented (with the help of his butler). If it's a little debauched, then so much the better. A couple of years ago at Wis...

The Steam Punk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford was small but perfectly formed. I really enjoyed the show and now many ideas are running round my head - like a steam punk version of Thunderbirds for one. You know - Thunderbird 1 is made out of rivetted bronze, Thunderbird 2 is a supersonic air ship and Thunderbird 3 is like the Nautilus from Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea . This was my favourite, a Stirling hot air engine made by Jos de Vink in Holland. Stirling engines have featured on Engine Punk before ( Nothing but hot air ) but for transport purposes they aren't practical. However, for stationary work they're ideal. All they need is the slightest temperature or pressure difference to get their displacers fluttering. They run at a constant slow speed so could charge up a battery or generate hydrogen for all sorts of interesting uses. And when they look this good, they could be a show piece of your energy efficient home. They...

I discovered this book in the best way, by chance and through a personal recommendation. If I had not sat next to Peter Jenkin on the train and fallen into conversation with him he would never have told me about the book he was reading. It was the traction engine on the cover that caught my eye. Although I prefer the internal combustion engine, external combustion varieties - where the fuel is burnt outside the cylinders - still appeal tremendously. Railway locomotives may have a literary presence but road locomotives rarely feature in fiction of any sort, let alone sci-fi or fantasy. A pavane is a dance of Spanish origin popular around the time of Queen Elizabeth I and this story is divided into measures and a coda. Now, I know nothing about music but I know what I like and I quite like this musical example of a pavane. Not sure how you dance to it, though - probably too courtly and graceful for my usual enthusiastic outbursts of physical musical pleasure. Keith Roberts' ...

Calling all Steam Punks! Here is the Murdoch Flyer, a replica of a road locomotive that might pre-date Cap'n Richard Trevithick's engine of 1801. It's been built by a group called the Murdoch boys based in Redruth. Construction was financed by voluntary contributions and grants including sales of a song called "The Ballad of William Murdoch" by Ed Hamilton. As interest in steam punk increases on the back of stories such as Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy, models of steam engines inspired by such speculative fiction are being made all over the world. But here we have the grandaddy of them. Or at the very least, one of the granddaddies. Cornwall can justifiably claim to be the birth place of steam traction. In 2001, we celebrated 200 years of Cornish motoring but the Murdoch Boys who have built this replica of the Flyer point to a tantalising account that Murdoch rode around the Cornish tin mines in a full sized development of the models he...