Engine Punk

The beast at bay I am currently researching Vincent motorcycles because Nick Hob, the Horsepower Whisperer and central character in my book of that name, rides a highly modified one. The reputation of the Vincent stands head and shoulders above any of its contemporaries. When introduced, it was the fastest production roadster on two, three or four wheels - and that probably includes some aircraft as they take off and land. This is an example of the very first Vincent V-twin, the series A Vincent-HRD Rapide. Legend has it that the two Phils, Phil Vincent and Phil Irving, were in the drawing office one day when a breeze caused two blueprints of their recently introduced 500cc single to land one upon another in a vee formation. The potential was obvious and, once Phil Irving had designed a new crankcase, the machine became an awe-inspiring reality. By adopting an angle of 47 degrees between the cylinder barrels, the same tooling for the single cylinder versions could be used. ...

I took me ages to get hold of this little book again I've got a stack of post-Christmas reading to get through but this slim volume is what is currently receiving my attention at the moment. I first encountered Alfred Hitchcock's The Monster Museum in the library of Goonhavern County Primary school. I would have been no more than eleven. However, some of the short stories have stayed with me over the years and while I was researching something else on Amazon, I stumbled across this little beauty for sale at a penny. How can they trade at that sort of price? So here it is, in my hands again, after all this time. My favourites still are (in order of merit) The Microscopic Giants by Paul Ernst, Slime by Joseph Payne Brennan, The Day of the Dragon by Guy Endore and The King of the Cats by Stephen Vincent Benet. I was searching for The King of the Cats and although the King of the Cats is not really a monster it's a good yarn. I was interested to see that a children...

As I sift the ether for brand new musical biscuits, I come across a lot of rubbish. Forget Myspace or YouTube - I found this little gem via the Hillman Imp Club website. Over the years I've had many fascinating musical discussions around car show camp fires up and down the country and the odd thing about the Imp Club members - apart from a weakness for space hopper sumo wrestling (or is that a strength? Discuss) - is how similar our tastes in music seem to be. I've been introduced to a number of rare grooves by its members and sometimes a guitar has magically appeared. At one show, a Beer Powered Noise Frenzy broke out but I missed it. I knew one of my fellow Imp-o-philliacs, Tim Morgan, was a guitar hero and an innocent enquiry on the Imp site discussion forum about how he was getting on led to me discovering The Scopies . Okay, a trip to their page on Myspace was involved but that's okay because here I was introduced to their track "I wanna be a Ramone." ...

The other day my sister mentioned our old school bus, a two tone blue coach (coaches being more luxurious than buses) run by Mitchell's of Perranporth. This was while I attended Goonhavern Country Primary school from 1969 to 1974. A torrent of fond memories followed and I took to wondering whatever happened to this old bus. At first sight this could have been Podgy's twin. I was intrigued to see that this coach has a Cornish registration number although Podgy definitely different (photo: Wikimedia) We called our bus Podgy and I'd seen similar coaches over the years. Everything pointed  to Podgy being a Bedford SB Duple Super Vega, one of the most stylish coaches made during the fifties and early sixties. I began to search the internet for information and was delighted to find loads of images on Flickr. Some pictures were historical while others showed present day survivors, beautifully restored in preservation. And there are still some mouldering round the pa...

BOB Today, I am joined by Billie A. Williams, the American thriller writer. Firstly, Billie, congratulations on launching your book! BILLIE Thank You Bob. And thank you for inviting me to visit you and your readers on your blog. But sorry I got your name wrong! I put Bob Blackburn on my site, not Bob Blackman! BOB No worries, Billie, it happens all the time! Anyway, you've fixed it now. I reckon this horrible cold I've got may even have affected my typing. When I can speak it's very dasal - I mean nasal. It's a good job this is a virtual book tour, otherwise you'd've had a very long and very wasted journey. So, for a book like Small Town Secrets , how much of the process did you do yourself and how much did you farm out? BILLIE I wrote the novel. Wings ePress , did the rest. Edits - I had to go through approve, fix or deny, line edits/copy edits same scene. Cover art – I fill out a form they supply of what I see on the cover - I hap...

Tomorrow I am hosting Billie A. Williams, the US thriller writer, on this very blog. Billie lives in Amberg, Wisconsin but she's currently on a virtual book tour and you can follow her progress on her blog . Billie is offering a number of prizes to those who leave comments on the blogs where she's interviewed. She's a successful thriller writer and has quite a following in the states. It's just as well that it's a virtual book tour because I've got a horrible cold this week. If it was a real one, I think it would be a wasted journey. This way, I can still interview her despite my coughing and spluttering.

There's a plate on it but it's not much of a clue It was some of my neighbours who coined the term Vintage Thing and this is the, er, Vintage Thing that prompted that remark. They were having a garage clear out and this emerged, metaphorically blinking in the sunlight. There's a tightening ratchet on the shaft on the right that pulls a shaped block up against two feet It's a special tool of some sort made by Churchill, serial number 18G227C. Nobody knows what it fits but somebody somewhere is probably, at this very moment, crying out for this Vintage Thing. To throw it away would seem to be a crime so I took pity on it and it has now come to live with me at the Cornish Repository for Unwanted Vintage Things until it can be re-homed.

As soon as I knew the Giles I was intrigued by it This oddity is mentioned in Peter Tuthill's book Cornwall's Motor Industry . As he expected, its publication is flushing out more information on the vehicles featured, many of which are very shadowy creations. This is the only one with which I could help and even then to a very limited extent. Mysterious back in 1984, the Giles 3 wheeler has since gone to ground again It turned up on an old caravan chassis at a "Superdo", a Vintage Things Show, at Penstraze near Truro in 1984, and that's where I took these photos. It was a very intriguing three wheeler with an air-cooled 350cc flat-twin Douglas engine mounted at the front. It must have just been discovered and acquired for preservation. Somebody removed the bonnet and lo! there was a Douglas engine It wasn't a bad job although a little under powered for my tastes. Douglas did some 500s and 600s. There was even a conversion that stretched the...

The Horsepower Whisperer is now featured on Marion Webb-De Sisto's author interview page. I'm new to being interviewed and she guided me gently through the process. Marion has been writing and publishing for years. I reckon De Sisto is a great name for an author. She's married to an American-Italian (funny how we don't get American-English) and has lived in the UK and the US. She writes fiction and non-fiction and is a very spiritual person. She is a crystal healer and a Bach flower remedy registered practitioner. In an earlier blog, I postulated (good word) that many women who are now practising alternative therapies had some connection with motorcycling. I know this is a bit like saying that if you are born on 27th July 1963 then you are a very attractive, energetic, creative person who everybody likes (but is also modest with it) but - you know - I genuinely believe that to be true. One of my fellow Pitch Idol candidates wrote mind, body and spirit books an...

When punk met goth This week I have been listening a great deal to Long live the new flesh (great title!) by Flesh for Lulu . They were among the first of the 1980's goth bands and, until recently, the only track I could name of theirs was their epic 12" EP Roman Candle. I've made a long search for this as an MP3 file to replace the worn out party mix cassette but I've drawn a big blank. I have, however, found this album, which dates from 1987. This was when things were really taking off for the band with a world tour and a conspicuous presence on MTV. But their fans viewed all this activity as selling out. It was about this time that I saw them in Brixton as they supported The Ramones and - dare I say it - I enjoyed Flesh for Lulu more on that night. I seem to recall that they were having a great time on stage. But somehow their records have eluded me. So I bought this album just before Christmas and the more I listen to it the more I like it. Personal fa...

Nice to see such a wonderful old car out and about in January Now that the dust - well, mud - has settled after the Exeter Trial, I find myself returning to these photos of a splendid Frazer Nash that was nonchalantly parked at the bottom of the section at Fingle Bridge. There's something of Chitty-chitty-bang-bang in this view They only made chain gang Nashes in penny numbers and this is the six-cylinder variety. That means a double overhead camshaft 1660cc designed and built by the Blackburne company lurked under that bonnet but it would have been incredibly rude to have had a look without the owners present. It was tempting, though. According to my info, the six-cylinder Blackburne engine powered the Colmore, TT replica and Shelsely models of Frazer-Nash but none of the illustrated examples feature bodywork like this one. There's nothing quite like wood when it's been worked by a craftsman The most impressive bit about this car - I thought - was...

There's been a hive of activity here recently at Anarchadia Publishing. Over the Christmas and New Year period, I worked up The Wormton Lamb into a state where it can at last be sent to Caroline Petherick (Magic Words), my editor. And now I've got it back! It seems that having collaborated on The Horsepower Whisperer we know how each other works and the whole process has been reduced, in terms of time, by a factor of at least ten. Now I have to go through and approve or discard her recommended changes. This is actually very enjoyable work and I'm looking forward to it but first I need to do some more publicity work. Most of this is for The Horsepower Whisperer. This book needs its chance first. But that's no problem because I can barely contain my excitement about what I've been up to recently! I'm not sure if it can be done but if not I can use the drawings for something else. Meanwhile the book cover has been developed with Red Snapper (Rebecc...

Just a glance at this drawing had me intrigued My web host Eric Cowan lent me a textbook entitled The Motor Vehicle by Newton and Steeds over Christmas. And there among its pages was a cut away diagram of a supercharged two-stroke four cylinder Trojan engine. This raises more questions. I've looked at the engine of a typical Trojan and this is nothing like what lurks beneath their floorboards. They're mid-engined and the cylinders lie down flat. There's no date of production but the book is the 1953 edition, originally published in 1929. There are two split cylinders and within these are two pistons and two conrods that share a common combustion chamber, which was a feature of other, more normal Trojans where more normal Trojans is an entirely relative term. With a bore and stroke of 65.5 mm by 88 mm, the capacity of the power cylinders is a nominal 1186cc, since the offset cylinder axes vary the strokes slightly. The two compressor cylinders measure 92.6 mm aga...

Occasionally, I enthuse about a Vintage Thing. So far there's been Pete Low's Ginetta G21S, Adrian Booth's Hobbsie Special (which was special only because it was such a lash up) They appeared on my book publishing blog along with the occasional motorsport event but don't really sit happily among all the literary stuff, even it's about horsepower whispering. So now we have the Vintage Things series on this blog. I predict the Tata Nano will be a future Vintage Thing so that makes 3 so far. Now that they won't get overwhelmed by publishing news, more are bound to follow. Only things that interest me or enthuse me will be featured. Sometimes they can be a bit odd, oftentimes they can be very ordinary. Rest assured that they will be hand picked Vintage Things, hand picked by me. And maybe one day I'll gather them together in book form if there's enough interest. That's a kiss of death if ever there was one. Having virtually guaranteed th...

Like some extract from The Horsepower Whisperer, (that's the book wot I wrote, if you didn't already know), the Grey Ones want to close Castle Coombe. According to the Old Bike Mart a couple of people have moved into the village, realised there's a motor racing circuit nearby and now want to get it closed. Sign the petition here.

I'm sticking my neck out here but reckon this car will one day be a classic The new Tata Nano is the world's cheapest car at roughly £1300 and does 43 mph flat out. It's designed to put India on wheels and has wind up windows and no airbag. Hurray! A real car for the real world. We need more cars like this and less life-style gas guzzlers that "say something about you as a person." Usually they say something not very nice in my humble opinion. All those fancy electric extras add weight. Manufacturers are looking at using a single wire to connect the showroom appeal goodies because the wiring looms are becoming so heavy. Components will communicate with each other by code. I believe this is already common practice on aircraft. But there is always more to go wrong and cars are being scrapped because their bits don't work when the bodyshell and drive train are hale and hearty. Great for the manufacturers of new cars but bad for the environment. So a b...

Trevithick's road locomotive Hidden away in the steep sided combes of south–western Britain, concealed behind unremarkable facades in market towns and sleepy hamlets, tucked deep down into wooded valleys or crouched against the elements on wind blasted heaths and moors, something is stirring. This is Britain ’s crumple zone against the Atlantic and, against very long odds, Cornwall is still home to an ongoing automotive tradition that has been quietly surviving for over two hundred years. If someone announced that they had written a book on Cornwall ’s motor industry, a very slim volume would probably be the result – not so much a book as a pamphlet. Being able to produce over 150 well illustrated A4 pages initially seems nothing short of remarkable. Having read Cornwall ’s Motor Industry by Peter Tutthill, it’s clear that he has unearthed a wealth of material and some fascinating insights into a surprisingly varied cottage industry. I am also struck by the influence of...

I have been in discussion with my some writer friends about the benefits of self-publicity. One or two have voiced the opinion that if they self-publicise before they have a book deal, won’t they come across as rather bitter losers who blame the world for not noticing their brilliance? I never know for certain what other people think, but I would say no. I think the general public is – actually – far more receptive to new ideas than mainstream publishers. It's up to us to find our readers. And once you are published, my understanding is that your publisher will expect you to publicise your own books. So you might just as well start sooner rather than later. In fact, if you are good at self-publicity, wouldn't that influence the choice of a potential agent or publisher? They certainly seem to appreciate the easy PR that come with celebrities. I am currently reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. This book confirmed something that I’d been wondering for some time. The i...

And awwwaaaayyyy they go In reverse order, there was the CCM 604 of Geoff Westcott and Michelle Maidment. I seem to have taken one of them leaving as well. I am still getting used to the various modes on my digital camera. In the middle is a Troll, a familiar enough car to me (I really like the colour) but I can't make out the number to determine the crew. The one of the Imp smoking its tyres is, unfortunately, of Bill and Will Rosten coming to grief. Bill suffered a puncture and by the time he got past us the tyre was spinning on the rim. We had a quick word with him and he'd been doing well until then. My biker mates Pete and John noticed Bill was wearing motorcycle boots. This caused no end of ribaldry because they know I like Imps and - I am sorry to say - that mention of The Flintstones was made and aspersions were cast. Thanks to Mr Robinson-Collins who, with Dave Turner, was next in the running order to Bill and Will, I can now reveal that Bill is a...

The boys dun good! Dave Turner and Rob Robinson-Collins cleared all the sections in Dave's BMW 318S, which means they won a Triple award. This is the first time ever for Rob my erstwhile sidecar pilot. I think Dave has a few under his belt. He certainly looked very nonchalant going up Fingle but apparently just floored it at Simms and cleared it in style! Here are some more photos. Unfortunately, I wasn't ready when Dave and Rob came by, either, because I swapping tales of derring-do and mechanical mayhem with my mates on that corner, plus a couple of knowledgeable strangers and - well - anyone who would listen, actually. And I didn't take any of the yellow Dutton, probably for the same reason (see comment on previous post below - can't believe I was first on the web with some smudges of the Trial!). First is John Adams on his Honda MT5, yes that's a 50cc sports moped that somehow survived all the learner abuse over the last 25 years. An astute choice of mach...

Geoff Westcott and Michelle Maidment climb Fingle on their CCM oufit I've just got back wet and muddy, cold and tired but very happy from Fingle Bridge, near Drewsteignton on the northern edge of Dartmoor. I was spectating on the Exeter Trial. This is real grass roots motorsport and a few tree roots came past my ears today not to mention mud and stones. Anecdotal evidence suggested that it was wetter this year but last year I got soaked watching at Simms, near Ilsington. Bill Rosten was really unlucky with a flat tyre As usual, I saw quite a few of my mates. I've either marshalled or competed for some years now and sometimes we often don't see each other for years but we just know that we're out there, somewhere. It's a Troll On a price per mile basis, classic trials are brilliant value. Sadly, the organising body, the Motor Cycling Club, has to put in a tremendous PR effort with each event to allow them to continue. The fun police are sniffi...

So what is an engine punk again? An engine is any sort of mechanical contrivance. The original calculator was described as a difference engine. My interest is mainly internal combustion engines and the uses to which they can be put. Or put-put-put-put. According to Wikipedia a punk is "a young male hustler, a gangster, a hoodlum, or a ruffian" and for many years it had that kind of negativity. But with punk rock came the kick-ass, DIY sub-culture thing and that is pretty much mainstream these days with the internet and all the connectivity that it offers. I'm not a gangster or very young any more but I certainly feel like a punk and if my Stiff Little Fingers will let me I can bash out "I wanna be a Ramone" by The Scopies.