Engine Punk

Well have you? I have. It seems that there are many other Bob Blackmans, far more famous than I am. The most famous Bob Blackman of all is listed on Wikipedia and was an innovative American football coach who died in 2000, aged 81. I'm not listed on Wikipedia yet. Apparently you're not supposed to list yourself. I have tried. I also tried to persuade some of my famous friends to mention me, on the promise that I will mention them but they are being too British and modest about this. I'll keep one of them and eventually they'll agree, especially writing yet the point across about the importance of being listed on the Internet when you're authors like they are. Having said that, my first amateurish attempt at a promotional video appears alongside an entry for the football coach Bob Blackman on FamousWhy . Now that I've got my voice back (I'm dictating this again on Dragon NaturallySpeaking), I'm really going to have to prioritise making a better vide...

I was over Adrian Booth's the other day shooting the breeze over cylinder heads and he pulled this out of a pile of other interesting stuff. He had another - all shiny and ready to be fitted onto the short block - but that belonged to somebody else so in defference to Adrian's customer I didn't photograph that but snapped this work in progress instead. The finished article looked rather fine, though you'll just have to take my word for it. It's a down draft cylinder head for a Modified Anglia Engine also known as the MAE head. I'd never heard of this before but as Adrian explained some of its history a distant bell began to ring. And you just have to peer down the inlet ports in the top photo to see what straight path the inlet gases now have. Usually they'd have to negotiate a right-angle bend. Cosworth were the firm most closely associated with the MAE cylinder head but there were many other firms of these versions including Holbay. Ford and C...

Ergonomics is the study of man, or individual men, in the working environment. The term is derived from the Greek "ergon" for work (and nothing to do with Jason and the Argonauts) and "nomos" which is law and nothing to do with "gnomic" remarks. Ergonomics is now a recognised profession and one of its pioneers was Henry Dreyfuss, who was one of the first superstar industrial designers. His most famous work was not John Deere tractors or the streamlined locomotives he designed for the "Twentieth Century Limited". It was a text book entitled The Measure of Man and this became staple reading for students, like me, of industrial design. The Measure of Man obviously refers just as equally to female women of the opposite persuasion but to publish a seprate book entitled The Measure of Women would probably attract the wrong sort of readership - even though it would have been much more interesting to a load of teenage predominantly male industrial de...

Tempted? It was during a rather ribald discussion with some of my motor cycling friends that the question arose -- what is the motorcycling equivalent of an Austin Allegro? My Austin Allegro is a particularly nice example but that doesn't stop them taking the piss out of it. I know that it is not one of the world's greatest cars and some people voted these chubby little cars the worst ones of all time but I like to point out that much of the Allegro's vital organs are shared with the Mini, which, at about the same time, was voted the greatest car of all time. It seems odd to me that two cars with the same engine, gearbox and the clutch from the same manufacturer, and with suspension systems that follow the same damperless and space saving concept, could be both the best and the worst between them. But, as we say in Cornwall, "There it is and there you are." And as some deeply philosophical type might also say, "Less is more." After a great deal of...

The title sounds a bit of an "Oh, matron!" in retrospect but it's true - my old laptop has been resurrected, leaving me feeling like a self-satisfied Dr Frankenstein. And without having created any monsters, either - for the time being at any rate. I'm pretty pig-headed and although my laptop is nearly superfluous, I decided to have another go at it. The problem was the very limited time in which the keyboard or touch pad would respond. If the McAfee logo, or a message saying that a Java update was available, came up I was stuffed. The only thing to do then was to switch the power off and let the FAT do its stuff and have another race against time. After a less than promising start, I managed to get a message saying that Open Office was opening up automatically and at more than one application at a time, too. So I deleted Open Office and bought myself some extra time in which I was able to delete McAfee and Java, too. The result of this, however, was a complet...

It was a dark and stormy night at The Borough Arms on the road between Wadebridge and Bodmin. There were precious few travellers on the roads that evening and we had the usually popular hostelry pretty much to ourselves. There was just me and my friends and fellow members of the Imp Club, John and Sarah Doughty. Outside, the rain beat at the windows, the wind moaned in the chimney and the pub sign rattled on its chains but inside it was warm and welcoming. The fires were lit and after our meal we pulled up the armchairs in a semi-circle and gathered round the hearth. And, as might only be expected on a night such as this, talk soon turned to the subject of the supernatural. I happened to remark that I had never heard of a car being haunted. There have been ghost trains and phantom trucks and cars, I said, and I had even heard of a headless cyclist. But while accounts of ghostly cars have often been told, I had never heard of a real car being haunted as a house or a ship might be....

Not such a welcome sight as an ambulance for any refusenik, this police van has made it to Blighty (Photo: Sam Glover) I've just heard from Sam Glover of Practical Classic magazine. Not only did he used to own two UAZ-452s, but he has personal experience of them in Mongolia. He had this ambulance and the brown pickup. Both of them are RHD and he says the conversion from LHD was done over here and was somewhat crudely executed. They were imported around 1979-1980, which corresponds with the time I was doing my Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme expedition and wondering why Russian 4x4s were suddenly everywhere. (What did you do in the Cold War, Daddy? I went camping.) "Off-hand, I can't really remember the story of the UK importer," said Sam. "I seem to remember our archivist - one-man library Tony Turner - spinning me the full yarn in a pub, but unfortunately it was towards the end of a salubrious evening. I keep intending to button-hole him on the subject agai...

Pete Low dropped by the other day on his Armstrong on MT500 and as you can see from the photographs he's developed a few refinements for this bike since it was first dubbed a Vintage Thing. The mechanical specification remains the same but he's added a bigger 22 litre tank from a Honda XL500 and a low level Acerbis front mudguard. He's also invested in a pair of Oxford heated handlebar grips, since Pete rides his bike all year round, unlike some of us - like me, for instance - who freely admit to be fair weather riders. The new headlamp unit is an Acerbis Cyclops, which can take HID (High Intensity Discharge) bulbs. Sort of. Acerbis make quite a few different types, but the Cyclops is the only one Pete’s seen that is "E marked" & street legal. An interesting discovery has been, that Acerbis make a clear plastic shield that is tailor made, covering both main & dip to guard against breakage. Somewhere between Essex and Cornwall he inexplicably suffere...

The UAZ-452 became the UAZ-22069 Mentioning the UAZ-452 on this blog has prompted some responses but nothing concrete enough to explain how they arrived on Dartmoor. Peter Tuthill, of Motormind fame, has a brochure for one in English. He's promised to get me a facsimile copy and seems to recall that someone in Birmingham was importing them. Meanwhile, my mate Matt, who is a Tavistock boy born and bred and is an off road enthusiast, also remembers these little Russian 4x4's trundling over the moorland. He seems to have a vague recollection of having a ride in one but as this is something like 30 years ago it remains just a vague recollection. Personally I prefer the look of the earlier UAZ-450 While looking for something else, Matt succeeded where I have not by digging up with his folding sand shovel other references to the UAZ-452 on the Internet. On Horizons Unlimited , “The Website Motorcyclists Trust”, someone was asking the question, are these little 4x4 is an...

Everybody I talk to about Oliver Postgate reckons he was on drugs. I think this says more about the chattering classes than dear old Oliver. They obviously don't understand what it is to have an imagination. Some of us - and I include myself and the late and great Mr Postgate - don't need drugs to think wonderful thoughts. A few years ago I read his autobiography, Seeing Things , and this confirmed my already high opinion of him. I'd grown up on Ivor the Engine and Bagpuss and can still remember the anticipation that the prospect of a new Oliver Postgate brought me and my sister late one Sunday afternoon when we visited our grandparents. It all started for me with Pogle's Wood . Mr and Mrs Pogle lived a wood in an old tree stump. Mr Pogle would go out and have some sort of adventure, whereupon they would wake up The Plant, a kind of talking tulip that grew outside their front door, by pouring farmhouse cider over his roots. The Plant would then tell them a st...

I've been welding up my van in the workshop recently so the book publishing activities have taken a bit of a back seat. This is awkward right now because at this point I should be doing all sorts of promo stuff about my publishing activities. The website needs updating and I want to make more videos with the new software I've got. But my old van needs me and I quite enjoy forming new panels. I'd much rather it didn't rust at all and have various plans to make sure that it doesn't. You'll be able to read more about those on my Engine Punk blog in due course. I'd much prefer to be getting on with more creative stuff in steel. And in print. I enjoy bringing stuff back from the dead, though, and I'd feel lost without a van. It's so useful and a great facilitator. The back of this van will be the back of the van from which I'll be selling my books and when I'm rich and famous it'll be worth a fortune. So, you see, it's really all part ...

There hasn't been much mention musical content on this blog recently but this is for a very good reason. True to the do-it-yourself anti-establishment philosophy that underpins (some would say undermines) the Engine Punk ethos, I'm having a go at making music myself. I haven't mentioned this before because - whisper it - I'm not actually very good at it yet but I have played in public to a bunch of very supportive friends. Somehow, at Newquay Tretherras School, they gave us music lessons without actually teaching us any music. I never learned to read music or understood musical structure. Music has played a big part in my life for many, many years and I particularly appreciate live music and still like to dance whenever I get the chance, even though at times it seems socially unacceptable to do so now that I am 45 years old. As the years went by, the feeling grew that I lacked something with regard to music. I knew what I liked and often heard tunes in my head, espe...

I first heard of Terry Pratchett when his first Discworld novel The Colour of Magic was read out as the book of the week on Woman's Hour. This must have been in 1984. What struck me then was his beathtaking imagination. Could magic ever have a colour? If only wizzards (note deliberate mis-spelling) can see the octarine glow of magic, or taste its tinny smell in their mouths, does this make them the supreme synesthetes? Since then, Pratchett has added regularly to the Discworld series and he's also found time to create the Digger series, known as the Bromeliad Trilogy . One of the great attractions of Terry Pratchett's work were the covers designed by Josh Kirby . Right from the start, the Discworld books had a distinct identity that could be spotted from across a busy bookshop. Kirby's illustrations became synonymous with Pratchett's stories and I think this great partnership had a lot to do with the success of the series. Whoever set up this partnership rea...

Sad that this very rare car got so far down the restoration path but then progress faltered. At least it got moved on to someone who might get it together properly. I spotted this on eBay yesterday -- it sold today for £300. The Austin Allegro Equipe is the rarest of all Austin Allegro production variants and earned notoriety as being the Allegro that had "Vroom!" As far as I know they were all in the silver and featured a rather fetching go faster stripe in orange and red. All Allegro Equipes had the 1750 cc engine and five-speed box. Those alloy wheels you see were also unique to the car. I have no idea how many Allegro Equipes were made but there can't be many survivors and I really hope this one has found a good home. If ever an Allegro was to become collectable, the Equipe is the most likely. The Vanden Plas 1750 may be posh but it doesn't have "Vroom!" Forget about folding down picnic tables and a burr walnut dashboard that really is as good as th...