Engine Punk

This the pre-facelift C15D and is now quite rare If you want a truly recreational vehicle, you could do a lot worse than one of these. This is my 1986 Citroen C15D van, known to other members of my family as Mighty Whitey. It's old enough now to qualify for classic insurance but for the last 14 years has been my principal vehicle. During that time I've had engines, motorbikes, a lathe, a coal bunker and a Shetland pony in the back but not all at the same time. I’ve camped in it, too, visiting various parts of the UK but also France, Holland and Belgium. If I put the passenger seat fully forward, there’s just enough space for me lie diagonally across the load space. On an inflatable mattress, I sleep incredibly well in it. It’s just an ordinary panel van really but, whereas all those designer SUVs are too specialised to be useful only as fashion statements, for versatility nothing can touch Mighty Whitey. My van has acquired many names over the years. It was fleeting kno...

Last night I was making a bracket - as well as a racket - in my garage-cum-studio when I heard a very thought provoking programme on Radio 4. It was about sleep patterns and how the early risers have been favoured by society ever since we were an agricultural economy. In our pre-industrial society, our lives were ruled by daylight and the early bird really did get the worm. However, since the dawn of industrialisation, we have adopted much more varied work and sleep patterns. Our sleep patterns change throughout our lives. As young children, we tend to go to bed earlier than when we are adults and when we are teenagers we prefer to stay up late and have long lie-ins instead of getting up at the crack of dawn. And sleep patterns vary tremendously between individuals. The point this programme made was that some of us are Type A and naturally disposed towards getting up early and going to bed early. The disposition towards early-ness for larks is much greater than it would be for mo...

I'm really looking forward to seeing this brilliant band again on Friday 27th March, this time in Plymouth at The Hippo, which was The Hub. Plymouth gets by-passed by too many bands so I'm hoping The Hippo (short for hippodrome?) will be a regular draw to those of us who like both kinds of music - punk and rock. It's a new venue for me but some of my mates say it's pretty good. What we're hoping for is a great gig from SLF, so good they'll include Plymouth on all forthcoming tours. I saw them in Falmouth last summer and I've been up to Bristol to see them many times in the past so want them to remember this gig and come back. (Photo from Kev-inr's Flickr photos ) To that end, about 30 people have been enticed into going. Some of us have seen Fingers before but most of our party are coming along because they've heard so much about SLF from the rest of us. I hope there's a good turn out but it'll be a new experience knowing so many people ...

I'm curiously tempted Or it could be a UAZ-3303, a UAZ-3741, a UAZ-4909 Farmer, a UAZ-39094 or a UAZ-39265. It could even be an SBA-2M-1S with armoured protection. I’ll try to explain. The UAZ-2206 is a sexed up version of the venerable UAZ-452, Russia's interpretation of a four-wheel-drive Ford Transit. The most noticeable difference is the revised front-end styling and the addition of a “kengurin.” I can't be sure but I'm fairly certain that a “kengurin” is the Russian equivalent of a roo bar. Roo bars were originally an Australian invention designed to keep kangaroos from spoiling the paintwork of your and yer mate’s utes down under, kangaroos have notoriously poor traffic sense. Obviously kangaroos are not much of a problem in Outer Mongolia but there's probably plenty of other big wild things that could damage the front of your UAZ. Peter Tuthill has sent me a copy of the UAZ-2206 brochure and although I don't speak or read Russian, I found it ext...

I spent a very entertaining evening not so long ago with Peter Tuthill, the motoring historian. He is a terrific enthusiast for anything and everything with wheels and engines and has a vast retentive memory. When Autocar magazine inaugurated the first ever Motormind contest (like Mastermind but with much more interesting subjects) Peter Tuthill was the first ever winner. He's also a very good speaker so if you ever get the chance to see him in action - whether it's about cars, motorsport, local history or the Observer Corps - do go along. Peter's interest began at an early age with an Ian Allan ABC. This featured the addresses of the motor manufacturers so he started to write off for brochures using the headed paper from the family business in Penzance in Cornwall. Soon he amassed an extraordinary collection as he worked his way through this book and then The Observer's Book of Automobiles. The response was almost overwhelming. Peter's knowledgeable enquiri...

I've just had an extremely positive review on BookPleasures.com, the independent internet review site. Read it here! I am particularly encouraged by this coup - I had a sneaky feeling some of the humour wouldn't be got by an American reader. Either the reviewer was particularly clever and understood what I was on about or it's not so abstruse for our transatlantic cousins as I'd thought. At first I never considered how it would appeal to an American reader. People are still people wherever you go but over the years I've heard many instances of British shows being adapted for American tastes. This seems especially true of comedies but it doesn't seem to be a problem for Jaspar Fforde whose very Britishness is one of his keyways to success. Wallace and Gromit also cross this great alleged divide. The Japanese love them especially their tea drinking. It makes for an alternative take on their tea ceremony, I suppose. In case Jaspar's sense of humour ne...

WARNING - PERSONS OF A NERVOUS OR SENSITIVE DISPOSITION, PEOPLE WITH A HIGHLY DEVELOPED SENSE OF MECHANICAL SYMPATHY, ANYONE WHO IS EASILY FRIGHTENED OR DISTRESSED OR ANY OTHER WETS, WIMPS AND DRIPS LACKING THE BACKBONE OF A JELLYFISH (NO OFFENCE TO JELLYFISHES INTENDED) SHOULD READ NO FURTHER. (AND THEY CERTAINLY SHOULDN'T LOOK AT THE FOLLOWING PICTURES EITHER.) There's been a burst of activity in the Boogie Wundaland studio recently. Quite apart from welding up tractor bonnets, at least three of my own vehicles have been through my personal industrial unit and every one of them is a forthcoming Vintage Thing that will appear on this blog dreckly. I just want them to be in finer fettle before I feel like featuring them. But first, some grotesque pictures of mechanical torture and automotive wrongs wot I have righted. This is a clutch but no ordinary clutch. It's on the point of collapse. If you look closely you can see the inner edges of the diaphragm fingers h...

Although I don't have a telly these days, when I was younger I watched a lot. And my favourite programme of all was Dr Who. In my opinion the best Doctor Who was Jon Pertwee who brought such action and excitement to the role. I remember Jon Pertwee was on the phone once to The Master, played by the brilliant Roger Delgado, when The Master tweaked a gadget and Jon Pertwee's phone cable became alive and began to strangle him - complete with sound effects from the BBC Radiophonics Workshop. Of course he escaped but I don't think Tom Baker would have managed it. He was too intellectual for me. Pertwee's Dr Who was like a time traveling James Bond. He had the the gadgets. Who could ever forget the sonic screwdriver? (I had one of those once but it gave me a nosebleed.) He had a quirky Edwardian car (a Siva Edwardian no less! - see my occasional blogs about Sivas on my Engine Punk blog ) that did more than 007's Aston Martin and could call on reinforcements in the ...

I can remember the point at which I felt four-wheel drives were straying in an uncertain direction that I didn't like. It was when I saw the Terrero for the first time (images provided by Car Styling magazine). And yet I like the Terrero. Four wheel drives trucks should look like they can climb Mount Everest. Here was one that looked like it was doing 100mph standing still. It also passed the Thunderbird puppet test - could I honestly see Virgil or Gordon behind the wheel of one of these? The answer to all three of these issues was yes. Vehma International, owned by Magna International, a Canadian automotive parts supplier, exhibited the 8.2-litre 4x4 Terrero as a highly developed concept car at the 1989 Geneva show. It was a wide-hipped, fat-flared off-road sportscar, which sounds great until you see the flush fitting glass and expensive interior, but at the time I was impressed by it. I still think it looks great and with 535bhp it could do the 0-60 dash in 7 seconds and...

I've taken to calling my shed a studio because of the arty farty things I get up to sometimes. Some might call it glorified bodging. This weekend I was sculpting in steel a new bottom edge to the radiator grille for this Nuffield 9/16 Mini tractor. It belongs to my very good friend and neighbour Andrew Snell. He bought it on eBay about three years ago with severely corroded front wheels and another of his mates converted some old Massey Ferguson wheels to the peculiar stud pattern that Nuffield used. Andrew also managed to find a spare bonnet for this tractor on eBay although the bottom lip was badly corroded. The original much-bashed-about bonnet had quite a good lip so he had the idea to make one good bonnet out of the twain. Some of mates among the local tractor owning mafia reckoned a repair in glassfibre was the solution but Andrew felt this area could be prone to damage and steel would be preferable. For some reason, he thinks I'm a better well than he is. I quit...

I am currently re-drafting the beginning of my next book and it has occurred to me how much of this self-publishing lark has nothing to do with the simple act of getting your thoughts down on paper. Or a screen. Or a digital dictaphone. Assembling these often random ideas into a coherent story also takes a lot of time but I quite enjoy doing that - drafting and re-drafting until the story has a direction that and sense of purpose that makes it almost write itself. Once I have that all important orientation in the narrative, the story assumes a kind of critical mass and I get carried away by it until it's finished. It always needs more polishing once I've reached The End but by then I can see the whole story, something no amount of planning can bring out. So that's the writing part, the easy bit. The self-publishing manuals are also telling me to do a whole lot of other things. Some of them I find easy, others I don't. And if I am to be a writer who actua...