Vintage Thing No.65 - Austin Hall-Scott

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 Wiscombe, I remember watching the Austin Hall-Scott negotiate the Sawbench hairpin only to cough and splutter and set fire to itself. Steam punk is for heroes and so is the Austin Hall-Scott.

The powerplant is a very early design of aero engine and is an overhead cam four cylinder.

Let's just think about this.

That's a 10-litre 4 cylinder so each pot is a two and half litre hole in the space/time continuum.

Elbert J. Hall and Bert C. Scott were Californians who subsequently contributed ideas for the WW1 Liberty engine. Their own designs of fours, sixes and eights shared many common components between them and featured a hemi-head that contributed to a good power-to-weight ratio for the time.

But Hall-Scott later went into gasoline marine engines and never answered the challenge of the diesel engine until the sixties, when it was too late.

The chassis is from a 1911 Austin and nothing like an Austin 7. Austins of those days were much bigger and included a straight six boasting 9.7 litres. But that was a side-valve and wouldn't have the right amount of grunt.

The trick with putting together a special like this is to make it look all of  a piece and little details like the embossed Austin logo on the bulkhead go a long way to achieving this. Little conceits by the constructor show how much they enjoyed building this machine and raise simple engineering into rolling sculpture.