Engine Punk

Following my earlier reminiscences about the GP Centron - the first ever VW based exotic kit car - none other than Colin Clifford got in touch. Regular readers may remember that I  recently had an exchange with him on the comments to one of my earlier Centron posts in which he mentioned some old photographs. Well, Colin's come good and sent me some, via his brother Gerald. This Centron has mismatched wheels - are those Wolfraces on the front and chrome Wellers on the back? Most intriguing of all though is the background, which contains another shell in white gelcoat. Could this have been a convertible version? The first picture shows the Centron in an industrial unit, which matches my memories of the Statestyle set up in Threemilestone. Note that I'm not referring to the car as a GP Centron. As originally conceived by GP Concessionaires it did not have conventional doors but by the time this car was built it the folding canopy arrangement had been dismissed as too exo...

Just by way of a brief update, it's sad to relate that the Jetstream (VT No.20) did not live up to its promise and is no longer available. I saw this machine as a prototype, looking good in bright red at the Royal Cornwall Show in 2008, but it never reached full-scale production from its base in Redruth. Part of the problem could have been its looks - Car Magazine hated them . Did the looks of this car sink it? And the guy who was claimed to have designed it, vigorously rejected this claim as this comment on the Car magazine website shows. "I am Brian Rossi, former Ford Motor Company design executive. Regrettably, the information on the Jetstream SC250 has reached me just recently.  I was extremely displeased to find that my name is used in association with this car - all over the web. I should have reacted immediately to clear my name and professional reputation. It may be too late now, but I still want to declare that BRIAN ROSSI HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ...

Goonhavern 2011 and there's nothing on the roads I mentioned a sprint or time trial on this blog some time ago, held in a decade when a nimby was unknown and folk were more like to say Yes on my back roads The time trial was held in Goonhavern during the 1920s and here is the "now" view compared with the "then" view below, when people said "Let's see what'll she do mister!" and had their own friendly little time trials on public roads. Here, I'm standing in the middle of the A3075 road facing out of the village, looking towards Newquay. There's a 30 mph sped limit here now and that black sign on the left facing traffic coming up the hill reminds you if you're going too fast. Goonhavern 1920s with a stripped down Calthorpe approaching the starting line Things haven't changed so much since the 20s. The road isn't much wider - it probably was always the width of a drover's road so shepherds could drive she...

I know this Austin Hall-Scott has a 10-litre 4 cylinder aero-engine but if it sounds like my mate's tractor that runs a turboed Ford Cargo engine, why not go hillclimbing with a truck engine? A question popped into my mind a couple of times recently about the powerplants in commercial vehicles and whether they might be suitable for engine punk activities - to wit, constructing a special for hill climbing and/or similar performance work. The Austin coach engine had a swept volume of 3460cc and put out 67.5 bhp at 2,900rpm This is not such a daft idea as it may sound at first. Many classic car engines began life in trade. The Humber 4-litre "Blue Riband" engine started out in Commer trucks and so did its rival at "The Austin", a similar 6-cylinder motor originally designed for Austin commercials vehicles, or Birmingham Bedfords as they were known. (The story goes that Leonard Lord approved the copying of a Bedford design to speed up the R & D proce...

"Here is a sturdy good-looking van which conforms in every way to modern requirements. It's construction is typical of Trojan simplicity and solidity and just as with all Trojan vehicles, even if driven carelessly, will not sustain injury to the mechanical parts." Despite their weirdness and lack of performance I remain intrigued by Trojans and some of the commercial vans were actually very well styled. The two examples shown are both Trojan Senior 12cwt models, 12cwt equating to 610kgs or slightly less than the capacity on my old Citroen van (VT No.44) . This a special bodied baker's van built out of aluminium to the order of Kenyon's. Cakes go on top with bread below. They had a reputation for hard work and economy but are hard pushed to even keep up with the traffic these days. As these are clearly pre-war vans, they were powered by the unsupercharged two-stroke engine that intrigued me so long ago and sparked my interest in these odd machines....

That's me on the left, looking vaguely spiritual but feeling more like The Hooded Claw in that hat, as I proselytise (good word) with my Suzuki clutch tool and a wooden raygun that I found - fashioned by the forces of nature itself - by the tracks of the Liskeard and Caradon Railway The Steampunk movement in Cornwall has been growing steadily during 2011 since a like-minded group of scientists, inventors, artists, explorers, adventurers, dollymopps, ruffians and natural philosophers had a bit-of-a-do fighting a squid in Falmouth last April. Organised by a variety of inspired and industrious individuals under the collective identity of Steampunk Kernow, notable members of our illustrious circle have subsequently survived a hot-air balloon crash, broken innumerable speed records on the Bodmin & Wenford railway (the cream teas went especially quickly) and cavorted with specially created daleks and oods in a Dr Who-themed Christmas party in The Bird in Hand, an ancient coachi...

This Morris Minor looks a little deflated but in a good way Posting about the Kilo Sports reminded me of this car which I spotted in the tax exempt car park at the 2010 Goodwood Revival. It's not been chopped and channelled but it's been sectioned in the style of the US hotrodders and could have been what the Barris Brothers would've produced had they gotten their grubby mitts on a Moggy Thou during the fifties. However, as it's a monococque, the sectioning process is much harder. It involves chopping right through the car not once but twice and removing the strip that's left in between these tow cuts. Of course, being a well-rounded little jelly-mould, the cuts are not going to be straight, at least not if the end result is to justify the effort. Nice picnic basket madam. Perhaps a bit more bulge to the bonnet, though? What is so clever about this is that the unaltered greenhouse area doesn't look out of place on the lowered shoulders of the section...

Here's the Buckingham glassfibre monococque resting on its headstock. What I'd really like to see is an image of the complete bike. From my stats page for this blog, I can see that one of the most visited posts on this blog is for the Buckingham 4 valve JAP 500, a speedway device featuring a GRP monococque frame and a DIY 4 valve conversion. It was built by Graham Buckingham who was a technician when I was a student at Coventry Polytechnic in 1985. We fell into conversation as fellow piston heads are wont to do and he brought in some parts to show me. From above you can see the recesses for the detachable tank and seat. They were held in place by rubber straps or over centre catches. I've posted all I know about this machine before and following recent erudite feedback on other automotive queries you might expect that I'd heard more about this curious machine. But no. It's as much a mystery as it ever was. Unless I hear something dreckly (good C...

The Kilo Sports was a no frills, doorless roadster based on a Morris Minor and produced in Cornwall. When I was still at school in the late seventies and early eighties, there were still some after shocks from what Peter Filby called The Fun Car Explosion. Kit car manufacturers sprang up everywhere, it seemed, and offered the eager purchaser all manner of extrovert motoring experiences. Many used a common basis like a Beetle or a Triumph based chassis but the Kilo Sports used the organs from a dead Morris Minor. The Kilo was designed by David Stiff and built by a local Morris Minor specialist known as the The Thousand Workshop. Production began in 1983 and lasted for a year with a brief revival in 1986 and estimates of production top out at about 14 cars. I had a very good friend and neighbour who about this time ran an ex-GPO Minor van. My first ever car was a Morris Minor, which I've still got (more about that another time) and we visited The Thousand Workshop because it ...

At first sight, with those fat wire wheels, this special looked rather good but reversing the tendency of a true Vintage Thing, this device did not get better the more you looked at it. The environmental disposal of this trials special appeared way back on this blog (End of a special) and I thought it had been featured as a Vintage Thing. Earlier today I stumbled across the Hobbsie (or Hobsy) Special again and realised that it had not been immortalised in this way. So here are some more images of it before the end-of-life directive was carried out on it by metal guru Adrian Booth. In truth, it wasn't such a Vintage Thing and had very little to recommend it. Somebody had built it for trialling and they seem to have started off with some good components, like a Ford 1600 engine and MGB wire wheels, but along the way something happened and the Hobbsie (or Hobsy) Special never amounted to much. It got parked up and deteriorated for many years until 2007 when space considerations...

Foxbat - wasn't that the code name for a Russian cold war fighter? Just a bijou follow-up-ette to my musings on the Jag shooting brake. Mr Valve Bounce left a comment and pointed me to the Bonhams website but there's still some mystery surrounding it.. Nobody knows who made it, although another existed back along (good Cornish expression). This car is thought to be the sole survivor and historians have suggested it was made as a competition tender for long distance motor sport events. It is properly known as the Foxbat. I'd spotted the badge on the rear door at the time but forgot about this when I uploaded the admiitedly rather dark pictures. I still say it took a genius to realise the concept of blending a Moggy with a Coventry cat. But how does that make a Foxbat? On my screen at home they don't look so murky but there's something fitting about this car emerging from the shadows.

Also at Goodwood this year, but actually competing was the Ferrari breadvan. And now, motivated by simple devilry following the last post on a Jaguar XK150 shooting brake, here is the Ferrari "Breadvan" modelled by Drogo on a 250GT. I'd first seen this car at the Le Mans Classic in 2010 but I'd heard about it years before that.  Whoosh! This car divides opinion but I like it. I think they find the straightlines don't match the curves but that roofline is the blurred streak from the top of the windscreen and I particularly like the effect from the rear. It looks so fast! Its nose is beautifully styled, too. Apparently, it was nicknamed "Anastasia", which around Modena is a derogatory name for an ugly woman but it looks pretty good to me. This car is low, lower than the kneecaps of a grasshopper. It was not built for its load carrying abilities. Although the rear window is hinged, just try to get anything in it. Or out of it. After...

From the side the lines almost flow nicely I went to the Goodwood Revival again this year and, despite the corporate hostility to the genuine enthusiast that's built into this event, still enjoyed myself tremendously. The racing was good the cars were amazing and there was a special dirtbike-heroes-of-yesteryear display, complete with classic scramblers and their riders. I particularly liked the way they had a burn up on the grass round the circuit. But out of everything, this is pne of the machines that intrigued me - difficult when it comes to four wheeled vehicular contrivances I know but bear with me. Parked by the entrance and exit, was this Jaguar XK150 shooting brake. As I'm sure you've guessed by now the rear end is Morris Minor Traveller. I was fascinated by it. It's something I would never have thought of doing and makes a lot of sense. Many woodies were produced in Britain during the late forties due to material shortages and Government restrictions...

Among VW buggies this machine manages to look quite distinctive without being consciously styled. In the 2008 Exeter it was crewed by Ben Johnson and Barry White ("Ah feel like makin' lurve") from Shaftesbury. Could this be the ultimate VW based trials special? I've heard it cost upwards of £30,000 but in the entry lists I've seen so far it's described simply as a VW Special. I'd like to know who built the thing. It's certainly very effective. I stumbled across these images while looking at pictures associated with my earlier posts on the Exeter Trial.  Y'see, I'm entered again, which makes 3 times so far but for the other two I was unfortunately a non-starter. You've probably read all about those adventure on Engine Punk already. Anyway, I'm quietly confident that with Rob Robinson-Collins we'll do better than before. With a record like mine, the only way is up. And we're going to be in Candidi Provocatore Allard, too. ...

So there you have it - The Car With No Name built by Anon I find this highly amusing. Through the power of the internet a chap has got in touch about a mysterious VW based special that I saw years ago at the National Kit Car Show at Stoneleigh. I featured this as VT No. 54 , described it simply as a VW Special and asked if anyone could identify it and tell me what it was called. Bob Bateman got in touch to say it was his car and it was called the CWNN. What does CWNN stand for? It stands for Car With No Name. The origin of this car still remains a mystery. Its builder must have called it something and if it still exists it ought to have something other than Volkswagen on its logbook or V5 because it definitely isn't a Beetle anymore. And the authorities are a bit fussy about that nowadays, unlike the glory times when this car was built. As if anyone could mistake it for a Beetle.... I nearly bought this issue Bob has filled in some of the gaps. He wrote about it i...

At first I thought this was a very rare Husqvarna vee twin but then I saw the tank badge. I've just got back from this year's Goodwood Revival and this machine is the one that made most of an impression on me, despite the great and the good and the presence of many other thoroughbred racing machines. This James vee-twin was propped up outside one of the "member's only" pavilions that blight the Goodwood Revival for the ordinary enthusiast. I stopped and stared and so did another chap in RAF uniform. He had a two-stroke James and an MAC Velocette and this machine had stopped him in his tracks. neither of us was aware that James had ever made such a machine and it occurred to me that maybe it was a "special" using a JAP engine. The only thing was, it looked like a production bike and had that well-used and well-loved patina that you can't fake. As soon as I got home I did some ferreting around in the Boogie Wundaland archives (this is a joke n...