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I am very interested in Infra Red photography and the haunting images it provides once converted to black and white 

Engine Punk began as a means of promoting my writing but this blog has grown a life of its own. The Vintage Things and Fire Drakes that I've happened across are noteworthy and I want to share my enthusiasm about them at a very personal level. 

Steamers at Boconnoc. I believe we will one day come to think of the internal combustion engine as fondly as we do those that are external. They are even making new steam engines sixty years after destroying so many! There simply aren't enough to go round.

Engine Punk is also a record of my low budget motorsport activities. There have been so many of them, they become a blur, a blur not through speed but from confused memories over a surprising length of time.

I discovered across the Pontsarn viaduct one frosty moonlit night, appearing across the valley as I crested the hill. Actually, it was late summer but you get the picture.

 

Steering Engine Punk back to its original purpose, I'd like to share some images that I think capture the mood or philosophy behind it. Or beside it. Or coming up on the inside and overtaking it so now it's slipstreaming mood, philosophy and child-like excitement.

There's a Mad Max steam punk element to Engine Punk. This is Wasp at Wiscombe Park in 2012. I read Specials by John Bolster and loved the stories of the home made Shelsley specials. Some cracking examples turn up at VSCC events such as the Hall-Scott Austin and the Salamander special.

Recent discussions with friends, neighbours and mates in the motor trade have highlighted the disposability of modern vehicles. Engine Punk is about DIY sustainable motoring. It's subversive and rails against today's designed obsolescence. 

Piles of gearboxes in a Cornish scrapyard become a kind of art, treasures among the rubbish that degrade, performance art that changes over time. 

Cars seem to be disposable life style items, marketed to consumers that say something about you as a person. I like them to be so interesting and fascinating I feel motivated to maintain their use in perpetuity.

My interest in motorcycles goes back a long way.

Motorbikes seem to be unnecessarily complicated and growing farther away from the engine on wheels feeling that I found appealing in the first place.

Bill Bennett in his MG on Simms in the 1996 Exeter Trial.

Over many years I have marshalled on motorsport events in the west country. Some of the photos I took are now of historic interest. Those times seem like only yesterday to me.

Inspired by "ghost hunter" Simon Marsden's work, I enjoy creating similar spooky images using a digital camera converted to infra red. Blue becomes black and green becomes white. A sunny day becomes a frosty moonlit scene. 

I also like benign neglect and am fascinated by industrial archaeology. Growing up in Cornwall I couldn't avoid it. I played around mineshafts and ruins and toxic waste. People from the local towns used to dump old cars in quarries or simply by the side of the road. I frequented scrapyards for my projects and found all sorts of treasure.

When neglect gets beyond benign. I found this WW2 truck at Tinker's Park in the eighties and even then it was too far gone. I am distantly related to Charlie Mann who collected Jeeps and GMCs from the Second World War. He had a museum at Lamanva in Cornwall and subsequently supplied vehicles for the film industry, including Raiders of the Lost Ark. Operating earlier, when trucks like this (maybe an American Autocar?) could still be saved, Charlie Mann followed his interest and made a career out of saving what others had thrown away.

I remember stumbling across a motorcycle frame in a wood with saplings growing up through it. I found a serial number and when I got home I looked it up in reference books (this was before the internet) and found out it was for an Ariel 500 twin, the proper Ariel design by Val Page. I couldn't return for some time and when did it had gone. So had the Austin 18 and Austin 20 next to it, by the way.

Again, I was too late for this MG. I can't remember what type it was but my memory of it was that it looked like a PA or TA Midget. My father died in 1980 so we must have discovered this several years before. I went back with a camera many years later (eighties some time?) and this was all I found.

On another walk with my parents, I came across a pre-war MG sports car in a field and my dad began to share my boyish enthusiasm. Many, many years later I went back and found its axles. I hope the rest of it was saved by other enthusiasts. 

The engine is a thing of beauty, especially when you know what each part does. I like to feel in touch with the designer and their thought processes. One of my favourite who-designed-it mysteries is The Classic Twin Cam Engine by Griffith Borgeson.

You can tell a lot about a civilisation from what it discards and I wanted to save all these old things. Preserving our motoring heritage is also good for the environment. 

You used to see obscure workshops and idle yards like this in every town or village. Usually, they've been swept aside to provide housing. This yard in Camborne was no exception. I used to pas sit regularly but had the foresight to record it before it disappeared for ever.

Present day vehicles don't interest me. They are too lumpen and complicated. They are not meant to be repaired. I reckon there's a cut off point around the turn of the millenium after which no car or bike is worth getting excited about or is capable of being used much after its warranty runs out.

The undergrowth can still hold treasures. Today they are quietly removed from public gaze, baled up before any useful components can be retrieved and sent half way round the world to be returned as fridges and washing machines.

I am willing to be persuaded on that point. In fact, I'd be delighted but doubt it will happen.

The GTM Libra V6 is a good example of contemporary design. I nominate it as a future Vintage Thing. I could just easily have chosen a Lotus Elise or a Dodge Viper but none of these are what you might call current. This photo was from the Exeter Kit Car show in November 2009. That's 16 years ago! The GTM is a kit car or a component car. Now there is an industry that - having flourished with a vast array of original designs during the fun car explosion of the sensational seventies - now offers replicas of "classic" designs, albeit of vastly improved quality compared to what went before.
Electric cars are like mobile phones or domestic appliances, essential to modern living but nothing to stir the soul.

Along the way I've snapped some examples of the sort of things that intrigue me.

Rolling sculpture