Engine Punk

Stephen Bailey's MG Midge during tea and cake after his successful ascent of Sutcombe Hill A Midge was a kit car you built from plans available back in the eighties. More of a self-build affair, some parts were purchasable to ease the construction process. Most were based on Triumph Herald chassis, which made the process of construction fairly easy especially if you had a vintage style radiator shell to hand. Stephen Bailey built a Midge but then felt he could build another one specifically for trials. Instead of a Herald he managed to find a pre-war MG chassis and used most of that as the basis for his Class 8 trials special. hardly anything else MG went into. The running gear is mostly Ford with a 1620cc Kent engine. This has a single SU on quite a long inlet tract for torque, hence that round thing on the bonnet. I think he used Triumph uprights I asked him how he'd registered it and he said he'd built such a long time ago the DVLA trusted anyone who was bui...

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...

While at Adrian Booth’s workshop the other day, I spotted this interesting old trails special. I’d gone over to nearby Doublebois (pronounced Double Boys) to discuss the shortening of a Volvo torque tube so that the vital organs of said Volvo could be insinuated into Morris Minor. Adrian can do strange and wonderful things with steel and aluminium and is another of life’s great enthusiasts. The Hobsy or Hobbsie Special  “What’s this old thing on the trailer?” I asked him.  “It was called a Hobsy but it hasn’t done much work. The chassis rotten and it’s a bit of a lash up, really. I’m having a clear out and this is going.” “I wish I’d brought my digital camera,” I said. “Then I could record its final moments.” “Oh you can borrow mine,” Adrian replied.  So despite my lack of foresight, the Hobsy Special did not go unrecorded.  Very little is known about it. It had a 1600 Ford Kent engine, that was reputed to have been ...