Engine Punk

I was unable to go to the VSCC Wiscombe hillclimb this year so by way of compensation have been reviewing the photos I took last year. This the Austin-MG special built and raced by Brian King. It's essentially an Austin 7 engined fitted with an MG ohc cylinder head but there's a bit more to it than that. I like the way it's been fitted - and supercharged. Most MGs of this era had a vertical shaft drive that doubled as the dynamo. It was notorious for getting covered in oil and not producing any sparks. For his Austin-MG special Brian chose a duplex sprocket chain drive. With all that going on the front of the engine most normal people wouldn't have known where to put the blower but Brian extended the tail end of the crankshaft rather than the nose and moved the flywheel outwards so that he could take the supercharger drive inboard of the clutch. The components date back to 1930 and 1934 so long before Austin and MG were bedfellows in the overcrowd...

At last - more info including a picture of that weird engine I found backalong A chap called David Pickard has sent me a link to the Trojan Trust website where there is a reproduction of an article published in the October 1946 issue of the Commercial Vehicle User's Journal . What wonderful names we used to have for our magazines! And the engine featured in this article appears to be the same supercharged engine that I found in an old copy of The Motor Vehicle by Newton and Steeds. This engine powered the 15cwt & 25cwt Trojan vans after World War II and in general terms the Commercial Vehicle User's Journal matches the technical description provided by Newton and Steeds - to wit 24bhp and 1186cc (65.5mm x 88mm). Although it is a four cylinder engine, it has six cylinders - four of them paired in two split cylinders that share a common combustion chamber. But the most interesting feature of the design is an inlet rotor in the head of the charging cylinders. This ...

There's something interesting going on across the internet at the moment. Somebody else has picked up the engine punk ball and is running with it. Engine Punk Litmus is a blog that suggests examples of the engine punk aesthetic and I have to say that so far - having coined the phrase in a tongue-in-cheek effort to pigeonhole my own brand of sci fi fantasy writing - the suggestions so far are pretty much what I would call engine punk. But what do other people think?

I was running late on Sunday but still manage to make the Werrington Park Speed Hill Climb just north of Launceston in the border country between Cornwall and Devon. In dry and sunny conditions but with a surprisingly chill breeze there were many fast runs and class records were being matched, if not actually broken. And the surroundings were just magnificent - the artist in me revelled in the colours and the light conditions. The course at Werrington is 1200m long and one of the longest hill climbs in the UK and there were almost 100 cars present, many of them featuring double drives with friends and family competing against each other in the same car. Held over two days, the event attracted competitors from as far afield as Birmingham and constituted a round of the 2009 Cornish Speed Championship, the 2009 Bridge Tires and Wheels Motor Sport ASWMC Hillclimb Championship and the 2009 ACSMC Hamilton classic hillclimb championship. I spent a very pleasant afternoon...

Following my recent amazement at discovering Ford Modified Anglia Engine head at Adrian Booth's workshop, not only have I been in contact with the owner of such a device (more on that later) but I also stumbled across this illustration of one in a most unexpected place. This is a scan of a black-and-white illustration from Dave Vizard's book, How to modify your Mini. This work was subsequently expanded to embrace all A series engines, whether fitted to a Mini or not, but whereas the later book concentrates purely on the engines, this volume also covers suspension and braking. In terms of modifying Minis, bigger engines have always been popular and in the chapter that I find most appealing a number of big for long stroke Mini engines are proposed. But right at the end of this chapter is an engine transplant involving a kit produced by Richard Longman allowed the fitting of a Ford cross flow engine. A series engines can be enlarged up to 1600cc but this is a very time-consu...

Candidi Provocatores Allard J1X Is this the ultimate trials car? It may not be the most up-to-date but it's brutally effective. My scrap buddy, Rob Robinson-Collins, and I borrowed it from owner Roger Ugalde for the 2009 Land's End Trial with the result that we both want one. Rob's a little ahead of me in that game. He has, as the French knights in Monty Python and The Holy Grail would say, "already got one." It is indeed, "vair nass-eh." In fact, Rob's got two Allards, a complete L-type in pieces and another one that had been chopped around to make a kind of overgrown HRF-Opus hotrod thingy. HRF stood for Hot Rod Ford and with a heavy metal Allard chassis and a stonking great Ford V8 it was more of an HRF-Magnum Opus. Rob was initially looking for a spare gearbox for his other Allard but when he told Tina about what he'd found attached the gearbox of his dreams, she said, "Well, at that price you can't really say no." What ...

I've just been advised of this extremely positive review on BookPleasures for The Wormton Lamb. I am particularly pleased because I wasn't entirely sure if the Anarchadian Engine Punk thang would translate for American readers but it seems that in this country we've been led to expect the worst. Obviously, this particular reviewer is a highly intelligent woman of considerable taste. And before anyone asks, no i don't know her. In the UK we hear so many stories of British TV programmes being re-written and re-acted to suit the American sense of homour - hell the folks in the parish beyond the Scillies even spell it differently - but they are people like you and me. Some jokes they get and some they don't just like Europeans, Africans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Australians. So I am re-assured that it my stuff will appeal to the American market and could even go global. It's quite easy being a megalomaniac, y'know.