Engine Punk

By the time you read this I will be gone. I will be on the camp site in the middle of the circuit enjoying the 24 hours of endurance racing at Le Mans. This will be my third visit to the circuit for this event and I am really looking forward to it. Everybody says that it's so much better value for money than Formula 1. I think that Bernie and Max should dispense with the racing and just concentrate on the refuelling and tyre changing because that's how Formula 1 cars overtake these days. At Le Mans, I will have virtually a very long weekend of proper job racing and razzmatazz.

The sun shone again on the Run to the Sun this year and in addition to peachy 23 windowed microbuses like this example there many other fine examples of automotive art present at the show'n'shine on Sunday. My sister said I was mad to go for many people who have live around Newquay believe RTTS causes nothing but trouble with the local toughs picking fights with louts from a line when I saw nothing but people having a good time, admiring each other's handicraft and relaxing in the weather. This machine won spirit of the event award and I featured it on this blog last year. At that stage, it still looked a bit like a Beetle but now resembles a tannalised log cabin on wheels that -- against all the laws of probability -- has been souped up. In the space of just 12 months, it's had a pretty radical reworking and about the only clue to the retention of the running gear underneath was the voodoo dolls head gear knob. Rust patination was demonstrated by a...

I read this book for the first time many years ago. It was recommended to me by a friend, which is always the best way with anything. He lent it to me which meant that I had to give it back afterwards and is part of the ongoing thought processes concerning the development of the Sole Trader Trilogy, I wanted to read The Wild Wood by Jan Needle again. Getting hold of a copy proved surprisingly difficult. Amazon listed it but, on closer inspection, this proved to be an entirely different book altogether. In the end, I notified eBay that I was looking for one and after a few weeks found an original paperback complete with illustrations by Willie Rushton in good condition -- and all for the princely sum of 50p. The Wild Wood retells Winston Grahame's The wind in the Willows from the point of view the working class stoats, ferrets and weasels. I had often wondered what Ratty, Moley and the Badger did for a living. Toad was clearly gentry. Although he was a menace to everyone wh...

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...