Engine Punk

I've recently been contacted by Gareth Jones who owns this Ginetta G26. It's a rather smarter G26 than the one that we fetched home and Gareth is looking for some wheels with the right offset to fill the arches and make his car sit on the road properly. Mondeo wheels look wrong. He says that "the Cortina wheel bolt pattern is quite common among Peugeots and many others, but the offset normally used on FWD cars is different, and the Ginetta needs something that’s deep-dish to make it visually correct too!" Since my close up encounter with a G26, the styling has grown on me and I have to say that of the G26 family this version with the pop up lights is the best. Some angles still look a little odd but once you know where not to look you stop looking at it that way - don't you? Okay, it's like an itch that you've got to scratch and takes a little discipline but it's somewhere around the rear quarter that I feel it's a little awkward but only from a c...

The Steam Punk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford was small but perfectly formed. I really enjoyed the show and now many ideas are running round my head - like a steam punk version of Thunderbirds for one. You know - Thunderbird 1 is made out of rivetted bronze, Thunderbird 2 is a supersonic air ship and Thunderbird 3 is like the Nautilus from Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea . This was my favourite, a Stirling hot air engine made by Jos de Vink in Holland. Stirling engines have featured on Engine Punk before ( Nothing but hot air ) but for transport purposes they aren't practical. However, for stationary work they're ideal. All they need is the slightest temperature or pressure difference to get their displacers fluttering. They run at a constant slow speed so could charge up a battery or generate hydrogen for all sorts of interesting uses. And when they look this good, they could be a show piece of your energy efficient home. They...

This is my Ford Sierra XR4x4, parked without concern on a muddy verge at a speed hillclimb last year - well, in a muddy verge for it was so wet. This old car is a bit of a monster - impertinent hot hatches come by but I real them when it comes to Hamburger Hill on the A30. Their little four pot screamers may match my old V6 for power but don't have the torque. They're probably more economic to run though - 28 mpg is good for my monster. But it's a sophisticated monster. With its four-wheel drive, fuel injection, and anti-lock brakes, this 25-year-old car was very sophisticated for its day. Having usurped to be XR4i from the range of performance Fords, the XR4x4 was in turn superseded by the Ford Sierra Cosworth but it wouldn't go away. The XR 4x4 was too useful. It wasn't as highly strung as the Cossie and was a very good tow car. Its engine was relatively lowly stressed and was the ideal powerplant when the car eventually entered the twilight world of the old, f...

The local paper grabbed my attention this week. The headline “Station parking fees are slashed by half” misses the point entirely. 12 months ago there were no parking fees at Liskeard station at all. They were imposed last year by First Great Western. This broke a gentleman’s agreement between the council and the rail operator, where the council re-surfaced the carpark at rate payer’s expense in return for an assurance that parking fees would not be introduced. Now people who refuse to pay these fees by parking on the street are being depicted as anti-social. The council are threatening to paint double yellow lines around the station to “ensure that people park responsibly”. Liskeard rail commuters are trying to do their bit for the environment by using public transport. They do not wish to antagonise people who live around Liskeard station because they travel with them on the train. It is not in their interests to park irresponsibly. But it seems entirely in the interests of First Gre...

Somebody sent me this scan of the Gillie in its original form some time ago and I've just stumbled across it in my archive files on my PC. I think it was from top chap Roger Swift who runs the archives for the Imp Club. It shows the Gillie in its original form and to anyone who has ever restored an Imp some of those panels look strangely familiar, especially those rear wheel arches. That is because they usually live within the Imp bodyshell. The Gillie drew its looks(!) from the structural panels themselves and for pressings that were never designed to be seen the look, well (how can I put this) as if they were never meant to be seen. But of course that was part of the charm of the Gillie. It was a chirpy looking thing and this picture shows it standing tall on its skinny little tyres thanks to the hub reduction gears that lifted its vitals out of the way of rocks. It had a diff lock, too, and Tim Fry, who with Mike Parkes brought the Imp into being, said the Gillie would climb the...

At last year's Lanlivery Show, I spotted this magnificent Alvis. It's a 1937 4.3 litre sports saloon with bodywork by Vanden Plas. Only 248 of these cars were built before World war II and every one was in chassis only form. As befits a thoroughbred motor car, each customer had the opportunity to work with a coachbuilder to realise the car they wanted. Some purchasers knew exactly what they wanted, others were content to choose from what the designers had to offer. Each body was bespoke and was haute couture for automobiles, using only the finest materials and workmanship. This sort of coachbuilding didn't happen overnight. The chassis was built in 1937 in Coventry (that place again - see earlier posts about Lea-Francis )but the bodywork wasn't completed at Vanden Plas' Kingsbury factory, in north-west London until January 1938. It was then sent back to the Alvis factory for use as a demonstrator until sale to Brooklands Motors who took delivery in July 1938. The...

If you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago, I would said 1894, for most authorities cite the Paris – Rouen event as being the first motor race and with internal combustion engine engines it probably was the first. But what if the motors were steam powered? The suggestion that two road steam motors had raced each other in Manchester in 1867 came from Karl Petersen. Karl is a steam car builder in the USA . He e-mailed me to say "Hi" and to introduce himself after my website and blog had turned up on various searches that he'd conducted. He went on to say that during a visit to the Science Museum library in 1971, he'd found an old book on steam road vehicles built before 1890 - William Fletcher's The History and Development of Steam Locomotion on Common Roads. This had belonged to a relative of the legendary locomotive builder and operator Isaac Watt Boulton and contained annotated notes on various matters that subsequently proved quite accurate. Upon revisiting h...