Engine Punk

Restored with only a brochure as reference material this Levis 600 has a pushrod tube that masquerades as a camshaft drive At the 2010 Great Dorset Steam Fair, I heard a great story about this very rare bike. The owner and restorer was looking round the autojumble at the 2009 show for Norton parts and saw a curious oil tank that might have been a Norton one. He asked the vendor about it and he said that it that it belonged to Levis 600 and that he had the whole bike under the bench - not the bench at home but the bench at the show. Levis are often confused with jeans manufacturers and the parent company latterly traded as Leviss to avoid this although this was long after motorcycle manufacture had ceased. Founded by the Butterfield Brothers in Old Station Road, Stechford, Birmingham, in 1911,  Levis were TT winners in 1922 with a 250 two stroke and went on to build a range of ohv four strokes in 30s until World War 2 ended production. They were always pretty rare machines and...

If Mr Jo-jo does not still exist, something very similar ought to be created. Photo provided by Phil Peters. Back in June 2008 I waxed lyrical about Mrs Jo-jo , probably the most highly developed of all Brooklands Austin 7s. Last week, Phil Peters got in touch about Mr Jo-jo. He'd been given a photograph of it by an elderly friend and neighbour and liked it so much he's put it on his blog . In his search for info on Mr Jo-jo he found my comments on the distaff side of the equipe but all I know about Mr Jo-jo is what I've been able to glean from The Austin 7 Source Book by Brain Purves, in which a copy of this very photo appears. Mr Jo-jo was an Austin 7 Gordon England Cup model, Gordon England being an aviation pioneer and Austin 7 racer who subsequently offered his own sporting bodies on the baby Austin chassis. The Cup model was a very neat Austin 7 two seater introduced in 1925 and named either after the Goerges Boillot Cup at Boulogne or the Rudge Whitworth Bi...

A fine example of the Fiat 126's contribution to motorsport These photos spilled out of an avalanche the other day and the memory of a day during the summer of 1985 came flooding back. While I was a student of Industrial Design Transport at Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic, the UK's motor city held various motorsport events, including autotesting. I was on my industrial placement working for John Mockett the motorcycle designer and during one weekend the sounds of engines having their nuts revved off floated across the city. "I must go to it," I said to my mate Geoff and he, too, responded like some brave Ulysses as if captivated by the sound of the sirens softly singing. We followed the sound to the city centre and found an autotest going on under one of the peirs for the Coventry inner ring road, a ring road notorious for being cited by its designer as an example of how not to design a ring road. In case you didn't know, autotesting involves ragging you...

If you ever doubted that the seventies were not sensational, then you probably weren't there. The first time I ever saw a Nova made a hell of an impression on me - one came into the harbourside car park in Falmouth when I was a student down there and raised its canopy to allow the driver to take his ticket from the barrier machine. No other vehicle had a "door" like this and, even after Lamborghini has popularised the scissor doors among the Max Power brigade, I think the Nova remains unique. Rolling sculpture - I think there's provision for a handle to lift the roof from the outside but electric operation looks really flash. Obviously this owner's confident her system works Of course, I knew it was a Nova - that's the original Nova, not the Vauxhall or Opel variety. they came later and I don't recall the same fuss over the name that Ford and Dutton created when both manufacturers wanted to call their cars Sierra. I'd already poured over num...

Colossus is back together again at last. I just love all that ironmogery on top of the boiler. For the last 18 months, whenever I’ve passed through South Petherwin on my way to Launceston, I’ve noticed a traction engine in a yard and workshop. One day I went slowly enough to see a nameplate on its smokebox door – Colossus . Like any steam engine, it had a certain presence, especially confined within four walls and looking over a gate. At the Great Dorset Steam Fair, I was delighted to come face to smokebox with Colossus and to find out what a remarkable engine it is. Its most striking feature is the tandem cylinders on top of the boiler behind the chimney. Most traction engines have them side by side, which makes for a more compact arrangement. I’d only ever seen tandem cylinders before on a conversion of an old single cylinder Fowler ploughing engine. The idea of souping up some great lumbering leviathan by strapping on another pot and making it more efficient, powerful and ...

Well conceived and brilliantly styled, the Toniq R is now even better It's especially good to do follow ups on Vintage Things but here's a VT that's got more of a future than a past. I first discovered the Toniq R at the Royal Cornwall Show in 2008 and was impressed in how it puts an original take on the Locaterfield type of kit car or track day car. To be honest, may of these open wheelers are getting a bit hackneyed. I like either the traditional ones or the radical ones. Most, though, fall between these extremes and seem to be neither one thing nor the other to me. The Toniq R is a fresh new interpretation of the four wheeled motorbike and I think it looks great. People ask Colin where gets his distinctive headlamp pods. The answer is he makes them. The battery and pedal boxes are pretty neat, too, certainly too good to hide under the bonnet, which fits so neatly over the brackets. Over the last two years, Colin and his dad have been developing the Toniq R and at...

I liked the Gardner Douglas T70 replica very much, especially in spider form. You can either have classic or high tech - I think a nostalgic blast gets the nod from me but the looks are timeless anyway. Depending to whom I talked at this year's show, we are either in for a long, hard winter thanks to all those cuts or kit car manufacturers offer a viable means of realising that track day/replica dream at reduced cost.  I went with Peter Tuthill, also known as Motormind, who was delivering some of his books to one of the booksellers exhibiting at the show. His books on subjects as diverse as Turner, Paramount and Kieft are selling steadily but he doesn't feel the time is right to take the financial risk of publishing any more for the immediate future. This is a terrible shame because some of them sound fascinating and explore obscure parts of motoring history nobody has examined yet. We were particularly impressed by this Ultima at the show and Peter just had to get in to ...