I'll have a Bloody Mary

Back in 1929, two school boys looking for something interesting to do in the "long vac" decided to build a car. Not a push cart or soap box...a real car!
They were the Bolster brothers, Richard and John. With a rescued V-Twin motorbike engine, some ash, metal bits and a hand-drill, they put together what was to become one of the most famous hillclimb and sprint specials of all time.
John, it was, who fostered the project after his brother went on to other things and eventually the definitive Bloody Mary was developed into a fearsome beast which often held Fastest Time awards and in fact held a course record from 1948-1953 for unsupercharged cars in the vintage class. I've always had a fascination for specials and for the ultra specialised competition of hillclimbing, ever since my uncle took me to a meeting at Wiscombe Park in Devon years ago.
So I resolved to build a model of Bloody Mary in 1/32nd scale... A working model which, according to my self-imposed modelmaking rules for hillclimbers, should have the motors where the engines were on the real car.
When I say engines, in the plural, I mean just that, for young John soon found another J.A.P. V-twin and installed it next to the first in an extended frame. Connected by chains to each other and thence to a motorcycle gearbox, these two firebrands of engines then were connected to a solid back axle by chain also.
No diff was used, a la Frazer-Nash. Brakes were a vestigial pair on the front axle of Austin Seven vintage. Rear hubs and wheels were from a Frazer Nash, so there were 36 spoke wheels on the front and 48 on the rear!

I started my model by making a drawing using all the pictures I could find and the above old Profile Publication, but quite a few features remain a bit foggy.

Once the drawing was more or less done I made a frame from brass tube in a square section and soldered it up as a simple rectangle.; Eventually it should have a member right down the middle too, but fitting motors may mean that has to be modified.

Then I made a front axle from 3/32" stainless rod. For bearings, the car used a double yoke system which took springs above and radius rods below, so I turned a couple of bobbin shapes in the Peatol/Taig lathe and filed them so that the lugs were of a diamond shape above and below the bearing.

Springs were fashioned from brass and given a slightly irregular look, because they were bound with twine in the fashion of the times.

Keen to start bashing aluminium, which I love to do, I also made the right hand body side from thin proprietary sheet from the modelmaker's friend, K&S Metal Centre. This is a particularly good aluminium for shaping. Cut with scissors, knife and files. This is progress, so far

A return to slot racing

After 42 years I rediscovered slot racing. I used to be a keen club racer in the 60s, but expensive can motor rewinds and sponsored team drivers at raceways killed it all very quickly, so I walked away from it.

Whilst looking for road vehicles to populate 1/32nd scale model railway layouts I found that there was a whole new world of slot racing, new clubs, new cars from Ready To Run companies like Scalextric and a lot of new companies I'd never even heard of.

During a discussion on Slot Forum I rashly offered to make patterns for accurate 1/32nd scale model car bodies and someone took me up on it, offering to mould them in resin. F-F Models was born, not as a business or anything fancy like that, but as a way of helping fellow enthusiasts out with really accurate, detailed bodies that they could put their own chassis under and go racing. Our website can be found at http://www.ffmodels.webs.com/

Our models are now all over the world and have been very well recieved so far.



This a Lola Mk4 F1 car from the early 60s. An F-F Models body kit built by Chris Wright in America..and very beautifully too!

1931, we had it all!

In 1931, Great Britain had all the major World Speed Records and that is an achievement that has never been matched, before or since.

To celebrate this fact I did some paintings of the holders, with head and shoulders portraits of the drivers and pilots in pencil.

My intention is to compile these into a poster format for sale.

Here are some of the pictures:-

Miss England II, driven by Henry O'Neil De Hane Segrave, one of the finest of British heroes.

The beautiful Supermarine S6B, forerunner of the Spitfire, with a Rolls-Royce R-type engine, seen on Calshot Water.

Flown by Squadron Leader Stainforth to over 400m.p.h.

The Zenith-J.A.P. motorcycle on which Joe Wright took the World Speed Record at over 150m.p.h.

This is a pencil study, since no colour reference has come to light, though in those days most British bikes were just black!

Bluebird, Sir Malcolm Campbell's record breaker on Daytona Beach. Sir Malcolm and his son, Donald were in very much the same mould as Segrave, breaking records for Britain, before themselves.

A few decades of modelmaking

Over the years, my main interest and, indeed, profession has been modelmaking.

I began with a model of a sand carrying barge called Peterna, which was made for a small Essex company and carried on making all types of models for collectors, companies and museums all over the world.

I never advertised, word of mouth being sufficient for all that time.Eventually I went to Germany to work on Prototype cars and Show cars, full size, clay and fibre glass.

I started with a passion for model scenery, particularly on model railway layouts. never having space for a layout myself, I made items for others or just as stand alone models

This is a model of my friend's country garage office. Soon it will be demolished to make way for housing and another fine old country garage lost for ever. the reason it can't make a profit selling fuel is that the government insist on too many tank tests and then have the gall to charge for the dubious privelege. They charge so much that it wouldn't be possible to make a profit if the pumps were running all day. No doubt this nonsense has emanated from Europe, where the mainlanders ignore every petty rule and we, the stupid English, labour under them to the letter! And so, for the sake of "being in Europe" a whole swaithe of our heritage and once pleasant land is swept aside. I'd say Tesco's had a lot to do with putting those rules in place. Soon, they'll be the only place a person can buy fuel and then...it'll be charged at whatever they feel like. Choice having disappeared.

This little scenic set-piece was built in 7mm-1ft scale just to remind me of my beloved estuaries when I was unable to be by one.

It is based on my memories of the River Roach when I was a child. My uncle had a Dunkirk Little Ship moored in a mud rill and we would go there most weekends to take a trip out or work on the old boat, a Thorneycroft High-Prow cruiser with a Meadows 4 ED engine.

The photography worked out well as this little set-piece is only 9" square. The dinghy was made in pearwood veneer exactly as the real boats only with no nails! The oars are bamboo.

This place meant a great deal to me when I was growing up, but a storm one night carried away a lot of the scene, including an old railway coach which the Kimble family had used for generations as a longshoreman's hut for their nets and repair materials. Outside it, a brick area served as a careening shelf, where the boats would be cleaned off of barnacles and re-antifouled.

Now, it is difficult to see where we ever went for our weekends. The oyster beds are just discernable as are the last remains of my uncle's dinghy. Wherever I played as a child, samphire now grows, easy for the picking at this time of year.

The old sea wall was crossed regularly by rustic old stiles made from fallen ships' timbers.

Just down from here in another mud rill still remains the last of Darwin's ship, the HMS Beagle. She was used as a Customs point after Darwin's great journey and eventually just rotted away. I used to play amongst her timbers at low tide.

Old clay pipes could till be found amongst the mud.

My canal artwork

Here are few of my paintings. I started out just doing pictures of classic canal boat engines while I was living afloat for something to do in the winter evenings.
I'd never painted before apart from airbrush work, but with a child's watercolour set I did this one as my first effort and didn't look back.




This is a Lister JP2, a mainstay of the later canal fleets. Heavy, thrifty and endlessly reliable, like all Listers. These are now a very expensive bit of iron, but not so long ago couldn't be given away!
It's shown in a background of a wooden boat very much like ours. In fact our boat had a JP2 for a long time.

This is a Bolinder semi-diesel 2 stroke. This was the engine which almost single handedly transformed the many horse boats and few steamers on the canals into the modern cargo carriers that continued right up to the point where canals became more for leisure than work.
It is started by a blowlamp being aimed at a bulb on the top for about 15 minutes, then it's kicked over by a retractable pin on the rim of the flywheel. Get that wrong and it would throw you clean out the side doors! On some engines there was no gearbox, you had to time it just right and get the engine itself to run backwards, which many 2-strokes can. these engines have just the one massive capacity cylinder, so need that enormous flywheel to keep going. You can hear a hardworking "Bolly" over a mile away.


Although not really ever a canal boat engine due to cost and size, the superb Kelvin engines are now very sought after for powering modern narrowboats and tugs. Their construction is flawless by design and excecution, even the insides of the engine are enamelled in white!


Their main claim to fame is the fact that they are petrol/diesel. That is, they are started on a tiny amount of petrol, then switched over to diesel once running. I once drove a Kelvin J2 and was presented with a 12 point list of operations to attend to each time it was started, but once those items were checked the engine would always start without fail amidst actual smoke rings from the chimney. Its exhaust note of "Gerdonk" was excelled only by a bigger K2 unit I once heard saying "Rivitt, rivitt" to me.
These were the darlings of the Scottish fishing fleet. If you're freezing in a rough North Sea, you need to know you'll get home.


Many people seem to think the Russell Newberry is the Rolls Royce of engines.

Hmmm.

It's certainly Rolls Royce price, but I think there are other, more worthy owners of that title.

Nonetheless, the RN is much loved and even warrants an owners' club.
It has a few strange and interesting features, like horizontal valves, for instance. It was until recently, still made, but at a very high price. It has a distinctive sound, like a cantering horse.

Many of the boats that housed these sorts of engines would gather at this most famous of meeting places...Gas Street Basin in the heart of Birmingham.
This painting shows Gas Street in around the 1970s.
The two boats in the picture are recently decked out in British Waterways colours, albeit without the lettering. The unpowered "butty" was usually tied up to the bank with the motor boat outside it wherever a pair stopped for the night or whilst awaiting loading orders.

These pictures and some others are available to buy as limited edition prints.
The reproduction here is not reliably coloured as, for some reason, they come out a little grey when photographed. Being all A3 size they couldn't be scanned.

I will, I hope, soon have a Paypal account through which they can be bought for £17-50 each+£2-50 p&p in a cardboard tube.

A blog begins.........

Hello, I'm known as Odds, don't ask why, I won't tell you anyway.
Having been on and left a lot of forums, groups and general collectives of supposedly like-minded people, I have been advised now by my good friend on Slotty Salad, Tom Wysom, to just stick with a blog. The hell with forums and groups and their cliquey, nit-picky, anal smallmindedness.
This is me and my interests, opinions, methods, achievements and frustrations, for what it is all worth, which, let's face it, because we are all very small, is probably not very much.

My interests include modelmaking of most types except military, old cars, old boats, old bikes.

I also draw in an illustratorly, rather than arty-farty style. I like to draw any of the above subjects and paint them too, with watercolours and gouache, because I haven't the patience and skill for oils or the tolerance of acrylic's foibles. I like to use pastel and pencil.
I try landscape and scenic subjects from time to time.

I have a fascination for vernacular architecture and have helped restore old houses with friends.

I have lived on boats, coastal and canal, in caravans, in houses old and new, home and abroad.
I used to work abroad, still modelmaking, for the car industry along with many other Englishmen, for the Englishman's attitude at work is highly prized by Johnny Foriegner as long as he's not actually on the books and under the laws of the host land! Dear me, no. That wouldn't do at all.

I have an interest in certain poets and writers. I can read L.T.C. "Tom" Rolt all day for his philosophy and sheer elegance of the use of English and for his vision.
Philip Larkin and John Betjeman make me smile as does an occasional dollop of PG Wodehouse.
Ian Rankin and Colin Dexter keep me turning pages when I need a mystery to escape to.

Time for tea, I think.