The best kind of R & R...

After a bit of an attempted mauling on the slot racing forum from a dissatisfied customer, I felt like some relaxation away from the pressures of a super active forum full of egos.

My favourite way to do that has always been silence, solitude, perhaps Radio 4 and model scenery.

In various measures.

This had got me back to my first passion in modelmaking, model landscape and architecture. I was born, it seems, with a love of vernacular architecture and although I have often drawn it and painted it, even drawn it officially for Councils to pore over in committee meetings, it is only models of buildings which ever really satisfies.

The tiny yard office at Grindley Brook Locks, Welsh canal

I made my first building when I was about 10. It was a little scratch-built flint dashed forge. I used poppy seeds as un-knapped flints. I was given some ancient copper foil rolled into a good scale corrugated which I used for the roof. Because I had no layout as such, I put it on a grassy base and kept it as that. A scenic set-piece. I have built many such set-pieces over the years, rarely having space for a layout.

I also have a love of estuaries, having spent many childhood weekends on the Essex coastal waterways. One day, when missing the clean air and the sounds of the saltings I made this little set-piece to get it out of my system. Just about 9 inches square, I put it on whatever I had under the bench in the way of a base board, yet it turned into one of my best pieces.

I can find inspiration anywhere, as in that tiny office above, so perfect in its proportion and fitness for purpose.

This is an old village cinema, now, alas, a hairdresser's emporium!

Imagine the queues of young lovers all desperate to get to the back rows in the days when it would have definately been known as the local "flea-pit", before the ugly cement dashed finish ruined the old bricks.

Here is the little country garage in the same village as the "Cinema Salon". Now used only for repairs to cars as the government has allowed the foreign unelected parliament to force stringent and unnecessary rules on small British businesses which cost so much to administer that they are forced to close in full or in part.

I have known this place for over thirty years. You could, at one time, choose from a whole line of Austin Healeys, Pipers, tuned up Imps and Mini-Coopers, to name but a few. The proprietor himself used to race. Now he is waiting for the economy to upturn again so he can redevelop the site because rules and unstoppable vandalism have made the business untenable. Just as well that I made a model of the office years ago then, eh? Another occasion when I needed the peace of architecture. Frozen music.

Comments on the blog

Not being very computer savvy, I have no idea how to answer people when they kindly leave a comment on the blog.
I would appreciate any viewer of the blog clueing me up on the methods.

Meanwhile, Jim, thankyou for your kind comments on the models and the Albatross in particular.
I had Hull No. 135., a Mk 1. I bought it from a chap in Yorkshire. It had a Consul Corsair 1500cc pushrod, pre-crossflow Ford engine. I wanted to put a side valve 10 back in or even a Coventry Climax, but the cost of rebuilding even a humble Ford 10 seems outrageous these days, so whilst it was cheap to buy one (my wife paid £90 for it), rebuilding it to a high level was to have cost much more than I paid for the boat! So the 120E engine got a clean up and put back in. New steering pullies and cables and a respray and off it went to a new owner when I got kicked out of the CMBA for telling a home truth or two about the museums in this country. No club, no water to go fast on, no point in the boat.
If you send me a comment with just your e-mail address, I can note it, but refuse the comment for publication then talk to privately about the models.
Thanks.

BXE 599, where are you!...

My Uncle recently scanned in and sent me some marvellous old Box Brownie shots of his Special as it grew, back in the late 50s/early 60s.
BXE 599 started life as an Austin Seven Ruby. Stripped of her bodywork she would have looked like this.

My Uncle was only 16 when he started this project and in fact, only 21 when he sold it, having used it for getting to work and for a long journey to Bristol. Here he is in our Bristol aunt's driveway.My Dad had built specials earlier and was obviously a good help-at-hand for my Uncle, since we lived over the road from where the car was being built.

Here he gives invaluable advice on steering geometry!

Behind them in that photo, all sorts of magic happened. My Granddad made his own paints and stains in the shed in the background for his work as a grainer and marbler and off to the right was where my Nan made her own wines and repaired all the family's bikes and resoled our shoes! Beyond both was a large garden in which grew most of the ingredients of the wine making. Remarkably my Nan never touched a drop of any of the hundreds of wines she ever made. I recall her parsnip to have been my favourite. Her rosehip was delicious, but gave me nightmares!

Unique as far as I know among specials, BXE had a hardtop. A removable accessory for the winter months which my Uncle made.

The eagle-eyed Special Builders among you will recognize some nice touches of the times amongst the goodies on this car.

A finned Aluminium cylinder head, but I'm not sure of which make. A four branch exhaust manifold and a nice twin SU side-draught inlet set up.

There's also an independent front suspension set up, possibly by Super Accessories or Bowndenex. My Uncle made many of his own parts including the header tank for the then quite rare crossflow radiator.

The very professional looking double hump scuttle always sets a special apart, I think, and BXE was no exception. It always makes for an attractive dashboard shape.

The lovely old spring-spoke steering wheel sets off a nice cockpit and never better than the Brooklands Bluemell's.

I'm delighted to learn that a spare one of these which hung in my Grandad's garage for years after BXE was sold is now in my Uncle's basement and he's promised it for my Cambridge Special.

That's a very special thing for me as I used to look longingly at that old wheel every time I was in my Grandad's workshop!

If anyone knows of the whereabouts or fate of this lovely special, please let me know.

And some more....

Since posting the last piece on Specials I've decided to put my money where my mouth is effectively and I have started an Austin Seven Specials Register under the auspices of the Austin Seven Clubs Association.
So far we have 39 fully written up sets of details about peoples' cars. We have home builts, Cambridges and Ulster replicas in about that order of popularity. We have some very old, even ex-Brooklands cars, too, which I never expected.
If anyone reading this blog has an A7 Special or knows someone who does, please let me know.

More on the Specials

I knew that I would finally find some relevant pictures of my special-building family and though it took my Mum's recent death, I'm sure she'll be pleased to know that amongst her old pictures and photos were these two old Box brownie shots.

The above one is my Dad, in his de-mob suit, standing proudly by his first special. Alas no pictures exist of the later two, but it was great to even get a Reg. no. in the view.

The louvred side valance was a very de luxe feature for a Special!

And this one is of me at about 10 months old, cranking my Dad's other A7 or it could be my Grandad's car, which Dad always drove as my Grandad didn't pass his test until I was in my late childhood!

All this driving down memory lane has got me back "into" specials and I have joined the Bristol Austin 7 Club and my local old-car club and have already got a line on some parts to begin the project. I've decided to build a Cambridge style special, using as many period style bits and pieces as I can find. The search alone should be fun.

I will leave the bodywork in unpainted aluminium, with Cambridge blue cycle wings, which I will attempt to make myself, using for skills what little I can pick up from books and watching old craftsmen at work.

Here's a Cambridge from which I'm making scale drawings as it's a nice square side view.

I'm sure with enough browsing through all the kinds of books and club magazines I used to have I can re-aquaint myself with my favourite old car. Fortunately there are so many knowledgeable types out there who remember every part number, design change date and type number there is and they're always so friendly in the Austin 7 world. Few cars of such humble origins can have crossed the divide between the luxury car (Rolls-Royce, etc), the true enthusiast (Vintage Sports Car Club) and the ordinary impecunious fan ...like the Austin Seven.

Whatever floats your boat....

Usually, people who are into scale models have a fairly narrow band of interests. Probably because they can only give their time to a limited number of projects.

Those of us with unavoidably wider tastes or the good fortune to have (or, it must be said, organise,) more time, often find ourselves being fascinated by more than one topic.

I can't help it, I'm just intrigued by many aspects of what's old and consequently, like to make models of them. Also, of course, when one let's it be known that a modelmaking service is available it becomes likely that potential customers will ask for a wide variety of subjects to be considered.

As it happened, my first truly professional commission was indeed for a boat, a small ship in fact, called the MV Peterna, a coastal sand carrier. I recieved the commission when I was just 18, had not the first idea how to set about it, but finished for a derisorilly low quotation and delivered it to it's owner, by chance on the last day of its legal service in British waters. My friend and I struggled with the model in its heavy 1/4" plate glass case on the train from mid Devon to the Essex coast and onto the vessel itself via the ship's dinghy.

We unveiled it proudly in the skipper's cabin over a warming mug of hot chocolate. The owner's wife immediately burst into tears. She hadn't seen the old girl look so good since they bought her and started their business and their married life aboard the 1915 carrier.

Strangely, it was to be many years more before I took such an interest in ships again, at least actively, by making models of them. By then I'd become a real fan of classic speedboats and record breakers. I wanted to make models of them for sale and that wish came about by my old chum in Florida e-mailing me with a potential customer in Washington DC.He wanted a model of Miss America X and Baby Horace III for permanent display in Arty's restaurant in the city, which was being refurbished with a record boat theme.

And so I built the two boats, in 1/8th scale, which is big. So big, the MA X model had to be built on the dining table because it wouldn't fit in my shed!

Now, MA X has four Packard aero engines in it, geared together as two pairs. Each engine has two superchargers, each supercharger has two carburettors. There are two plug leads per cylinder, each 2500M power unit having twelve cylinders. An exhaust stack emerges elegantly from each pair of cylinders. The steering is by a chain drive, all on view. The hull and deck is mahogany planked. It scaled out at 5ft.-3ins. long!

At the very last minute I left marks on the freshly painted seats which I couldn't remove, so I quickly carved the two toy teddy bears that its driver, Gar Wood, always carried with him for luck and covered the marks with them.Flown west by FedEx, it was safely delivered and installed in its place in a booth at the diner, where, I assume, it still is along with its much humbler brother Baby Horace. The family could eat again!

I also made some Rive Aquarama Special speedboats because I had the plans and found a real one, the last imported before Riva stopped producing them, to measure and photograph. As ever, it turned out that the works drawings were wrong, so I used my own taken from the actual boat near Southampton. My own choice of scale is always 1/12th. One inch to one foot. Beautifully Imperial. The models all had detailed engines under hinged decks, working cocktail cabinets with hand made Morano glasses and one of them even had working steering, involving a hand made worm steering box with two universal joints. Over 150 seperate parts were made in brass and nickel plated. The cloth used for the floor covering was miniaturists' canvas, hand painted. The wood, as with MA X and Baby Horace was steamed Pearwood to look just like mahogany in scale.

But I found that it seemed people were keener to throw their money at the hole in the water represented by their real boat than the mark on the mantleshelf represented by one of my models. I made a 1/6thscale model of an aluminium Albatross speedboat for a collector, which I enjoyed, but nothing further came of it. Promised articles in national magazines never materialised.

And so I gave it one last go with an all aluminium model of Miss Britain III, the salt water World Record Holder. It had a completely detailed Napier Lion W 12 engine and was impressed with nearly 10,000 screw heads with a special tool.

It sold at auction for a measly £2800, of which the thieving auctioneer took another £500 for commission and a whole raft of other "costs" of which I was never forewarned, but which I had no option to pay if I wanted my pathetic remainder, which I recieved after 6 months!

My chum in Florida also had to come to the same conclusion...there ain't no money in model boats, unless you happen to just "fit in".

Something Special

After the War, Britain was in a pretty parlous state and life's luxuries were just not to be found by the average guy who wanted a bit of colour and excitement out of the drab scene of Labour's New Utopia, which as we all now know, was such a miserable pipedream.

With so little money floating about, the natural "make-do & mend" mentality of the rations-battered British came to the fore.

At that time, pre-MoT test, there were thousands of old pre-War cars on the road, still giving sterling service. Mainly Austin Sevens and Ford 8s and 10s.

These could be had for a few pounds and pressed into life fairly easily again. Then with a few bits of steel tube and some aluminium sheet a really smart new creation could be in your driveway in just a few weekends. A sports car, indeed.

These used a more race-orientated pre-War name of "specials", but post-War the Special became the be all and end all of British motoring enthusiasm. Before the War a special had been a racing or hillclimb conversion of something, usually with a bigger engine, meant for sprints and short course competition and so the name stuck after the conflict for anything that a reasonably able mechanic could cobble up in his back yard or shed.

My own father was just such a man and with a £5 Austin 7 from a breakers' yard he built a little 2 seater very much in the style of the Cambridge, one of the best looking of the A7 specials, but in the pre-War tourer mould.

My Mum still has happy memories of that little car. Previously all Dad had was a Coventry Eagle motorbike which would only go up steeper hills if my Mum got off the pillion seat!

He later built two more specials, refining the previous ones and getting a little sportier. Unfortunately no photos have survived of those.

Later, my Uncle also got the specials bug and I helped him build his very low, light, modern Austin 7-based special. He tried to get it to look a bit like a Maserati 250F at the front and it had the typical special-builder's short back.
I remember many trips in it at 70 or more MPH, which was good for any car then, let alone something which started life in 1937 and had only 747cc.

One night, during one of the last real "pea-souper fogs" we were travelling home on a 30 mile journey which would normally take about 35 minutes, but which, with me feeling the kerbside through the side-curtains, took 3 hours. The battery came loose and burned a hole in the aluminium back end! But, frozen almost stiff and dog tired the old girl got us home.

Pretty soon, the aluminium sheet jobs started to give way to the new post-War material, fibreglass and all manner of wierd and wonderful creations were popping out of tiny units up and down the country from recently de-mobbed servicemen looking for a new direction in life. Some, like the Falcon were really quite professional looking and some were just appalling to look at, but the public took them and a new industry was born, with several companies specialising only in the bits and pieces that would make your special go better as well as look unique.

I had thought most if not all these old fifties creations had disappeared, but, true to British form, many have surfaced again and been lovingly restored by a completely new generation who weren't even born when the cars were originally made for a hard-up motoring public.

Americans had hot-rods, mainly because their cars had all had thumping big engines to cover the mileages in that country and they hadn't had rationing of fuel and just about everything else to hold them back. But here we had to watch the pennies and a home-built special was the only answer. New cars had to be exported to try and get some money back into Britain's War -emptied coffers, so we built cheap and cheerful specials.
I'd love one, but they seem to be fetching as much, if not more than, the cars from which they were built. Not so long ago an Austin Seven Special was an affordable entry level classic car, but no longer.