A Trip to Bristol

 My girlfriend & I are collecting Concordes, not to keep you understand, that would be - inconvenient. It started when we went to Brooklands on our first date & we have now been aboard four.

To accomplish this we went to "Aerospace Bristol", it looked a bit "corporate" to me from the website, but it was actually very good, telling the story of the Bristol aircraft company from before it made aeroplanes (under a different name obviously) until we as a nation gave up on making stuff & just bought it from other countries.

The first "room" covers up to the end of the first world war & has - as you can see a Bristol Fighter & hanging above it, the wooden structure of a Bristol Fighter for comparison, there are lots of displays on making wooden propellers & the other paraphernalia of aircraft production, then as you walk through to the second room there is a model showing the flying controls of an aircraft which is animated as you move them. What I found interesting was that the plane looks like a '30s model of a plane called "Britain First". It was designed for the then owner of the Daily Mail who could see that other countries were developing monoplanes & the UK didn't seem to be, so he asked Bristol to design him a six seater airliner - it was faster than the RAF's fastest fighter & was developed into the Blenheim.

In the second section it's all about the '30s to the '60s, so we have this. In the thirties an awful lot of the worlds planes flew with a Bristol Jupiter, the tubes running from the centre casing to the end of each cylinder house two push rods, each of which operates two valves - four valves per cylinder - the mechanism is exquisite.

We think we're clever these days? Try designing that with only a pencil & slide rule. You'll have to compensate for heat expansion in different materials, different cooling, design in a mechanism for adjustment, while keeping the engine diameter as small as possible.

Moving on from the Jupiter, we come to this, it's a Bristol Hercules (all the Bristol engines were named after Greek or Roman myths), the thing about air cooled radial engines is that their diameter tends to control the shape of the aircraft, so how to get more power when you can't just make the engine bigger? Well for a start there's two rows of cylinders, but also, no push rod tube up the front, because this is a sleeve valve engine.

Sleeve valve engines put the piston inside a sleeve inside the cylinder, then move that sleeve such that holes in the sleeve uncover & close holes in the cylinder, letting the exhaust out & a new charge in, a little like a two-stroke. To do this the sleeve moves both up & down & rotates around the piston. As you can imagine, this is quite complicated when the cylinders are arranged in a circle & there's two rows.

In this photo of a sectioned engine the timing wheels that move the sleeves are in a ring just ahead of the removed cylinder - the sleeves are painted yellow.

Why do all this? As I said, a radial engine tends to control the shape of the aircraft. Taking the valves off the top of each cylinder means the cylinder itself can be bigger with no increase in the overall engine diameter.

The 1920s-30s designed Jupiter would make around 500 bhp, the 1930-40ss Hercules around 1,700. There's also a supercharger built in the middle of that & as I said, designed with pencil & slide rule. No wonder they knighted Roy Fedden the designer.

In the far corner is a cut away front fuselage of a Bristol Beaufighter. I can't imaging this is recent, surely no-one's cutting chunks out of a Beaufighter these days.

We then went for a short tour of the restoration hanger where they are rebuilding a Bristol Bolingbroke (Canadian built Blenheim) & a Bristol Freighter. These were used to fly cars  two at a time with their passengers from the south coast to France.

Surely you'd have to suffer very badly from seasickness to even consider that?

Back in the main area, was this Bristol 173, there was only ever one of it, intended to be a "heliliner" for moving people between cities. None were sold, but it led to the Belvedere which was operated by the RAF.

 

There is also an example of the finest aircraft known to man.

I used to work in there installing all that stuff.

But onto the main event, The Concorde (G-BOAF) sits in it's own hangar with commendably little stuff around it. The website had promised a video playing on the aircraft side, which sounded disappointing, but in fact was technical stuff about the aircraft, so when talking about the aero-heating around the nose, the nose was coloured yellow, fading to red, fading to blue to demonstrate & every few minutes it stopped so I could take photos.

Analogue. I like analogue, this is the flight engineer's station, looking forward to the pilot's positions.

So, Aerospace Bristol - it's a good thing, there's lots of toys to learn how stuff works & it's well laid out.

Exhaust Fairing

Today I sallied forth & made the front panel for the exhaust fairing. Like the rear section it's made from the old boot floor from my girlfriend's Tiger which being 0.5mm aluminium had given up the ghost after carrying spares, petrol, jump leads & all sorts of other essentials on innumerable road trips.

So, starting with a paper pattern, I rough cut the sheet & rolled it to more or less match the sill (over my knee if you must know).

There was then a lot of to-ing & fro-ing, matching the shape & dressing a flare into the rear edge to match(ish) the exhaust can & stiffen the panel a little, also to make sure it covered up the holes in the body punched by a badly located exhaust clamp. Once I was happy, I drilled a number of 3/32" holes & jig-pinned it in place.

I polished it up a bit, though not too much, the rest of the car has many many stone chips, so the "patina" of the second-hand sheet is a good thing, after that it was just a case of opening the holes up to 1/8" & riveting it on - it doesn't need to be removeable like the rear one as the silencer comes out backwards. This is as far away as I can get in the garage, when I get a dry day I'll move it outside.

Bodywork

 I've always shied away from bodywork, in theory I know the principles of tin-smithery, but having a car made of GRP meant I never had to bash anything into a different shape.

But the Stylus has an embarrassing personal problem which explains why the huge majority of the photos I post show the driver's side.

When Jeremy Phillips designed it, he made the sills big enough to take a silencer, so builders didn't need to spend money on big expensive stainless jobs. However, as you can see, a previous owner on my car did just that & chopped a huge hole in the side to fit it. It's ugly & it looks naff, I've always hated it. Also it pointed at the ground & any car following me got covered in dust from the gutter, blown into the air by "the wind of my passage" (ahem).

So what to do? A number of ideas had suggested themselves over the years, But I have now taken action!

The first thing was to bend the silencer bracket so the silencer sat parallel to the body & the tailpipe was nearer horizontal - easy enough, I can bash things about, then I cut a hole for the tailpipe out of a sheet of paper & taped it on the side, marking where the edge of the new fairing panel should be.

The next job was to cut some thin aluminium sheet to match(ish) the paper template & form it to the curve of the sill. I also knocked a flange into the free edge a/ to make it stiffer & b/ because it looks cool.

After that I had to fiddle & faff with it, cutting some away here, changing the curvature there until I was happy with the fit.

Then I took a brave pill & drilled the body!

I also bonded on a tab at the top front to the inside of the body to bolt the panel to, here you can see the panel's jig-pinned on.

After I was happy with the fit I put riv-nuts into the tab & installed more into the GRP (I slightly squeezed them with tigerseal in the holes as pulling a proper squeeze on riv-nuts in GRP doesn't really work).

So here we are - I can't get far enough from the car for a long shot & I'd like to do something similar at the front, so we'll see how that goes.

There will be "development", I may have to enlarge the tailpipe hole if heat expansion moves the tailpipe back, but I'll deal with that as it happens.
 

Airbox - Yes Again!

The airbox on the Stylus has been an ongoing story - not a story of woe I hasten to add, just a story of ideas superseding ideas.

In the beginning the car had sock type filters over alloy trumpets, it works but it means the engine is breathing hot engine bay air, so I got some foam, cut it to make a male mould & made an airbox drawing from a cone filter next to the radiator.

To connect up the hose I used an alloy connector that came with the filter glued into the end of the airbox. It was fine, but after a few years the glue failed & the alloy connector was rattling about.

I hit upon the idea of 3D printing a circular seal which was basically N cross section so the outward facing groove would fit into the edge of the box & the inward groove would fit over the connector flange.

AND IT WORKED!

But (you knew there'd be a "but") the connector sticking out of the angled end of the airbox put the hose very close to the edge of the bonnet aperture & the underside of the bonnet - it looked awkward & I don't like awkward.

So then I thought If I re-designed my seal / retainer, I could have the connector angled downwards, which would make the hose route straighter & take it away from the bodywork.

It looked good, but then I thought - the alloy connector is now swinging off the end of a rubber thing just hooked into a flexible composite box, why am I using it at all?

Back to the drawing board.

The next iteration did away with the alloy connector & just put a bead on the end of the printed thing. I would be using the harder polyurethane, so the hose would still clamp on & yes, a little weight saving, less components, less airflow disruption - marginal improvements I'll grant you, but better is better.

But then I thought - why take the air in through a curved pipe? normally that would be good, aligning the airflow with the space I'm putting it into. However, the trumpets take up a lot of the depth of the airbox, a straight pipe would "aim" the airflow at the trumpet mouths, again marginal, but as I was printing something anyway, why not?

Back to the drawing board again.

So here is the final version, it's a simple shape, so I fired up the printer with shiny black 95 shore hardness TPU & just over six hours later I peeled this off the printer bed.........

I put a "break" in the bead as you can see so a/ the spiral wound hose screws on (ish) & b/ so there was no "support" required for the overhang & the print finished sooner.

Getting it into the end of the airbox was a bit of a trial, but warming it up made the flanges pliable enough to twist into place on the box end wall & it is a tight fit, so isn't going to wobble itself out.

It just remained to wrestle the airbox back over the trumpets (it has to be navigated round the trumpets, the bonnet hinge, the suspension rockers, the fuel pressure valve ......) & connect up the hose.

As you can see, the air hose now runs nicely along with plenty of clearance with the body work. It's tucked nicely out of the way, it could rotate to point a little further down, but I think where is is is the best place.

Wipers Fixed

The Stylus has always had a minor problemette with the wipers - they struggled to clear the centre of the sweep - yes, the bit I needed to look through. They would clear it after a couple of dozen sweeps & after 1/2 an hour or so it'd be fine. The Fury I built never had this problem & then one day I noticed the angle the Stylus' wiper spindles sat at. The builder had presumably used the angled sleeves that came with the wiper motor, so the spindles were almost horizontal, meaning there was spring pressure on the wipers at each end where the screen was 90deg to the spindle, but just about none in the middle where the screen sloped away.

So I removed the dash top - skinning several knuckles - removed & measured the angled sleeves & printed a couple of prototypes. That all seemed to work OK, the spindles sat perpendicular to the screen, so I re-printed the sleeves in polyurethane, I have two hardnesses, so I printed the face the nut screws onto in the hard one & mid-print swapped to the soft one for the face that seals to the bodywork. 

Having done all that a few times (starting with the wrong hardness, using the wrong print file etc) I had a set of parts that worked & after refitting, I squirted the screen, started the wipers and ........ perfect!

Wipe marks right to the very top of the very middle.

It looks pretty good, so tomorrow I'll put the dash top back on & skin a few more knuckles.

Winter Jobs

 Yes it's January & it's cold in the garage - but needs must.

With the rear axle looking fixed (hopefully) I took the car down off the stands & ramps & put just the front on stands to put some more anti-squeal shims on the front brake pads to get a quieter life (my girlfriend won't complain about the brake squeal). Obviously that's an easy enough job, but while I had my head in the wheel arch I noticed some corrosion at the rear lower corner where the paint had come away. Nothing serious, just a little surface rust on steel sheet 1.5mm thick, but I got out the rotary wire brushes & cleaned it back before running some polyurethane sealer up the join & giving is a thick coat of Car Builder Solutions' "Wonderseal". When it's cured off I shall over-spray it with black stone chip paint.

Yes, I know it looks a bit of a mess, but it's meant to, it protects the surface from stones, I used it in the Fury's wheel arches & never had a single star crack. the Stylus hasn't got any & has many star cracks.

Also getting done is the installation of new cameras. My lovely girlfriend bought me a pair of DJI "Action 4" cameras for Christmas & while they have the same fitting as the GoPro Hero 3+'s I've been using, there were a few tweaks.

Firstly the camera doesn't fit in a waterproof case - it is waterproof, except when the charging door is open. I had cut holes in the GoPro cases for the power lead, so they weren't waterproof either, but often it just rains a little bit, so I've drawn & printed a "shield" to keep light wetness away from the power plug & a tethered cap so I can close the charge door, run the camera off the battery & still keep the charge lead's business end dry. They are printed in TPU, so are soft & flexible, but extremely tough. Of course if it's proper rain, the hood will be up & either the camera arm will be folded across, filming through the windscreen, or the camera will be on the outside mount above the windscreen running on the battery.

Not a very clear picture of the power lead shield, cap & its' tether.

A clearer picture, but the shield's not on the plug in this one.

The cameras themselves seem pretty good, with stabilisation built & any number of different options. I will keep it simple, I only want the lowest setting it does as that's still better than the Hero 3+ that I was perfectly happy with. I'll be keeping those for the occasional views from the radiator intake / door mirror etc.

New Year - Brooklands Meet

 We trotted along to the New Year's Day meet at Brooklands as we had a little membership left. It was cold (but about to get colder) & having nothing else taxed, we went in the Cactus. as we arrived there were signs to a car park the other side of the main road, but I spurned them for the main "The Heights" parking, which nearly went wrong - we were one of the last cars in!

Having parked up & got in, we were faced with a whole bunch of Triumphs, but the volunteers were starting to struggle to get cars parked up, there was a queue all down the show car approach road & next to no space. This is a good thing as it means there are many many cars out there in garages & people enjoying them.

Not long after we ran into my Brother & Nephew attending their second car event of 2026, as they'd called in at "The Phoenix" at Hartley Witney on their way. they had come with a guy of my nephew's acquaintance who was driving a Lagonda, so when arriving at the gate they said "We're with the Lagonda" & found themselves parked in the prestigious area in the square in front of the club house - many |rolls, Bentleys, Lagondas, Delaheys with a stripped out Ford Model A & a '90s kit pick-up based on a Sierra.

As usual the truck got a lot of positive attention - not necessarily good as my brother was trying to find his phone & interested passers by were something of a distraction - he did find it in the end.

Nice Buick Riviera parked round the back of the trade stands.

A couple of Sevens

Not a Willys, It's a VW with a body kit, but very very well done, hats off to the creator.

Interesting Saaaab, the exhaust exit is just ahead of the front wheel.

Three Fulvias

Really liked this - I wouldn't want to have to park it though

This was interesting too, it's a Puma GT, production made in South Africa on a beetle floor pan.

Lotus Seven S2 from 1960, which makes it even older than me!

Austin Woody. I'm not going to speculate on which county it's named after.

The writing said it had been restored