Hi all,
I’m based in Gloucestershire UK, of early 60’s vintage and have always been interested in small IC builds. At 16 yrs old I acquired a set of Castings for a Westbury Kiwi. At the time I had a Myford lathe and little else, and to be honest back then not enough skills. After making a start the Kiwi got put on hold for many years, but it was largely completed about 15 yrs ago. There are various photos of it’s construction on the late Ron’s excellent MEN site. I’ve built cam grinders, (2 to get one working right) a spark eroder, converted an Orac lathe to modern standards and made countless tooling. For the last 8 years I’ve built the extreme off road race truck you’ll see in my avatar. It’s a huge truck on 40” tyres with an Alfa Romeo V6 engine which my daughter races. Most parts were made including billet machined dry sump etc , not too much bought in – that’s why it took so long.
I’m a great fan of classic Alfa Romeos, in fact I’d love to build a scale Alfa motor one day.
During the last 30 years I have acquired far too many engineering machines, to the point where I would be embarrassed to list them here! None are new, they are all older machines (including a mix of older CNC) and all have come from factory closure sales. Some of them are quite a decent size. Various CNC lathes and mills were bought as non runners but I’ve eventually sorted them without calling anyone in. I hope to be a bit more active here in the future but I still have too many other commitments right now for a build. The next build will be a Whittle V8 which I’ve fancied making since the original articles were published over 20 years ago. I reckon I’d better have a go at that whilst I can still see the all those tiny parts. (I hope I can). It’s great to be part of this friendly knowledge sharing community! I’ve learnt so much from lurking here! Thank you to all that have shared their knowledge, Nick
