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Thanks Andy,
Much appreciated, and the photos bring it all flooding back.
So much of the car and engine were made "in house" heaven only knows how many hours I spent making parts for George, but to give you an idea a solid steel crank would take about 80 to 100 hours sometimes more depending on the spec, i.e. a 3 main bearing MAE type (44.45 mm stroke as I recall) was a bit easier to machine from a billet than a 5 main bearing. It got very stressful towards the end one slip and it's in the scrap bin, toughest task was drilling the oil holes, spend ages checking and double checking the set up before drilling a 5mm dia. oil hole about 6 -7 inches through the crank and praying it exited in the correct place.
George often turned up with un-machined casting and forgings he found on his travels and a sketch uttering the words, "see if you make this for me Steve".
He was very fortunate in having the machine shop, nothing fancy just good solid machine tools and we always tried to get the biggest we could, turned out some amazing stuff over the years. He had a few specialized machine tools like a crank grinder that we could set up to "blue print" cranks, extremely accurate stoke settings and A1 geometry, a dynamic balancing machine for crank assemblies and propshafts, modified by my good self to balance his racing wheels and tyres etc. A few other bits and pieces modified and adapted for whatever we needed them for.
Reading through the article it is clear that his cost were minimal compared to others trying to compete with him simply because so much was achieved in-house with the only costs being my wages, tooling consumables and materials. His time, Clive his mechanic and Kevin's time came for free.
Thanks again for taking the time to copy the article and post it, like I say all the memories came flooding back and some great photos too.
I don't suppose you happen to know if George is still with us or not, he retired at least fifteen years ago I think he was born around 1938 ish but not sure, I have tried searching all the social media sites etc. but no joy.
Regards,
Steve.
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