From the Editor - September 1^st , 2019

Greetings once more from Canada's West Coast! I'm well and truly back in the groove after my extended absence in June and July, although catching up with the backlog has been a bit of a challenge. Thankfully, as far as I can presently foresee there should be no further interruptions in service for quite a while now. 

Of course, hits are one thing - actual visits are quite another, since they reflect the level of interest aroused among those who happen to hit upon the site. The August total of 8,405 visits was also down on figures from previous months, probably for the same reason as that cited earlier.

The visit/hit ratio for August (the proportion of hits which translated into visits) was 2.1%, once again only a little down from previous figures. Still a perfectly reasonable figure - one hit in 47 continued to result in an actual visit. Clearly the site still attracts its share of direct interest from among those who stumble across it!

However, the number of visits only tells part of the story - the number of pages accessed is a more representative indicator of the level of interest in the material on this site. This was the most worrying facet of the August 2019 figures. The number of pages accessed in August showed a really sharp decline to a figure of only 46,565 pages The average number of pages accessed per visit also fell sharply to only 5.5 pages per visit. This is a somewhat worrying indication that interest in the material offered on this site may be fading. I'll be watching these statistics carefully, because the work involved in maintaining this site can only be justified through an ongoing expression of reader engagement as reflected in these statistics.

Now a note which has unfortunately had to continue to be a regular feature of these Editorials. This one is mostly for new readers - old hands can skip to the following sections.

So why is it still there?!? Well, before anyone else asks (and quite a few well-meaning souls already have!), I've thoroughly explored the possibility of removing or at least blocking this feature, but it can't be done without extensive (and very expensive) custom modification to the otherwise very useable generic platform which came as a ready-to-use over-the-counter package, thus keeping the costs and complexities manageable. So we're stuck with this feature.

Along with the continued use of this website, the correspondence from my valued contacts around the world has continued to pour in unabated, even during my absence on vacation. During the past two months I've received communications (in no particular order) from Maris Dislers, Johnny Shannon, Dennis Toth, Bob Christ, Darrel Peugh, Alan Strutt, Ken Croft, Neil McRae, Miles Patience, Andre Rousseau, Dave Ellis, Tom Walker, Bob Allan, Pat King, Bill Mohrbacher, Luis Petersen, David Burke, Lars Gustafsson, Peter Valicek, Paul Venne, Mike Conner and Tim Dannels. Sincere apologies to anyone whom I may have inadvertently missed in the crowd - it can be hard to keep track! The blog site has also continued to justify its existence by generating a fair amount of relevant traffic - thanks for that.

In last month's isue I noted that the illustrated timelines pages which formerly graced the O.S. website had been taken down. While this is true, my friend and colleague Bob Allan drew my attention to the fact that those pages remain available here on the very useful Web Archive site. My thanks to Bob for bringing this to our attention!

Some good news came through from outgoing MECA President Bill Mohrbacher. I mentioned last month that Bill has been facing some medical challenges. He now advises that he has undergone a PET scan which showed that his lymph nodes are back to normal, meaning that no further treatment is required. He will have periodic scans, but for now the crisis appears to have been averted. Great news, Bill - all the best!!

Some far less positive news came from my valued friend and colleague Miles Patience. His father Mike Patience, who has made very significant contributions to the gathering of model engine history, has been diagnosed with primary lung cancer. Taken together with Mike's other health issues, the doctors are doubtful that they can do a lot for him. This is of course the worst possible news, and I'm sure that you'll all join with me in expressing our shared empathy and support for all the members of the Patience family as they work through this difficult period.  

Maris Dislers reminded me of a technique that I have used for many years to dismantle and reassemble .049 and similar engines having screw-in cylinders. Far too many of these show up with marred cylinder or head fins due to the use of inappropriate tools to dismantle them. Pliers or vice-grips are the worst offenders, but the use of a lathe or drill chuck just is as bad becuse of the localized pressure points applied by the chuck jaws, which tend to distort the bore. A collet of exactly the right size might be OK, but how many people have access to those?!?

The best method that I've found is to use a standard common-or-garden hose clamp to grip the cylinder. You should only tighten the clamp as much as needed to provide the required grip - no more. One then uses the protruding strap screw mounting as a purchase to rotate the cylinder, first always making sure that the piston is completely free in the bore and positioned at bottom dead centre. Forget to do this, and in many cases you'll break the conrod by twisting, or at the very least mar the bore. 

I though that I had come up with this myself and assumed that many others must also have done so - it seemed pretty obvious. However, Maris drew my attention to the fact that this very approach had been the subject of a brief article by my friend Bill Schmidt in the December 2013 issue of "Engine Collectors' Journal" (ECJ, issue no. 219.  The article is reproduced here. I believe that it is self-explanatory.

Maris suggests that dressing the captive end of the strap piece to avoid it acting as a localized pressure point might be a good precaution. I concur. He also recommends the use of a strip of leather (coarse side towards the job) rather than aluminium flashing for better/safer grip. I've used both leather and thick fibre gasket material over the years, with good results in both cases. My sincere thanks to Maris for drawing my attention to the need to make this technique more widely known! Thanks also to Bill Schmidt for his original article in ECJ.   

One of the very best rewards for the time and effort that I put into my in-depth engine reviews comes when they trigger a reader's recollections or knowledge about the particular subject, resulting in the receipt of corrected or updated information. Another example of this very satisfactory response to an article came in connection with last month's lead piece on the Mechanair 5.9 cc sparker.

At the time when that article was originally published, I had seen no evidence to support the frequently-advanced notion that the Mechanair was ever manufactured in Leeds by its original distributor, the Astral Aero Model Company. However, immediately after the article's first appearance on August 1^st, 2019, my good friend Ken Croft sent me a couple of images in his possession which forced a considered re-evaluation of this aspect of the Mechanair story.

Ken's images show what unquestionably seems to be a previously-unreported variant of the Astral/Mechanair 5.9 cc model. Although its crankcase, cylinder, timer and carburettor mounting arrangements appear to be identical to the corresponding features seen on the more familiar Mechanair 5.9 which formed the main subject of my original article, it displays a number of key differences. Chief among these are the radially-finned cast alloy head, backplate-mounted fuel tank, very different venturi and needle valve and seemingly soldered-on exhaust stack. It also features an alloy spinner nut.

Ken did not have the actual engine shown in these images, nor has he ever seen an example of this model. Neither have I, for that matter - indeed, it does not appear in any of the standard reference works on British model engines (and I have 'em all!). It was also never advertised at any time. Ken received the images some years ago during the course of a discussion about Mechanair. Beyond what is visible in the photos, he has no information, nor does he know where the engine is today.

Regardless, this information has compelled me to add a discussion of this variant and its potential implications to the Mechanair article. The new material will be found near the beginning of the article in the background discussion. If you're at all interested in the Mechanair, it's well worth a read!

I'm always delighted to hear from my vaued friend Johnny Shannon of Houston, Texas, USA. As a latter-day designer and manufacturer of high-quality speed engines along with his friend and colleague Dub Jett, Johnny has taken a close and highly supportive interest in my series of articles on classic 2.5 cc racing engines of the 1950's. He was particularly intrigued by the photograph of Ray Gibbs' 1956 World Championship winning Carter Special which I included in last month's article on the Super Tigre G.20 V.