UKDRN

herb andrews wrote:Bill

Perhaps Bruce Brown made more than one rail. Was it broken up by you and/or Johnnie or were the front wheels, axle assembly and the steering wheel and support bought from somebody else?

Nice price, but then that was in 79...

Herb

Maybe you could contact Pete again to sort out this problem as to which car was broken up as acording to the British Flathead Racers Ass. newsletters Pete was doing work on the steering before debuting the flathead rail and as Cunning Plan has pointed out it's alot different on the barn find car compaired to the early shots of Age Machine. Maybe Pete only started with the bare chassis and the steering had been fitted to something else?

timetravel wrote:Maybe Pete only started with the bare chassis and the steering had been fitted to something else?

Correct Timetravel, I've been in touch with Pete and heres his summary, which explains a lot :

I bought the car from a guy who came from a small village in gloucestershire near the M5 ..but I cannot remember his name ..he ran a small junior dragster briefly. It was just a bare chassis with body and steering box. Of course the person you are speaking about may have had the remains of age machine as the chassis was bare, the guy I bought it from also bought it bare..as I recall the original front end was very wide and looked too wide !!

The car in the pics attached to this is a different one, at that time there were a lot of flatheads around or under construction, I think close to 16!

I built a narrowed westminster rear for it ( many ratios available 5.6 to 3.4 I think)
The 'Lads' father bent up a front axle. ( the lads were 3 friends one of whom lived next door to Ken Cooper and ran the white falthead rail at the time)
The toolmaker at Grenadier ( where I worked) made up the front axle ends and the front wheel hubs ( from plans from "rachet jaw" Shaw). I welded up the bits and pieces of the rest of axle / steering and they were plated by Grenadier.
Motor was a blown up block from the "lads" , welded up and re-ported..that was a lot of fun !!!
welded up the block and filled it with tile grout ..bored 3/8" as I recall ?
Isky 300 ( I think) mushroom lifter cam imported direct
ex Ken C rods and pistons ( I bought his new pistons )
merc crank torn from a wreck at a scrapyard in northants ( I think) for a little more stroke
3 strombergs on a ? intake with home made ally cover alcohol fuel ..tried nitro also I remember see the results when it blew up, Herb
Beautiful shaped ally fuel tank ( make to my design by the "Lads" father ) using a pressurised system , stock shimmed fuel pump pumped air into the tank, forced the fuel out through a large delivery pipe to a manifold split the supply to the 3 jugs
NOS magneto for a static flathead pump from "Wallys" incredible stocks of old parts .. a disused WW2 airfield in somewhere like essex. (Wally Wheatly, Herb) ? This was rewound and dual points set up on Ken C's fixture
It also had aftermarket heads and thou I want to say Offenhauser or Edelbrok I don't think they were

The trans was varied a lot ....I think I had the following;
direct for a while ( with a thrown together clutch help from Ken C)
electric overdrive only from a westminster or such ( gear ratio changes with the westminster rear helped)
Then the best...a borg warner 35 ( I think ) with a clutch , from a jag with a manual valve body ( from John Whimore Drag n Fly) rebuilt heavy duty clutches and torrington bearings. As I recall it was push started so that it must have had a pump in the back, at one stage this was in Ken C's car which I ran for a while when building mine. I don't believe I ever ran the manual 2 speed thats in it now, but I must have kept the auto box because I think it ended up in Ken's car..not sure about that.

My car ran just into the 10's as I remember and when I ran Ken's car an off the trailer 10.72 was the best as I recall.
The objective was for my car to be as light as poss and everything was drilled and lightened..Ken was the king of light tho , I seem to recall his car without the motor trans only weighed something like 190 lbs ?????

Of course hard to be sure ..but that looks like my front end in those pics, thing thats weird is that the support brackets and tube ine area appear to have been painted..they were chrome moly so should have not needed to be ? the control rods were chrome so could have rusted and been painted ?

Herb

Hope that clears everything up. One thing Bill, did you ever find the diddycoys that were last seen running up Dartford high street with dragster parts under their arm?

Wow ,pretty comprehensive build sheet as for the bits that jon had all i can say is that i remember the front axle,wheels and tyres and the steering wheel and column,we had a custom car circa 1971ish and on the front page was a shot of the brucie brown car looking into the cockpit showing in some detail the steering wheel and column,,,they where the same ,inside the mag it showed the front axle etc and it was the same,borranis bracketry ,allthe same,this was the brucie brown car with the strange headers because they came off a topo

I just came across this and thought I would add to it. After the car belonged to Bruce Brown then Roz Prior (age machine). it was then painted green on a red chassis and became the Lizard (seen in the photo running at Silverstone) and only ran at a few meetings in 1973 before being sold on to John Wright and John Sutton.

Thought I'd resurrect this thread seeing as I just spent an hour or so looking over this dragster, having just supplied some new wheel nuts for the period ARE 5 spoke wheels being fitted to the car! The flathead motor is now out & a 327 SBC has been obtained to replace it, together with a sexy Hilborn stack injection system. The discussion now is whether to find an adaptor to mate the engine to the existing clutch can or take that can out & get a new one to fit the SBC, I favour getting a new one & keeping the old one with the flathead motor.

The whole car needs a lot of TLC to get it back to a running condition apart from the above, including another front axle assembly as the existing one is quite narrow & not really in keeping with the original theme of the car. Plus various other parts will need replacing like the very homemade butterfly steering wheel etc. Once a complete build spec of the car has been found from various archive material, work will progress towards getting it to a running state & hopefully able to participate in RWYB events.

Would be great to see it out again with an injected mouse as it was in '71.

Here's a shot of it in the far lane racing the similar machine of Ray Hoare.