We still frequently use the term horsepower as the primary indicator of how much power an engine produces, but very few can explain what it actually means and how it was originally calculated. This concise 9 minute short film explains the origins of the term, how it was calculated by James Watt, and why it…
This Dodge 426 Hemi V8 was constructed by the factory back in the late 1960s as a cutaway display engine for the car show circuit. Display engines like this require an enormous amount of work to get right, carefully pre-planned sections need to be expertly cut, milled, and polished in order to expose the internal…
This Ducati square case model engine is exact down to the smallest detail, it’s not made from a commercially available kit, each of the over 200 components was cast from patterns drawn from the original factory parts from a full scale engine. The model features stainless steel fixings throughout to add to the realism, and…
This is an original Rolls-Royce Olympus Turbojet engine (593-610), fitted with afterburner. It was fitted to a Concorde and flown at supersonic speeds as engine #3, it’s now notable as it’s the only Concorde engine sold by BA with its afterburner and serial number still in place. If you’ve been concocting a plan to buy…
The Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 is almost certainly the most famous aircraft engine in history, I’m sure there are other contenders of course but I’m convinced the Merlin has them beat. Although most believe the engine is named for the famous wizard of the same name from the legend of King Arthur, it’s actually named after…
Editor’s Note: This film starts with 2 minutes of skiing and ice skating footage, stick with it and it’ll all make sense in the end. Riding the Film is a 1937 Chevrolet instructional film that does an excellent job of showing how motor oil is used throughout your engine for lubrication. There are a series…
The Continental R-670 is a 7-cylinder, air-cooled radial engine that was used in planes, blimps, tanks, landing craft, and armoured vehicles – mostly during the Second World War. The most famous aircraft fitted with the R-670 was the Boeing-Stearman Model 75, a single-engine biplane that made use of a large centrally-mounted engine – over 10,000…
This Ferrari F50 V12 engine was built to F50 GT specifications along with three chassis and another three or four race-specification engines. The F50 GT (also known as the Ferrari F50 GT1) was built by Ferrari in collaboration with Michelotto and Dallara to compete in the BPR Global GT Series against the likes of the…
The Bimota DB1 was the first Ducati-engined bike from Bimota, it was originally developed as a joint project between the two companies overseen by Dr. Frederico Martini – a former Ducati engineer – but things soured before the project was completed, and the bike was very nearly never built. The Bimota DB1 The Bimota DB1 is…
This series of 26 images were taken in March 1993 by Matt Thompson and his family, on a special birthday trip to the Britten workshop near Christchurch in 1993. These photographs been completely unseen by anyone other than Matt and his family for the past 26 years. 1993 was a big year for the John…
The NASA Apollo Saturn V Rocket Building Kit is over 1 meter high (3.2 feet or 39 inches) when fully assembled, impressively it has a removable first and second stage that contain a model of the Lunar Module (Eagle) and a model of the Command Module. The Apollo missions took man to the Moon for the…
The legendary NCR workshop played a significant role in the early competition life of Ducati, perhaps most famously they built the special 900cc race bike that Mike Hailwood piloted to his seemingly impossible comeback win at the the 1978 Formula One TT at the Isle of Man. NCR was founded in 1967 as a small motorcycle…
