by Guy Martin
You can buy Snap-on on tick, paying off a bit every week out of your wages. That’s how they get you. There’s something you want, but don’t really need, but you work out how much you can afford out of your mechanic’s wages and talk yourself into it. Some mechanics and fitters don’t care what tools they use, but the good ones want the best they can afford, and that, in my experience, is Snap-on. It’s a good feeling to be working and knowing you have the right tool for the job. That’s more than half the battle.
Also in shed number one, I’ve got my big eff-off lathe, the small lathe, surface grinder, parts washer, metal bender, plasma cutter, welder, porting tools …
The big lathe came out of a big factory in Grimsby, called Huntsman Tioxide. They shut down years ago and I bought some of the stuff out of there, but a long time after they’d closed. It needs wiring in and tidying up a bit.
The parts washer is something special. It’s made by Snap-on, but it’s not a UK-supplied unit, so it needed converting to 240V so it would run over here. It was part of one year’s sponsorship deal, too. I’d have struggled to justify buying it myself, but I love it and I’ve used it loads since I’ve had it.
Nearly everything I’m working on engine-wise goes in it. It uses a very aggressive soluble substance in the water, so you have to rinse everything with clean water as soon as you get it out or you risk the components being corroded by the chemicals in the cleaner. You have to leave it on for half an hour beforehand to warm the water up. The parts come out of the washer cabinet bone dry, because it’s heated. I’ve never seen an electric meter move so fast as when this parts washer is working. It’s a thirsty bastard and a big unit, too. You could put a human in it. I could sit in it, but it wouldn’t do me much good.
I’ve spent so much on tools because I love them and because I’ve doubled up on a lot of them I’ve got a lot of tools at home, and loads of very similar ones at work, too. The work tools are stored in a Snap-on Workstation. I’ve had it about 12 years and I traded in two smaller Snap-on toolboxes for it. When I say toolboxes, they’re not something you pick up off the floor. They’re metal chests with drawers of different depths. They’re chin height and on wheels, or a bottom cabinet with a smaller set of toolbox drawers on top. The toolboxes I traded in were the ones I used when I worked at my dad’s. Back then I’d pull my toolbox around the workshop so it was closer to where I was working at that particular time.
At Moody’s, and the place I’m working now, you have a place of work and your toolbox stays there. That big bugger I’ve got now takes too much moving so that’s not an option. It covers the floor area of a normal office desk but it’s over head height. There’s a load of storage drawers with a workbench on top and, above that, what they call a riser, which is an enclosed workspace with a lockable up-and-over door, like a car garage, on top. It’s trick.
Snap-on tools are sold by agents who travel around their regions in vans. You can’t buy Snap-on from Halfords or a DIY store. One of the most unusual things about these tools is the lifetime guarantee of most of them and the fact that the stuff is that good, that if you look after it you can trade in used kit against new stuff and there is a market for used toolboxes.
My milling machine, as I’ve said, is the XYZ CNC I’ve had for five or six years and have taught myself to use. The plasma cutter looks like a little MIG welder that has a hand torch with a button on it, but for cutting, not joining bits of metal. I cut sheet metal with it. I’ll cut the bottom out of my Transit van with it when I get around to fitting the engine in the back.
I have a Kemppi TIG welding set. MIG is better for some things, if you just want to daub on some weld without concentrating the heat, but TIG is better for a nice, penetrative joint. TIG does titanium welding a lot easier than a MIG, too, if I ever get into that.
Also in this same shed I have all the bike stuff and a bike bench; a couple of good workbenches; a good air system, with air pipes plumbed round the workshop and take-off points positioned around the workshop to attach pneumatic air tools to, so I don’t have a massive long air hose trailing behind me. There’s my welding bench; a metal-working workbench and my other Snap-on toolbox – a tool wagon or TUV (tool utility vehicle) that’s on wheels with big pneumatic tyres. It’s designed for NASCAR pit lanes, and was part of the sponsorship, too. The partnership with Snap-on has been running for a few years so the stuff’s added up. The tool wagon stores all my milling gear, so all the computer leads to link a laptop to the XYZ milling machine, all the cutting tips, cutting tools, boring bars, chocks and wedges, parallels …
Shed two is home to the vane compressor, which is rated at 20cfm. That means it pumps 20 cubic feet of air per minute, which is man enough for everything I need to run in my sheds and it’s quiet because it’s a vane, not a piston, compressor.
I have a Nissan GTR six-cylinder turbo engine out of a wrecked car that I bought off eBay. That’s going in the Ford pickup project when I get my teeth into that. While I’m writing this, the Nissan engine is sat next to the Ford V6 turbo that was in the front of my black Trannie van, the one I raced at the Silver State Classic in 2016, but this engine is going to be bolted in the back of the same Trannie. I have a Scania 143 500 truck in there, too.
I have lifting legs for raising trucks off the ground to work underneath them and a two-poster car ramp, so I can service all my own vans and cars. Shed two stores a steam cleaner, another workbench and garden stuff like a chainsaw, lawnmower and strimmer.
The latest shed is my dyno room, dyno being short for dynamometer. I did a deal with the TV lot and they helped kit out the dyno shed. I have two Dynojet dynos. One is a four-wheel-drive car dyno that will measure up to 2,000 horsepower. The other is a motorbike dyno, a Dynojet 250i that will measure up to 1,000 horsepower. They both have Eddy current brakes, so you can hold the rpm at a steady state no matter what the throttle is doing. It’s the same kind of brake a rollercoaster would have on it. A dyno with one of these fitted allows for a more accurate load test. If I was trying to get the fuelling right on an 800 horsepower Suzuki Hayabusa, the Eddy brake gives more controllable resistance, so the bike isn’t revving out every time you touch the throttle. It allows you to see what all the sensors on the bike are reading while it’s under load.
Like the parts washer, I’d got around not having my own dynos, but I had already used the motorbike one plenty of times in the first few weeks of owning it. The car one will come into its own when I crack on with the Transit and pickup projects. As with so many things, the more you use the dyno the better you get at it. I’ve already blown two bikes up on it, but that was nothing at all to do with operator error or the dyno.
I agreed to race the 2018 Spa Classic Endurance round again with Boastie. The lads who own the bikes that we race, Jez and Pete, and his mechanic Ben, had prepared some late 1980s GSX-R750s, the newest Suzukis the Classic Endurance series will allow people to race. They’d made a lovely job of these GSX-R750s. Both frames had been vapour-blasted, then Scotchbrited, to a really lovely finish. Scotchbrite is a bit like a kitchen scourer and is used to clean and finish metal. The engines had been rebuilt with loads of new parts including performance pistons and rings. We were hoping for good things from them, so they brought the pair of bikes down to set them up on my dyno.
In the case of the motorcycle dyno, the front wheel is rolled into a chock so that it’s held securely. The back wheel is on a rolling drum sunk into the floor. The dyno operator, that’s me, sits on the bike and operates it like riding a bike in a straight line. As the bike is started and begins to accelerate, it rolls the drum and the dyno system calculates the power and torque the bike is making.
I put the first of the Suzukis on the dyno and ran it up. Within a few seconds it had stopped running on all four cylinders and was only firing on two. I stopped the engine and we had a bit of a looking around, but we couldn’t understand why it would stop. We took it off the dyno and put the other bike on. It did the same, but it stopped working even more qui
ckly, if anything. When we moved that bike off the dyno, we noticed a load of fine, gritty sand where the bike had been running on the dyno.
We worked out that when the frames had been vapour-blasted, the medium that they put in the water to blast the alloy frames had found its way into all the nooks and crannies in the frame. As the bikes had been run up for the first time this dry, very fine grit was shaken loose. The bikes are never run in dusty conditions in the kinds of endurance races they compete in, so the air filters on the carbs are dead coarse. They’re not designed to stop fine dirt, just bigger stones in case the bike slides off the track into a gravel trap during a race. If you do that with no filters on, the carbs can swallow stones and wreck the engine. Game over. When we took the filters off we saw the carbs were thick with this fine sand. It had got into the engines and buggered them. We couldn’t believe how much of this grit had been left in the frame and what damage it had caused. It wasn’t a good night, but we all learned a lesson, the hard way.
If I’m setting up a bike on the dyno, while I’m sat on it I’m looking at a laptop computer screen to see the power read-outs and the other information like air mixture. I can have one hand on the throttle, and one hand on the laptop adjusting the mapping of the ECU to adjust how much fuel is being fed in or the position of the ignition timing. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics. The dyno isn’t just about measuring power, it’s more about set-up and fine-tuning.
It’s all right having a dyno that will measure 1,000 or 2,000 horsepower, but when you’re kitting out your dyno room you have to do the calculations to make sure you can supply enough air to the engine to allow it to make that power. Turbos are sized in different ways. You have rotor sizes and input and output sizes, but, in general, turbos are referred to and rated by a number that is the maximum horsepower it can help provide. The turbo I’m fitting to the Hayabusa I’m building, the one I’m hoping to reach 300mph in a mile, is a 1,000-horsepower turbo. The bike won’t make that power, because of the size of the engine, valves, intakes, loads of reasons, but that turbo will provide enough air for the right engine to make 1,000 horsepower. It’s all down to the flow of compressed air the turbo can deliver to the engine.
These are rough figures, but to make 1,000 horsepower you’ve got to put 90,000 litres of air through that engine in one minute. That means, if you want an engine to make 1,000 horsepower for one minute, the turbo is taking 90,000 litres of air from the atmosphere and compressing it to mix with the petrol and be blown through the fuel injection system into the cylinder bores so it can be lit by the spark plugs. And when I say 90,000 litres, that’s the air measured at barometric pressure – sea level. So, take a one-litre bottle and pour all the water out of it. What replaces the water in the bottle is a litre of air. Imagine 90,000 of those bottles. Every minute.
Turbocharged and supercharged engines can deal with this much air passing through their combustion chambers because the air is compressed and forcing multiple litres of air in the same volumetric area by upping the pressure it’s held at. The more air the engine can flow, the more fuel you can mix with it, the bigger the bang when the spark ignites the fuel and air mix, and the more power the engine can make.
So, going back to my dyno room, it’s equipped with one big fan that can deliver 500,000 litres of air per minute. When it’s blowing at full chat it feels like you’re in a hurricane. The tricky thing is keeping the room in a neutral state. It’s all right getting all that air in, for the turbo to gulp up all it needs, but you’ve also got to get it out. If you don’t, you’re turbocharging the room, and your dyno will start reading mental numbers, because the turbo would be compressing air that is already being compressed by the room itself. That would never happen in nature. If you ran a non-turbocharged engine in a room that’s not properly ventilated, it would behave like a turbocharged one. In most cases, when you’re actually competing on a bike, the opposite is true. The higher you go above sea level the less dense the air becomes and a normally aspirated engine struggles to get enough in. That’s why making good power at Bonneville, which is 4,200 feet above sea level, or near the top of Pikes Peak, 14,000 feet above sea level at the finish line, is more difficult.
That means you’ve got to get the air out so the atmosphere in the room remains at one bar, the air pressure at sea level. To do that I have a big, louvred grate in the wall. The air flows to it round two corners and the whole room is fitted out with sound-deadening panels and acoustic foam so the neighbours aren’t too bothered by noise. The last thing I want to do is piss them off. That’s why I don’t run anything on the dyno past nine at night. The bloke who lives behind me plays drums in the shed at the bottom of his garden and I can hear it, and it doesn’t bother me because he’s good, so I think we’ll be all right.
CHAPTER 22
‘I stayed up the top end during the birth’
I COULD HAVE gone through life not being a dad and I’d have been all right about that, but, as of 23 October 2017, that situation changed for ever and I’m happy about it.
Dot, no middle name, was born in Grimsby. I stayed up the top end during the birth. The doctors ended up cutting her out of the sunroof. I didn’t really want to see any of that.
Early on, like a lot of new dads, I imagine, I felt I couldn’t do much with Dot. I would get home from work and talk to her about Nige and Steve. Just talking daft. I talk to her like I’m talking to another human being. I don’t talk to her like people think you have to talk to babies. She seems a happy kid. She’s always smiling. When I get up at four to take the dogs for a walk before work, Dot wakes up too, always looking like she is over the moon to have woken up to another day, smiling and full of beans at four in the morning.
I don’t think anyone knows how they’re going to react when they become a parent but, from my few months of experience, it’s been good. I’ll be honest and say it wasn’t on my urgent to-do list, but it’s made me realise as the job’s evolved that now I can see I’ve got things I can pass on from my short time on earth. Maybe Dot will look at things differently to how I do, but share some of my perspective on life. There are pros and cons in everyone’s personality, so hopefully she takes my pros and adds a few more of her own.
She is someone to leave my lathe and milling machine to. I didn’t grow up with any of that. It was great having the shed, and the freedom to use whatever tools I could physically pick up, because I could build lawnmower engines, but I never had the chance to do any welding, turning or machining. I think if I would have had a lathe when I was six years old I’d be turning some good stuff out by now. I might have been a few fingers short of the full set, but I’d be a good machinist.
I keep telling people I would like Dot to be a welder, because women are supposed to make better welders than men. Shazza doesn’t agree with my career plans. She says Dot will be whatever she wants to be. I’m the same, really. I want her to be a better welder than me, but she can do what she wants in life.
I’m a nappy changer. I get stuck in and do what little bit I can. I like it, but I have no idea how the job is going to go. There’s no part of me thinking, She should be doing this by now, or comparing her to anyone else’s kids. I’m taking every day as it comes. I just want her to grow up to be a good lass who can add a bit more to the world.
Sharon is the absolute best mum. She’s brilliant. We have different views on good parenting, though. I think I might be rushing stuff. I bought a baby seat for the pushbike after a few weeks, and said I’d take her in the woods on the bike, but Sharon told me Dot’s body wouldn’t be ready for it until she’s about nine months old. I’m not going to argue. As I said, Dot came to one of the Classic Endurance races with us when she was a few months old. Shazza organised some little ear defenders for her.
We had our first family holiday in June 2018. We had originally talked about driving to Italy, but it was too far to go with the young ’un. Then we thought about the south of France, but Shazza thought that would still be too
long for Dot in the van. Eventually, we decided we’d stay in England and go to Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre in Dorset. Shazza is fascinated by monkeys.
We set off on Wednesday, dropping my BSA off at Les’s near Dudley on the way down, so he could machine the cases to try to solve the gearbox problems we keep having.
We didn’t have anything booked in advance. Instead, Sharon sorted hotels as we went along. The first hotel was a posh one in Christchurch; we ate in the hotel restaurant overlooking the harbour. We had nice hotels every night. The next night we stayed in the New Forest, another nice hotel. Dot was old enough to be put in a seat on a bike, so Shazza took her and I was on my bike, just having a steady pedal around.
We were going to get the ferry to the Isle of Wight, but there didn’t look like there was much to do over there, so we went to Beaulieu instead. What a lovely place. It has the motor museum with Donald Campbell’s land speed record-breaking Bluebird on display; there’s a monorail to take you round the whole site and a country house. Beaulieu was dead quiet, because we went midweek, out of school holidays.
Along with the regular motor museum exhibits there is a Top Gear museum with a load of props and cars that have been used, and wrecked, in the making of the programme. It might have started tongues wagging if I’d been spotted in there because it was the same week that Matt LeBlanc had announced he was packing in presenting Top Gear. People keep suggesting my name as a replacement, but what reason would I have for doing that? I’m sure the presenters get to do some good stuff, but I get to do amazing things anyway. The museum showed a 15-minute film highlighting the best bits of the programme a few times a day and we sat down to watch it. It was just long enough to make me realise it was all utter bullshit. Entertaining, but pointless bullshit. There’s no arguing it’s a very popular show, but it’s not for me.