A couple of years back, I was approached by a member of the Morgan Club to ask if I could help with this car.
I was referred to the then owner John Brown and I had a long telephone conversation with him.
The original concept was exciting but the drive train had a very short life, so it was impractical.
The car had been rebuilt with a Ford engine and continued in this way for some years.
When John Brown bought the car, he set about converting it back to the twin Scott engine layout.
As I understand, there then followed two separate attempts to make it operate successfully which both led to failure.
John Brown had tired of knocking his head against a wall and had taken up fly fishing. The car was in his garage with two Scott engines on the bench.
I explained to him that I was financially unable to make an offer to buy the car, but that if he wanted to solve this problem, I believed that I could do it. The solution lay in understanding the basic causes of the failures and conceiving a design to apply the Scott engines successfully. I explained that my career had been in conceiving such designs and bringing these concepts to a successful conclusion, for example, working with Rolls Royce advance manufacturing division to help improve the efficiency of the original Harrier engine. Mr Brown subsequently sold the car.
Some time later, I was told that the car had appeared on a trailer at a Brooklands reunion event and that the solution had been suggested to modify the drive system so that one engine ran backwards.
I mentally started to calculate the effect of this as running backwards under power means that the rod angle and resultant cylinder wall pressure are increased due to the desaxe crank location.
I can not put hand on heart and claim that an initial impression contains the whole answer, but I would add weight to the flywheels to reduce chatter at this point and design in a compliant drive system to absorb the tendency of one engine to fight the other. Belts rather than chain drive and maybe a limited slip hydraulic unit.
The concept was very interesting and I would have loved to have been involved in bringing it to a successful conclusion with the help of my two engineering renegade friends Bob Collett and Ted Hills
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