“This year’s report is much the same as last year, the Club´s website continues to enjoy a regular number of visitors, which peaks when a report goes live on a major event such as the Annual Dinner.

Its contents remain stable, covering the the most important aspects of the Club which were read out last year. One new topic has been added this year, namely the Club’s Policies on the subject of Data protection and Privacy, generally known as GDPR.

On average there are usually about 9 current reports of Events, the Dinner and AGM on the website.

I continue to have to remove older reports to keep the site size under 100MB to ensure it remains free according to Google’s rules and regulations. An interesting activity when one considers the Dinner report alone is about 25MB.

All removed reports are kept in an Archive and these can be provided upon request, as has been done once or twice.

The Webmaster continues to be a relatively-easy-to-find initial contact for people around the world with a question or query on Perkins. Many of these are marine "friends" who, for example wish to repair or sell their Perkins engine (including outboard engines which Perkins stopped making in 1965) in a boat.  

Other popular questions come in from farmers, requesting details about their engines in MF tractors. David Boulton is a very helpful source of information when I cannot provide the answer out of his book.

This year’s most interesting query was from a gentleman in Yorkshire who has a Vauxhall Bedford CF van fitted with a 4.108 vehicle engine (remember those!). It turned out he had installed an automatic gearbox, don’t ask me how, out of an old Jaguar XJ to reduce the engine’s rated speed from 4000 rpm down to around 3000 rpm. He had done this to prolong the 4.108 engine’s life, firmly believing the 4000 rpm rated speed was an engine killer. The only problem now was however he had major smoke problems when running the van on the motorways at his new rated speed of 3000 rpm. I explained to him that he was operating the good old Perkins diesel at a point that as a vehicle engine it really wasn’t developed for. The end of the story is that I set up instructions for a fuel pump testing rig for him, so that he could set the fuel level, and hence the smoke, exactly at his new rated speed. He did all this in his garage! The feedback was that it worked and he is now driving over and across the Yorkshire Dales without smoke screening them! It took me back a few years to my applications days and was rewarding in that it all ended with a  positive conclusion.

Any comments or ideas for improvement of the website, please email me (address on the website)“. 

David Foster