"A jet engine is not that much different from an internal combustion engine in that it pushes the air in, squeezes it, ignites it and pushes it out.”
Simon Lipscombe’s idiot-proof explanation of the jet engine’s basic operating principle would surely have delighted Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine. That he knows how one works is because he bought one, like you do…
“I found it on eBay,” he says. “It’s from a Mk3 Avro Shackleton. The plane had two jet engines, one each behind the outermost Griffin V12 prop engines to push it along. It produces 2600lb of thrust and with a few extra bits it cost me and my dad Richard £2000.
With his new jet engine safely in his garage, Simon, who is chief mechanic at a hire car firm, began exploring how it worked. He says: “I started fiddling around, working out what everything did.
YouTube was my friend; there’s enough information out there to give you an idea where you should go. Once I had worked it out, I decided to run it up, so screwed it to a trailer attached to a tree. My friends were all gathered behind an 8ft dirt bank but I was too busy looking for oil leaks to be scared.”
Now with the jet engine running, Simon’s next task was to decide what to do with it. “I already had a Ford P100 with a V8 in the back, so another with a jet engine seemed like a good plan,”he says.
“The P100 can carry a ton and has an 8ft load bay. The jet engine weighs 800kg and is quite short. You can buy an unrestored P100 for as little as £2000, so that’s what I did.”
Second P100 sourced and restored, Simon then fitted the jet engine to its load deck, wisely leaving the vehicle’s original 1.8-litre diesel engine in place at the front. “The pick-up is driven by the normal engine and the jet engine provides thrust,” he says.
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