Design and the Bristol Car by Dr John Hobbs, Butterfield Press.
I attended the recent Heritage Trust meeting where among the speakers was Dr John Hobbs son of Bristol Cars long serving designer Mr Dudley Hobbs. John gave a very interesting and wide ranging talk about the evolution of draughting techniques from the early days into the computer aided design era with obvious reference to his fathers time with Bristol where he spent the longest part of his career with the Car Division later to become Bristol Cars. This is all going to be the subject of the latest Butterfield press book which I am really looking forward to, especially having had the opportunity to look at copies of the original design drawings for the 603 which John had on display.
Full details of the book are now on the Butterfield website and it is due out in June of this year, it is really nice to see a British car designer get the credit they deserve for a change as far to many seem to be back room staff compared to the engineers and it must be fairly unique that one man has been able to develop so many different models over so many years yet retain the essential DNA of the Bristol Car.
Very interesting. It looks like another "must have" book and to hell with the price.
For those who are interested here is the link to the Butterfield website and you can order the book now for delivery in June.
Richard
I tried dropping lots of late Christmas present hints but it didn't work the family have realised Bristol ownership comes at a price.
Years ago before deciding that I still wanted to be a Chartered Surveyor my first job was in the highways department of a local authority doing road surveys and design, this was before the days of CAD and laser levels etc so the design principles John talked about were very familiar, I still have a box of the old railway curves which we used all the time so this aspect of the book is right up my street.
There is still one aspect of Bristol history I would love to see recorded and that is the storey of Brian May and his years of dealing in and restoring Bristol cars.
Geoff.
I still have my set of "French curves" from my days in the aerodynamics office in Filton working on Concorde, doing simple draughting work and plotting infinite numbers of graphs. The advantage of hand plotting graphs over machine/computer is that you remember the result and only produce what is really required for a conclusion.
There is an article by Brian May about his Beutler on the BOHT website
Richard