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elling is undoubtedly Britain's most prolific engine designer. Until the mid 90's
he was also |
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the country's least known. Working with an eight strong team of master graduates he has
designed literally hundreds of engines – and improved countless others - for clients across the world. He has been in business since 1964, but has only sprung to prominence in
recent years, first as a designer of TVR's own V8 engine and then as a potential supplier of an engine to the consortium of Rolls Royce enthusiasts who aimed to outbid BMW and
Volkswagen for the Crew based company. The over riding reason for Melling's lack of public profile has been legal. For the past 34 years Melling Consultancy Design (MCD) has
been constantly restricted by confidentiality agreements in which the people paying the bills have taken a designs intellectual property. |
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It didn't help that Melling had already been marked down as an outsider; his route to success
had not been up |
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some big-company greasy pole. He admits that at 20 he was so "totally bloody unemployable" that
the only course of action was to start up in business on his own. |
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When MCD produced a new TVR engine – a high-torque, 24 valve canted straight six – which was cheaper to
produce and more refined for road cars, the tone turned to admiration. |
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Fate intervened. At the TT races one year, Melling's eye chanced to fall on "two beautiful bikes"
made by a Japanese manufacturer, he won't name. He got talking with the team boss about deficiencies he perceived in their engines' design. Incredibly, the Japanese chief seemed to like Melling's
bluff style, encouraging him to start designing in his own right and eventually offering him paid work. That led, through many twist and turns, to the establishment of MCD and to regular design
jobs for Japanese clients, Several still bring in tidy royalties. |
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"I've always worked in my own business," says Melling, "and there have been some pretty bad
times. But these days we always have as much as we can handle, and it ranges from outboard motors and motorcycle engines to the F1 engine I designed; that engine, which features four vales and
three tiny MCD designed spark plugs per cylinder, has recently been tested and will soon go into a test program. |
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Today's business, he says, is 60 per cent pure engine design, 30 per cent diagnostic work for clients whose
engines have problems, and 10 per cent working as expert witness for clients involved in legal wrangles. The diagnostic work, he says, is especially satisfying. "We recently helped a client
whose engine was having all kinds of head gasket leakage problems. When the head was fitted to the block, the champing loads were all wrong. WE suggested fillets in the water jackets and some
other changes, and the problem went away. |
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Melling takes enormous pains to keep abreast of the latest trends. Indeed, he likes to them. MCD has engine
inventions under the counter which it will soon reveal, such as a racing piston that can be produced by a new, simple process to cost just under £20 each instead of £ 150. Most intriguing is a
new main bearing design, which is claimed to cut power losses dramatically. |
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When you meet him in his comfortable Rochdale lair, it is the completeness of Melling's absorption with
engines that makes him special. He just loves them. There's a Biggles-like quality about the man, who comes across as a genuine-and satisfyingly unconventional-British hero. Though he quite likes
cars and has collection of bikes. Melling says he's never messed much with the parts of them that stay cool and don't go bang. "I've not really bothered about chassis and things," he
says. "They're just there to carry my bloody engine." |
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