Brayon Classic Engineering

Great photos taken by Peter Lawrie at knockhill. John Marshall out in his new build Mustang.

A+ block being faced after having been bored to +.020" to use a set of pistons. As you can see from the factory machining the face is always far from perfect. .010" machined off and alls well again.

-series #1098 #1275 #998

Jaguar E-type fully rebuilt 4.2ltr power unit sitting waiting to be installed.

.5 .2 .8 +2

Jaguar E-type v12 heads that were previously machined at another shop. One head was .068" thinner than the other also the other was wedge shaped by .027" from end to end!! Valve seat heights varied by .020" on each head. New guides to our own spec, seats all cut and depths re calculated to match both banks and also work well along side a reground pair of camshafts. New stainless valves throughout so next stage is shimming valve spring platforms to get correct installed heights/pressures and then the time consuming and very dull job of shimming all 24 valves.....sigh....

Small piece of local motoring history near our workshops. A very good late friend who was a Citroën specialist in Glasgow passed along the hand drawn picture of what the factory was going to look like before building works commenced.
The Argyll motors ltd was initially established in Bridgeton, Glasgow in 1899 as the Hozier Engineering Company. By 1905, the company was expanding production rapidly, and a new site at Alexandria, outside the city, was identified. Plans were drawn up by architect Charles James Halley, and the building was officially opened on 26 June 1906. The factory covered 12 acres (4.9 ha), and was served by its own railway line and several streets of houses for the factory workers. The new facility cost over £200,000, and was designed to produce 2,500 cars per year. By 1907, production had passed 800 per year, but a series of technical experiments, and increasing competition, led to the company's decline. The high running costs of the huge factory, and the failure to adopt mass production, may also have contributed to the company's troubles. The final blow came in 1914 following a lawsuit brought by Daimler, which Argyll won, but the costs led to bankruptcy and production ceased.
The works, and its employees, were taken over by the Admiralty  as a munitions factory during the First World War (1914–1919). Afterwards, it was briefly a silk works, but remained empty for most of the interwar period. In 1937, it was repurchased by the Admiralty and reopened as the Royal Naval torpedo Factory, which operated into the 1950s.
In the 1960s, the site is said to have been involved in Chevaline, a secret project to improve Britain's Polaris nuclear warheads.
The facility was closed in 1969.
Despite various proposals, the factory remained empty for nearly three decades; the factory sheds were demolished, and the substantial red sandstone offices facing North Main Street deteriorated. The future of the building was secured in the 1990s with its renovation as a shopping centre, opened in 1997 by Princess Anne as Loch Lomond Factory Outlets.

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