MORLEY’S WORKSHOP
DAVE RAVES ABOUT PADDOCK BOMBS, GT500 CORTINA DUAL FUEL TANKS AND COMMER KNOCKERS... AGAIN
The Commer Knocker two-stroke, opposed-piston diesel engine has been keeping the mailbox of this column pretty full lately. It’s a wonderful concept, although it was born to solve a pretty fundamental aspect of truck design back in the 1950s. To keep trucks physically compact, the cab-over-engine design was born as a way of placing the driver on top of the engine, rather than behind it and, therefore, making the overall truck shorter. That made it easier to manoeuvre and, in some cases, cheaper to register in markets where the rego fee was calculated on the vehicle’s length or where there were absolute limits on how long a truck could be.
The brilliance of the Commer Knocker was that it was quite a flat engine, so it would comfortably fit under the floor of the truck’s cabin, making the cab-over thing work beautifully. And while the six-piston, three-cylinder TS3 Knocker gave sterling service across many continents and millions of kilometres, there was better to come. In theory, at least.
See, Commer was well down the path to developing a four-cylinder, eight-piston version of the Knocker, dubbed TS4. It was to retain all the TS3’s virtues of compact shape and good specific output but, with even more capacity, newer metallurgy and improved design elements, it stood to be a real world beater. Of course, by then, Commer was part of the appropriately named Rootes Group, which also owned soon-to-disappear brands like Hillman, Humber and Singer and was itself taken over by Chrysler in the mid-1960s. And being a conservative, US-based company in the business of making money, not unusual engines, Chrysler killed the TS4 dead there and then.
But it makes me wonder what might have been. What could the Commer Knocker have become if it had been developed in line with improving manufacturing practices and technology? Mind you, the Knocker is just one of the victims of mergers, take-overs and globalisation, and that only makes me wonder more about what might have been over the years.
What a world-beating car, for instance, would Peter Brock’s take on the Opel Monza have been had it been green-lighted by General Motors? Here, after all, was a swoopy coupe that shared a lot of its platform with the then-current VB/VC/VH Commodore and could easily have been engineered to accept a five-litre Iron Lion in place of the three-litre six-banger that the Poms considered such a source of pants-wetting excitement. Throw on a set of Group 3 HDT wheelarch flares, a set of those Irmscher rims and those mad HDT stripes. Paint it Tuxedo Black, fit a red Brock interior and stand back. Today, it’d be one of the most collectible Aussie cars ever built and would, I reckon, give an A9X Hatchback a run on the toughness scale. Actually, it’d be a hell of a project car, wouldn’t it? Quick, somebody wake me up before I do something stupid.