Legendary mechanic
A MASTER OF WHAT IS BECOMING A LOST ART FINDS THERE’S STILL PLENTY OF DEMAND FOR HIS SKILLS BY JUDE WOODSIDE
Meet Mike Hobson of Feilding, a master of his craft
Mike Hobson is a bit of a legend in the lower North Island. For 32 years he has been rebuilding, regrinding, re-boring, and repowering engines for classic cars, motorbikes, and less classic makes throughout the area and beyond. His impressive shed contains everything he needs to perform any kind of precision surgery and there can’t be many things he can’t do or hasn’t done to an engine.
Mike started his working life as a mechanic’s apprentice but soon tired of general mechanical work. When he was offered a job at the local engine reconditioner he leapt at the chance.
“I spent a year just dismantling engines before they let me near the machinery,” he says.
But he soon developed his skills working the machines to the point where he decided in 1987 to go out on his own. He built a shed in his backyard and set up shop.
That sharemarket crash
The timing wasn’t exactly ideal, coinciding with the crash of the sharemarket in New Zealand, but one man’s misfortune is often another’s opportunity and he was able to pick up a shed full of high-tech machinery at auctions of other failed businesses — equipment that he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford.
That windfall has been the mainstay of his business and contributed to countless winning race cars, repowered classics, and high-performance bikes since. Being based not too far from Manfeild Park in Feilding is another advantage for a specialist in highperformance engine building.
Amid a surfeit of old engine blocks and heads, huge boxes of used valves and springs, all neatly stacked under benches and covered with a fine grey dust from the grinding and polishing processes, Mike takes us on a tour of his shed. He shows us where he cleans and bead blasts engines, before setting them up for grinding their surfaces on his rotational surface grinder, which is currently grinding its third flywheel of the day.
Mike’s set-up
He has a mill to rebore cylinders and another to hone them. He can grind the big end on a con rod to precise tolerances and rework the bearing shells to fit with exquisite precision. He has a lathe dedicated to grinding the journals of a crankshaft and an even bigger one for general work.
Heads are a speciality and Mike can not only lap valve seats, but he can also recut and reprofile them with a magnetic-base Mira valve re-seater. In an alcove in the workshop he shows us his secret weapon: a machine rescued from the now-old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) that comprises two enormous electromagnets where he can position an engine block and apply fluorescent magnetic crack-detection fluid. The magnets energize the block and attract the fluid to cracks where it accumulates and can be seen under UV light. He also has a pressure tester for doing the same thing with alloy heads.
A bit of a vanishing art
His real passion is motorbikes and he owns four late-model bikes, including a late-model Royal Enfield, which are now being built in India.
Mike has found that many workshops don’t like spending time grinding and honing cylinders and heads and prefer to simply replace them. He has made specific jigs for torqueing motorcycle cylinders for honing. A cylinder can go out of round without the appropriate tension, so the jigs are designed to fit several types of cylinder and provide the working torque they experience in position. It is easy to make an ellipsoid cylinder, which is of little use to anyone.
What is now second nature to Mike is a vanishing art. In the era of computer control, much of what he does is now done with a CNC machine or the part is simply discarded. It’s often cheaper to simply replace an engine or a head than to machine it.
Trying to retire
That’s not an option for rare classics or for high-performance race cars and bikes. Many of the motors that Mike works on come from a time when all this work was done by machines under the watchful eye of experienced technicians like him. Since he started in the engine-reconditioning business the number of similar companies has fallen from 13 to just two in the Feilding area alone.
But Mike isn’t giving up. He wants to carry on doing classic cars and the odd bike, but at his own pace.
“I love working on Jag motors. They are beautifully put together,” he says.
He is presently working on a Chevrolet and has two Mini Cooper heads on his bench, one for a friend who is racing it and the other a spare. He isn’t hungry for work: “I’m retiring. I just want to work on the projects that interest me now. I don’t need any more work.”
He may be trying to retire, but the procession of people arriving at his workshop indicates the difficulty of doing so. It’s also testament to his reputation.
There can’t be many things he can’t do or hasn’t done to an engine