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Trialand no errors
WHEN I FIRST owned my Model T back in 2012 – I later sold it, and then missed it so much I tracked it down again – I had vague plans about using it as a VSCC trials car. My ‘T’ is configured as a small pick-up and the VSCC doesn’t allow you to trial commercial vehicles, but I reckoned it would be an easy job to remove the wooden side rails and temporarily swap them for a ‘turtledeck’ rear boot instead. I actually bought an original turtledeck with this in mind (see Octane 112) but sold it on when I no longer had the car.
As it happened, I decided not to go down the trials route because the Model T’s engine has very primitive splash lubrication and there’s not a lot of oil being diverted to the front when the car’s pointing upwards. Steep hills, high revs and whitemetal bearings with minimal oil are not a good combination! What’s more, the two-speed epicyclic gearbox – with a massive gap between the ratios – lacks the flexibility that you really need on muddy hills.
Instead, I get my trials fix by marshalling at least once a year. Most recently that’s been on the VSCC Welsh Trial, which is conveniently just a few miles from home. It’s a popular event in beautiful scenery, held over a weekend in October
