www.kangaloosh.com started life in 2000 as a blog to share our cruising life with friends and family. The blog is still available here, but it ground to a halt when a shore based life became so much easier with two small children.
I have hijacked the site for carFactory and so the sailing experiences which comprise 99% of this site have become irrelevent.
Despite building carFactory I'm afraid I have no academic or professional qualifications in any engineering discipline. I did, however, grow up surrounded by parts of my parents' vintage cars and motorbikes and can remember, at an age when most children would be playing lego, being sat cross-legged on the floor of the garage sorting a tin of nuts, bolts and washers into metric, BSF, ASF and Whitworth. For a while in my late teens I worked as a motor mechanic for Terry Hoyle Limited in Maldon, Essex, who at that time restored Ferraris and built race car engines. I have never worked in more beautiful surroundings since then, nor have I achieved much as rewarding as helping to rebuild a 275 GTB/4 engine. Perhaps art historians feel the same way about the paintings they restore?
I got to ride in some fairly interesting machinery (MG 6R4, part of a batch Terry Hoyle made road legal, and various Ferraris), though unfortunately as a teenager the closest I got to driving was blipping the throttle of a Koenig 512 Boxer on a four-post lift, while somebody below listened to the butterflies chattering on overrun.
I.T. offered a more lucrative future and that was the end of my professional career, such as it was, in motorsport. A career in I.T. means I am better than most at creating bugs in software. Combined with a non-existent academic background in engineering means carFactory is built on the two shakiest foundations of any software product known to man. Despite this it seems to work quite well.
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