Engine builder on discovery mission
Hamilton Jet, Tait Electronics, Windflow, Mooring Systems, Martin Jetpack andnow Rocket Lab. Is Christchurch engineer Bill White sitting on something just as big? MARTINVANBEYNENreports.
In a less than spotless white lab coat, Bill White peers over his little round glasses at the visitor.
It could be a scene from a Bond movie with White as ‘‘Q’’ carefully explaining his cunning device as though to a child.
He stands next to an engine in the wind tunnel of his inconspicuous, self-built workshop in an industrial part of Christchurch. The workshop, the size of a large house, boasts an advanced engine testing bay and a design office.
A feature of the design area is a bank of stereos and speakers on which White plays Led Zeppelin and Grace Jones, loud, while he thinks and schemes.
The engine in the wind tunnel is White’s famous patented AeroTwin, a 65HP, four stroke, twin cam, two valve engine with a vertical crankshaft. The lightweight machine has a terrific power to weight ratio, making it attractive for myriad uses, particularly in aviation.
It has already been fitted to a microlight version of a helicopter called the Air Scooter, which started life in Henderson, Nevada, about a decade ago.
White is also developing a version of the engine for a client who wants to install it on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
There is no shortage of potential in the White workshop. On a table covered by a bit of camouflage material is a gleaming 1200cc, V8 engine that has excited boutique car manufacturers, motorsport people and motorcycle manufacturers. No names at this stage.
White, who works closely with the engineering school at the University of Canterbury, has also developed a two-stroke, twocylinder, 5L bio-gas engine that is able to run on different gases at the same time.
The engine is running but still in its prototype stage. White says it’s very interesting but might not work in the long run.
‘‘Maybe the answer is no but it’s too compelling a question to not look for the answer,’’ he says.
The big question for the outsider is whether any of these engines, beautiful in their own way, are going anywhere.
For instance, if the Air Scooter takes off as a commercial enterprise, it is not hard to imagine a colossal industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
And that leads to another question. What can a one-man band produce, that the world’s most well-resourced engine research centres can’t?
Glenn Martin, who headed the team which developed the Martin Jetpack, has known White for 20 years and regularly catches up with him to swap war stories.
He says White is one of five or six engineers in New Zealand capable of building an engine from scratch. ‘‘With AeroTwin he took some bold steps and you have to applaud people who do that and the world needs more people who are willing to take bold steps. If we don’t have people like Bill White in workshops trying stuff then we will never ever succeed in doing anything.
‘‘It wouldn’t surprise me to learn in five years time that Bill has developed an engine that takes over the world and is worth hundreds of millions to New Zealand but it also wouldn’t surprise me if he carries on and he doesn’t.’’
White, 63, for his part, doesn’t seem in any hurry. He is more the mad professor than the clever strategist thinking about how much money he is going to make.
He is hard to pin down, he speaks carefully but vaguely, his clients sound mysterious and his plans blurry.
There is a venture in China to do with jet propulsion, hydrogen projects with the US Marines and a possible relationship with the US giant, Lockheed Martin.
The ideas, the clever engineering, the precise fabrication and constant testing and improvement do have an end purpose, he says.
‘‘I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think it was a marketable entity. I enjoy it but I’m not one of those people who says, ‘that’s fun and what’s the next project’.’’
Nor does he feel under any pressure to produce results and make money.
‘‘Not at all. I’m one of those people who thoroughly enjoys what he is doing and each day is a blessing in its own right and I get done what I get done and tomorrow’s another day. If you do a good job each day, sooner or later the rewards of your work will be demonstrated.
‘‘I know one of these days I will be retiring and you could say this is my retirement plan. I would like to have all of this functioning perfectly so that if I feel like retiring I can hand it to someone and say it’s a going concern, go and have some fun.’’
His advantage over the big research departments is simple, he says. ‘‘I can say yes.’’
It hasn’t all been plain sailing. The father of eight children (from two marriages) walks with a severe limp thanks to contracting polio at six months old.
The polio affected his left eye and the hearing in his left ear.
‘‘Otherwise, it left anything else I have two of alone,’’ he says.
He has a grip that could crush a walnut and a powerful upper body, which perhaps reflects the genes handed down by his father, a boxing champ with the New Zealand Army, who worked most of his life as a painter and decorator.
A life-defining disability? Not a bit of it, says White, who steadfastly refuses to be seen in those terms.
White, raised mainly in Auckland and Picton, was always interested in machinery but his almost instinctive aptitude with engines first showed when he adapted a Howard rotary hoe to run with a Norton motorcycle engine. Needless to say, it went like a rocket. He started his apprenticeship with the NZ Motor Corporation in Christchurch when he was about 25 and developed a speciality in Rover V8 engines.
By age 32, he was out on his own and began a long relationship with the New Zealand Army. He commissioned the army’s new Land Rovers and when it had a problem with the ignition systems, he designed and built a new one. Only two weeks ago, the army museum in Waiouru asked him for the bits and pieces so it could put them on display.
When the army took part in the United Nations peace keeping mission in Bosnia Herzegovina (Operation Radian) in 1992, White and a couple of army mechanics put diesel engines into 35 Land Rovers and designed and installed disc brakes, all in about a month.
The AeroTwin developed out of a Christchurch project in the late 90s. White was brought in late to sort out problems and took over the project when other parties began to peel away.
About 50 of the engines have been built and White is still making improvements.
Many would say forget the improvements and exhort him to spend his time getting more capital on board. He disagrees.
‘‘It’s an old-fashioned view. I have seen often what starts out as a good idea between a couple of people with a common goal ends up being something else. The thing just takes on a life of its own, gobbling them up mercilessly. I’m not a scaredy cat but I’m not in a headlong rush to be doing anything in particular.
‘‘No debt, no cash. I can live comfortably on not much. And so a number of people say, ‘go and borrow 100k and get this done’. Then you have a bank manager. I just feel it is a far better thing I do if I go quietly, patent what I need to, and, if I need more money, just go and earn it. Fortunately I’ve got ways of doing it.’’
Jetpack’s Martin says, ‘‘ The trouble with New Zealand is we develop great technology but we never have the money to get it to the market in the way it needs to be done. We live hand to mouth.’’
White doesn’t seem to mind it that way. A loner by nature he will keep working hard and if he hits the big time, all well and good.
And if he doesn’t? ‘‘Well, I’ve had good fun trying.’’
I’m one of those people who thoroughly enjoys what he is doing and each day is a blessing in its own right. Bill White