I had already recruited one colleague to help with the eventual engine rebuild, and she would therefore be present for the assembly of the model. The instructions promised that a 10-year-old would be able to put this together with a little adult supervision. Surely that meant that two 20-somethings should be able to manage it?

Of course, prior to assembly, we had to purchase a few things that did not come as standard in the kit. The first was batteries. The second was beer.

Haynes internal combustion engine model

Alcohol and batteries thus acquired, we put in our takeaway order and opened up the box. Out spilled plastic heaven. A million fiddly parts attached to plastic frames, with tiny numbers on the frames indicating the part numbers. The manual would instruct us on how to assemble it. It also named all the parts, so hopefully we would learn the names of at least some of the moving bits and pieces by the end.

Things started off pretty well. We had Top Gear’s Africa adventure on the telly and the pistons/crankshaft assembly in the cylinder block, and the pistons made satisfying up-down movements when you turned the crankshaft. The instructions said that you needed sanding paper to get the edges of the plastic smooth, but as we lacked sandpaper we made do with nail files, which seemed to do the trick. The whole thing turned so smoothly that we didn’t even need the vegetable oil to make it work.

“This would be even better if it was the right size,” I said as the plastic innards were slowly swallowed up inside the model.

“That would be much more satisfying,” Colleague X agreed, trying to get the tiny screw to stay perched atop the tiny screwdriver, and slot the entire thing into the tiny hole on the side of the crankcase. “This feels more like keyhole surgery.”

“Which is also important.”

“Yes. But not the sort of thing I had in mind when I bought the six-pack.”

I, too, was getting a little restless. Earlier that week I had opened my planner to try to book a last-minute meeting with a senior colleague. He, peering over my shoulder, wanted to know what “Engine Build” was referring to, and why it had so many exclamation marks. I attempted to explain.

“Hmmm,” he said, frowning. “Yes, interesting. But an engine’s a big commitment. Did you think about starting with something a little smaller?”

A motorcycle? Sure. Ultimately, though, I’d decided on the engine, because I was learning to drive a car, not a bike.

“No, not a motorcycle,” he said, just as thoughtfully. “Something smaller. A lawnmower, maybe, or a hairdryer.”

I very pointedly did NOT stab him with his own pen, but instead said that we were doing a model version first.

“Yes,” he said. “I think that’s probably for the best.”

Anyway, other than patience and tact when faced with senior people and their hairdryer suggestions, what did I learn from doing this little side-project?

Firstly, it’s bloody cool. There’s now a little engine model on a shelf in my living room, and if you press the little button it lights up and makes happy engine noises.

Secondly, the instructions may well be wrong. Try the different bits together until they fit. This will probably be more useful that memorising engine layouts.

Thirdly, the reviews and advertising for this product piss me off something chronic. “Ideal for a dad and son project,” one proclaims. Well, yes, it is, but it’s also ideal for a dad-and-daughter and mum-and-son project. Or mum-and-daughter. It’s basically model assembly, and doing this with a kid (without taking over and finishing it off yourself) would probably take an afternoon.

Fourthly, the rocker arm assembly fits on top of the valves and the camshaft, and there’s only one correct way of lining up all the cams on the camshaft. There is no obvious way of knowing what that way is without having them labelled in alphabetical order. (This may require a textbook. Or a mechanic.)

Finally, although doing the plastic model was fun, it is limited in several major areas. It is extremely simplified, for one thing. The water-pump is two bits of plastic moulded and snapped together. The ‘sparkplugs’ are tiny Christmas tree lights that light up according to the position of the crankshaft (so the position does have to be correct, and the wiring is a bit tricky, but it’s not actually how a spark plug works). The dipstick is a completely pointless clip-on piece of plastic that looks like a Barbie accessory, and I still have no idea what it does (although presumably you dip it in things).

Lookit! All shiny and plastic and PERFECT.

You also get the feeling that filing tiny bits of plastic with a nail file is not precisely what engine maintenance is all about. (Although it may well involve nail files. At this stage I have no way of knowing.) Assembling the model did make me more familiar with a lot of the parts, and I think I understand the fundamentals. But it felt a bit… delicate. A lot of the parts were so tiny that you had to hold them by the tips of your fingers, and slot them into place using your nails. It’s the same problem as following a textbook: it’s too clean. I didn’t start this wanting to stay in my living room, with clean fingers and a perfect working model completed in a couple of hours. I want something that will take months and leave me exhausted and exasperated and absolutely triumphant when it is in fact finished.

Colleague X and I sat back and contemplated the finished product while James May and Richard Hammond performed emergency surgery on Oliver in the background.

“Well,” she said eventually, “it’s very nice.”

“Yes,” I said. I pushed the button again, and we watched the pistons move up and down and the little lights pretend to be sparkplugs. “Shall we build the real thing?”

“Let’s.”

• Look out for more Secret Diary of a Female Petrolhead entries as Vik continues her engine adventures (you can read her previous Secret Diary entries in the “Toolbox” category on the sidebar on the right).

Real engines go in real cars. Our glowy plastic engine will have to go in a glowy plastic car.

Let me tell you about it. It is a simplified, reasonably accurate version of a four-stroke engine, and it comes with its very own Haynes manual. It’s also entirely plastic and aimed at ages 10+. Bollocks, I say. If I had kids that age, I wouldn’t let them anywhere near the thing with their wickedly sharp craft knives. They’d have their fingers off before the first tea break.

The Haynes model internal combustion engine. Like Airfix, only not.

Let me back up a bit. A few months ago, I decided that I was going to learn about engines. I’ve always been a bit hazy on the theory behind internal combustion, and despite my father’s repeated attempts to explain, I’ve never really been able to get it straight in my head. This could have something to do with his insistence on explaining over the dinner table, rather than opening up the bonnet of his car and explaining there. (My brother got the lecture over the open bonnet of the car. He got so bored he fell asleep.)

This will all be a lot easier to grasp if I can actually do it myself. If I can take apart an engine and put it back together, you can be reasonably certain that I’ll know how it works afterwards. OK, maybe I’ll explode the back garden a couple of times, but I’ve accepted that as an inevitable consequence.

Miraculously, my new-found zeal is shared by a colleague of mine. She, too, wants to strip down an engine and see what makes it tick. Excellent! We ordered a plastic model to assemble in order to get a vague idea of what it will all involve, before thinking about taking things a little further. While we waited for the model to arrive, we may have become a little… unruly. Rowdy. Noisy. Obnoxious? Surely not!

After one of our exchanges, a colleague came up to me. She works in HR. You know the type: perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect smile. Was my enthusiasm too, er, enthusiastic?

“I just wanted to say, what you’re doing is fantastic,” she murmured quietly, and straightened the strand of pearls at her neck. “I love my car, I’d kill any fucker who so much as touched it. There’s nothing quite like a good engine purring, you know?”

I didn’t know, actually, but I nodded just the same.

The next day, another colleague was delivering some papers over my lunch hour when she saw the driving lessons website open in my browser. “Oh, are you learning to drive? Good for you! I learned in Nairobi, I thought I’d be quite frightened and sedate but it turned out I was a real girl racer, I nearly failed because I was speeding the entire time…”

I’m guessing that speeding will not be encouraged in London.

The next day, colleague Y came up to me, very upset, and drew me away from my desk. “I heard that you and colleague X are rebuilding an engine!” she said, looking very upset. Well, yes. Was this against her ethical beliefs? Was I in trouble with the ‘cycle to work’ initiative?

“Why didn’t you invite me?”

The thing is, I haven’t really mentioned this that much at work, despite being giddy with it for months. The people that have found out about it have either nodded sagely about how many times I’ll set myself on fire, or raved about how brilliant it all is. Invariably, my young female colleagues have fallen into the latter category. They’ve also taken the opportunity to ask me what I thought about the new Pagani (undecided, and I miss the Zonda R), the One-77 (I do like it, but why is it so angry? It looks like it’s been munching on stray pets) and plus, wouldn’t it be nice if the off-road vehicles didn’t kill your spine every time you went off road? (Seriously, Toyota, sort it out.) All of this was delivered in hushed tones over the tea and coffee, and by the time we were back at our desks we were very firmly back on either the Sudan referendum or the receptionist’s new hairstyle.

The Aston Martin One-77: Gratuitous car!porn. Image from CarzTune.com

Why? Was what we were talking about so shocking that it wasn’t fit for general consumption? Would the office spontaneously explode if it turned out that the female accountants and aid workers in my organisation actually knew their Nissans from their Nobles? Why did they get so embarrassed talking about it?

“Well,” colleague X said philosophically, “I didn’t get into cars before because I thought that it was a traditional male thing. And that didn’t mean that I couldn’t do it, but blokes would know more about it than me starting off, and I didn’t want to feel stupid. Then it turned out that they knew just as little as I did.”

Two hours later, a male colleague decided to ask condescendingly what kind of engine we’d be rebuilding. Would it be, he said, sneering, a rotating one?

“A Wankel rotary?” I asked. No. It would be a four-stroke.

• Look out for more Secret Diaries as Vik continues her engine adventure…

At least, that was the case three months ago. I’m not going to go into the many and varied reasons why, sitting on the sofa one November weekend, I decided that I wanted to know more about cars. Suffice to say that maybe I was going a little house-crazy from being stuck indoors with the flu.

So I decided I was going to rebuild an engine.

This is a difficult and challenging task if you’ve worked with cars all your life. It is nigh on impossible if you can’t tell your pistons from your poppets. I also decided I was going to learn how to drive. This, too, would be a challenge, as the last time I’d been behind the wheel of a car had been twelve years ago. My father decided that, as I was seventeen and had my newly-minted provisional license in my pocket, the best thing to do for my first hour in the driver’s seat would be to take me out in London rush hour and make me practise three-point turns and parallel parking. After miraculously not killing anyone, I swore that I’d never get behind the wheel again.

The other major drawback is that my father was an engineer and a mechanic. He had engineering for his work, and mechanics for his hobby. You can imagine what his reaction would be if one of his children finally – finally! – showed an interest in anything remotely mechanical. Even if it was the girl.

Obviously, you can’t just walk off and buy yourself an engine. Well, actually, you can, but there’s not much point. First off, you have to work out where you’re going to keep it. There’s a useful space in the back garden, and I’ve measured for tarp, engine stand, and general manoeuvrability. It will, I am told, be sufficient.

Then, you have to come to terms with the fact that you’re building an engine, not a car. There’s no space to keep a clapped-out old banger in suburban London, and I’m not about to shell out for a garage for no apparent reason. The downside is that my beautiful rebuilt engine will never be seen in action. The upside is that I am far less likely to explode myself and the neighbours.

Thirdly, you’re going to need to get some tools and learn about engines. And therein lies the rub. Have you ever tried to find a general mechanics course? Have you? I have. There are two choices:

1. Full-time year-long course leading to an NVQ or equivalent;
2. How to not explode your car when changing the oil.

OK, so they weren’t terribly suitable. How about a textbook? I used to be an academic, I’m good with textbooks. Well –

1. Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals by John B. Heywood – looks interesting, and has been added to the wishlist.
2. Essential Car Care for Girls by Danielle McCormick – well, it’s pink. It must be just for girls. The reviewers helpfully point out that this is a book simple enough for even women to understand. OK, then.

Pink automatically makes everything simple enough so even a woman can understand.

After wishlisting the first and stabbing my eyes out over the second, I decided that textbooks may be all well and good, but what I really needed was an opportunity to take the damn thing apart myself. (Yes, I was the child that disassembled all my toys to see how they worked.) Unfortunately, in order to do that… Yup, I was back at square one.

Despondent, I complained about this Catch 22 to a colleague of mine, who had been making similar noises about getting a little fed up of being pushed into a knitting club or daisy-counting-clique. What she really wanted, she said, was to mess about with something a little more robust, like an engine…

So. We’ve measured the back garden. We’ve ordered appropriate textbooks and acquired a couple of Haynes manuals. We’ve ordered a model engine to get a rough idea of how this all works. I’ve signed up for driving lessons in the vain hope that I can overcome my car phobia.

And then, once the sun comes out, we’re going to lay down the tarp and set up the engine stand, and buy a crappy clapped-out engine off eBay for 50p and take it apart.

I’m not going to tell my father a word about all of this. I have a horrible feeling that he will be so delighted that I have finally come around that he will decide to show me how to do it ‘properly’. Where my teachers failed to instil any interest in me at age 12, I am hoping that my own interest at age 29 will bear out and let me stick with it.

Who knows? It might even work.

To be continued…