14 Dec 06
Star is one of the forgotten names of British motor manufacturing. Edward Lisle's Wolverhampton firm started in bicycle-making, with the first Star car built in 1897. This is thought to have been influenced by a Benz bought from the Netherlands by Lisle's son Joseph; six were made by the end of 1898, and by 1903 Star claimed that its cars were of an all-original design. Pitched towards the upper end of the market, Star's cars were expensive, so a sub-brand, known for a while as Stuart, was created to sell low-cost entry-level models. This became Briton in 1919, the year Star created a parent company called Star Engineering Ltd, the better to reflect its more diverse activities.
From 1910, these activities included aircraft-building. Star's first plane was a biplane similar to Farman's, and the second, designed by 19-year-old engineer Granville Bradshaw, was the innovative Monoplane, with Bradshaw's own 40hp, four-cylinder engine. This failed to fly at an initial trial, so its rudder and steerage system were redesigned and fuselage reconstructed. The plane did not go into production, but the 40hp engine was offered for sale.
Star went on to make the wings for the Avro 504s constructed by Sunbeam during World War I, and after the war it made aircooled Renault V8 80hp aero engines under license for De Havilland. It was running at under-capacity after the war, however, and its costly 15.9hp and 20.1hp cars were too expensive for most buyers. The cheaper 11.9hp (1921) sold well, as did the successive 12/25 LA and 14/30 LB (1923-26), with Star managing around 1,000 cars a year, but sales momentum slowed in the late 1920s, with only small numbers of the 18/50, 20/60 and 24/70 produced. In 1928, Star was taken over by Guy Motors (which had, like fellow Wolverhampton firm Clyno, built the ABC Dragonfly aero engine for Sopwith during the war, as well as the Bradshaw-designed ABC Wasp unit), and continued to build cars under its own name, but it had failed to profitably enter the mass-production age. Star was finally declared defunct in 1932. Incidentally, Surrey-based ABC, new employer of the whizzkid engineer Granville Bradshaw, was also responsible for the Gnat and Scorpion aero engines and its own ABC Robin light aircraft with enclosed cockpit (1929). Bradshaw adapted the horizontally opposed twin-cylinder engine design from the aero engines for ABC's motorcycles - a design later seen in BMW's twins, and ABC also made light cars (a 1,200cc from 1920-23, and the 1320cc Super Sports from 1925-29) and the Skootamota, one of the earliest scooters or mopeds.
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