A 102.4 litre engine from 1953 runs again for Mr Hewes

Built for an RAF generator set and silent for years, the Mirrlees Blackstone JS8 needed stuck valves freed and seized injectors cleared before it would fire.

Channel: Mr HewesStory of October 6, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The channel is adding 5,997 subscribers a day, 11 times a normal day (530).

Mr Hewes and his crew in Leicestershire have spent September on tanks, a Foden recovery truck rescued from a Welsh field and an American tank transporter. Their latest job is a single engine, and it has brought more new subscribers than anything else lately: around 6,000 a day, where a few hundred is normal.

The engine is a 1953 Mirrlees Blackstone JS8, and the description puts it at 102.4 litres, one of the biggest the channel has ever worked on. According to its documented history, it was first supplied to the RAF as part of a generator set. It had not run in years. Once the team opened it up, the description says, they found stuck valves, seized injectors, water where no water belongs and a crankshaft that barely wanted to turn.

They got it going with what the description calls "a slightly questionable starting method." The tags give a hint: a pickup truck and a Ford F-150 are on the list beside air-start diesel. Once it ran, the covers came off so the internals could be filmed at work, turbo and all.

The short of the first start, posted on Sunday, has gone past four million views. The full episode, "THIS 102.4 LITRE ENGINE HASN'T RUN IN YEARS…", followed on Monday. Between them they pushed the channel's daily views to roughly seven times their usual level.

It fits the channel's own pitch. Mr Hewes promises mechanical history and unusual vehicles, and a wartime-era power plant the size of a small room covers both.

Published on Trari

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The numbers

One short about a single engine moved the whole channel, in subscribers as much as in views.

new subscribers per day

typical day

530

now

5,997

subscribers

531,000

▲ 11,000 in the last 7 days

total views

188,192,354

views per day

1,991,889

typical day: 289,894

compared with similar channels (subscribers)

letsdig18

752,000

Massee Media

719,000

Mentour Now!

641,000

blancolirio

617,000

Mr Hewes

531,000

Alan Trucker

462,000

As of October 6, 2026 · Data source: Trari Social News, Trari Traffic Trends and Ranking Platform, Google YouTube

Subscriber, view, like and comment counts are YouTube's. Rates, usual days, rankings, comparisons and categories are Trari's own calculations.

Where next?

A different discovery todayVideo taking off 16x its usual first dayKarl Deisseroth 'almost couldn't speak' when the Nobel call cameAssociated Press filmed the Stanford scientist in California on the morning of his medicine prize, and the short clip became the channel's most watched new upl…Channel: Associated Press · Story of October 6, 2026