From 1985 I was employed by Ford Motor Company as Supervisor, Quality Engineering at Ford's Swansea Plant. Part of my responsibility was to supervise the noise and functional testing of Transit Rear Axles in our fleet of 3 Transit Vans. I first read about John and Magno-Flo in the January 1997 edition of the Engineering Magazine Eureka, which had an article describing John's work and some of the testing conducted. I requested from John a copy of the report from the Bolton Institute School of Engineering. The report confirmed an improvement in fuel usage on a diesel engine, but gave no scientific explanation of how it worked. I communicated with John during 1997. In 1998 when our department's Axle Evaluation test Vehicles were replaced with the latest production level vehicles I asked John if he would be interested in conducting trials on these vehicles as they cover a fixed distance over a fixed route by the same driver when conducting a test. These are ideal conditions for fuel consumption testing.

After allowing the Transit's engines to bed in for 2000 miles we started to record fuel consumption results. After logging results for 1400 miles John Brown came down from Scotland and fitted a set of magnets for a free trial to Transit S953 SHJ. It can be seen from the table of results below that the fitting of the magnets had a dramatic affect on the fuel consumption of this vehicle. The fuel consumption of the sister (Control) vehicle did not change during this period, remaining at 28 - 29 Mpg. This trial was conducted during the summer to avoid large changes in temperature affecting engine performance.

With such encouraging results the magnets from the Transit were transferred by John to a Manager's TD Mondeo. A further Magnet was fitted to a fellow employee's TD Mondeo to compare the results.

The results are shown below. In 1999 I had John fit one of our new Traffic Fleet trucks, a 6 cylinder diesel Iveco Ford, also free of charge. This vehicle was used for Supercube delivery of the Parts made at Swansea Plant (Automotive Hubs, Discs, Drums, and Axles etc) to various Ford plants in Britain and Europe. The results are also shown below. The Unit were again transferred to another TD Mondeo owned by a Ford employee T228 JVW, also with positive results.

The results of these tests were related to Senior Ford Management including William Clay Ford, Jac Nasser and Richard Parry-Jones. They expressed interest in the results and instructed various under managers to contact me to follow up. They did contact me but due to various reasons did not follow it up with John Brown.

Fortunately one of the Swansea Managers who had the magnets fitted related his results to another manager in Ford Central who subsequently is conducting his own tests with John Brown on a much larger scale than those at Swansea.

A C Osborne
Quality Engineering Supervisor
Ford Visteon, Swansea Plant