Not too long ago, I was at a junkyard in Sydney's western suburbs and came across some old equipment from a the defunct theme park Wonderland. There were a number of these cars on the Antique Autos ride, which like so much of the park's former assets were just left derelict at this junkyard.
Originally these cars drew their power from a ground track which was likely DC powered; which then fed into an electric motor underneath the rear passengers. I can only assume that these cars were built to some kind of theme park general spec, with probable options for different kinds of passenger cells on top. Anyone who ever played with slot cars would have found this to be a broadly similar experience except scaled up to the point of actual driveability. Actually, if cars like these can all be controlled from a central position, it seems to me that some kind of electric slotway or overhead pantograph might be useful if we are to switch to electric cars. If power can be cut centrally, then this could be really useful in the event of an accident.
These particular bodies, built out of fibreglass and metal and fitted with hard wearing polyvinyl seating, are meant to look like the Ford Model T. They do a pretty good job at aping what people think that a Model T looks like; especially considering that the only place that people are ever likely to see one is either in a museum or at an antiques car show. As the last Model T rolled off the production line some 95 years ago, the chances of people actually seeing a Model T on the road, are non-zero but getting ever asymptotically close to zero as time goes on.
At best guess these particular examples sit on something like 120/140 R24 tyres, where the tyres themselves are likely to be steel belted but solid. These look like hard tyres which were meant to be installed once and then survive until the end of life of the ride (which happened). Even sitting in the junkyard like this, they still seem reasonably good.
Perhaps one might feel nostalgia for a dead theme park ride which one may have ridden on as a child. However, as I looked under the hood of these, all I felt was a sense of purpose and opportunity. If I had many many thousands of dollars that I could blow on a vanity project, then I'd buy one of these from the junkyard.
As far as I can make out, the chassis for these cars are still all pretty good. Granted that they are getting on for 37 years old now but they would have led a reasonably unstressed line as they paraded around their little enclosure at no more than about 20km/h. My suspicion is that an angry nine year old child with a grump on, could have likely outran one of them in situ. Having said that, the chassis looked hideously overengineered to the point that I think that serious modifications could be done to them.
As they are pretty close to the size of a regular vehicle, I suspect that they would take up a donation of a small four cylinder engine and/or a set of electric motors without any problem at all. Of course there would need to be proper engineering of brakes, lights, installation of proper seating and seatbelts but because this would be a single build engineering project, as the law stands they would not need to be crash tested.
There is probably no shortage of crate motors that one could buy which would fit in there. If I was going to turn this into a full-on hot rod, then I would consider a GM LFX 3.6L V6 as used in the Holden Commodore, or maybe the 1.4L Turbo four cylinder from the Cruze but equally a crate motor from Toyota or Ford would do as nicely. We already know that a car engine is capable of driving a car and from what I've seen of the chassis of these cars, they look up to the task of having a fair amount of power and torque being sent through them. Of course whatever engine would be installed, would dictate the rest of the drivetrain including the gearbox, differential et cetera and all of the mounting points therein. I can say without qualification that there would also need to be significant cuts and holes made in the floor because as a fairground ride, these cars had no feet controls at all.
The weird thing about the various motor traffic acts in Australia is that they still allow room for crazy backyard engineers who barely know what they are doing, to invent crazy-go-nuts motor cars and get them registered. Provided those crazy backyard engineers who barely know what they are doing don't sell any of their insane semi-deathtraps to the general public, the law is actually pretty generous when it comes to what they can get away with. For new bonkers-deathtrap machine bonkers-deathtrap machines, one only needs to show that they can stop and start within reasonable distances and have a set of lights (brake, blinkers, headlamps) that indicate to other road users that they can be seen.
Actually building a crazy-go-nuts bonkers-deathtrap machine would imply that anyone foolhardy enough to attempt such a thing, would have to be confident in their own engineering skills to make this work. The really neat thing is though, that a lot of engineering work, such as braking systems, engines, gearboxes et cetera are already made by proper auto manufacturers; so really this job would be similar to building a partscaster guitar or other kludgematic device.
Surely if I've walked into a junkyard and thought about this, then as I am a certifiable doofus, then some other person in the world must have also already thought about this. If they have not, then I hope that this post is the first domino in a chain-reaction of crazy-go-nuts insanity to build a bonkers-deathtrap machine.
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