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Posts Tagged ‘custom cars’

YAY! Bumper Cars! YAY!

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 32 Comments › )
Filed under Art, Cars & Trucks, Humor, OOT, Open thread at March 10th, 2012 - 11:00 pm


[via email from 1389AD]

We’ve featured Rat Rods before, but now it’s time for some street legal mobiles that would make Ralph Nader crawl into a freshly dug grave just to roll over.

Yes, you read that right; these little beasties are street legal.

They run on either Kawasaki or Honda motorcycle engines and co-opt vintage bumper car bodies into the most awesome form of mini-car we’ve seen in too long. There are seven of these little monsters floating around California and they’re all the creation of one man, Tom Wright, a builder in the outskirts of San Diego who figured the leftovers of the Long Beach Pike amusement park needed a more dignified end than the trash heap.

They were originally powered by two cylinder Harley Davidson Motorcycle engines but they rattled like heck because of the two cylinder vibration and Tom replaces them with four cylinder Honda or Kawasaki 750’s and a couple have been measured as capable of 160 MPH, which is terrifyingly fast in machines with such a short wheelbase.

Unsafe At Any Speed is just how we like it on The Overnight Open Thread.

Rat Rods

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 35 Comments › )
Filed under Art, Cars & Trucks, Humor, OOT, Open thread at January 30th, 2012 - 11:00 pm

A rat rod is a style of hot rod or custom car that, in most cases, imitates (or exaggerates) the early hot rods of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It is not to be confused with the somewhat closely related “traditional” hot rod, which is an accurate re-creation or period-correct restoration of a hot rod from the same era.

Most rat rods appear “unfinished” (whether they actually are or not), with just the bare essentials to be driven.

The rat rod is the visualization of the idea of function over form.

I hadn’t heard the term “Rat Rod” until recently, and didn’t know that it was a genuine classification of custom vehicle. We called ’em “beaters” but they were nowhere near the awesome extremes pictured here.

Chopped and channeled and lowered and loud fits right in with
The Overnight Open Thread.