Home Made Sports Car - Garage find, after 18 months.

To commemorate the somethingth annual Chicago Auto Show and Concept Car Disappointment Parade, we're doing a week of car features. So far, so good. Today we bring you a 1956 article from Popular Mechanics about a father and son who built a sports car in their garage. You're probably thinking that a project like that is a huge amount of work, but actually it's a huge amount of work. We present for you all three pages of this interesting article describing how they did it. Please find it interesting.

"I though you were gonna do the styling." "No, I thought YOU were!"
Well, somebody must have done it."

It's a rare thing to find someone who's a brilliant engineer AND a brilliant artist. I'm way more artist than engineer. I've built a few pieces of furniture to fill a need, but they usually turn out to have one or two obvious flaws that tell you it was designed and built by an artist, not a proper carpenter, such as being partially on fire, or being 31% useful for it's intended purpose.

This sports car has a curb weight of 2500 pounds with a 250 horsepower V8, and a perfect 50/50 weight distribution. Impressive, especially for '56. It also has the look of a balloon with a zip tie around it. You can't have everything.

This does not diminish the achievement of building your own car from scratch. I sure as hell couldn't do it, even if I could design one that looked better. My design would live forever as a drawing on paper. You can't drive a drawing... until the next iPad changes that or something. And, as the article says, "These are individual opinions which you may not agree with but, after all, the real reason for building a car yourself is to create something that you like. You are not trying to appeal to everybody, just to yourself." Absolutely. Just getting any shape at all to come intact from your wood frame / plaster / fiberglass layup process is an a victory. Who cares what some jerk fifty years in the future thinks. "Eff you futurejerk!" Hey, that's me!

I'd have to say that the relative positions of the battery and gas tank spells
trouble in the case of a rear-end collision. Pinto, anyone?

This concept car will arrive in the marketplace in the shape of a perfect cube after design changes driven by committee review, accounting adjustments and market testing. It will have a one-cylinder engine, nine-seats, forty cup holders, rear seat diaper changing station, and convenient vomit troughs throughout.