wacky cars, in which mr. a-go-go finds his transportation animal spirit

A Garelli in action.
From 50ccs, a blog about small cycles.

Yet another fine example of the apple falling close to the tree: when I was fifteen I fantasized about having wheels that turned faster than 30mph downhill with a tail wind. That was about the upper limit of my first motorized vehicle, a Garelli moped that came to me as a gift, albeit a non-functioning one. Two-stroke engines dislike owners who neglect to mix oil in the gas, and it was left to me to undo the damage. Getting the little black Garelli back on the road required an oversize piston and rings, cylinder lapping, and new points. With guidance from dad and after lots of assistance from the Eagle Rock bike and moped mechanic, I was delighted when the new piston rings were broken in and the Garelli was making its loud smokey sputter again. Delight turned to frustration when I had to pedal like mad to get home. We lived at the top of a steep hill and getting back from anywhere required pedaling or pushing the surprisingly heavy Garelli up a grade for a mile or more. Phoo! This was worse than getting home on a bicycle, and I really didn’t need the tiny engine to get down the hill.

Felix Wankel
I lifted this image too, from here.

Clearly it was time to move beyond 46.5 cubic centimeters of displacement. A goofball engineer friend of my dad had a fine proposition for me. He had sitting in his driveway a ’66 Beetle and a ’73 Mazda RX3 pickup, neither in working condition (completing the quorum of sleeping vehicles was a Buick with fine cracklier in the vinyl top and a panel van). The Mazda truck was to be mine if I could get the Beetle to run. The Bug was easy, it just needed a tune up, new plugs, and a dose of fix-a-flat, but the truck was a nightmare (yes, the Bug should have had two new tires instead of some spray gunk, but like hell if I was going to go to that kind of expense for that miserable truck). The RX3 lived in our back yard for months while I cleaned out the bird nests, fixed the gaping rust holes left by the leaking battery, and fiddled and fussed trying to make it go. Felix Wankel’s marvelous rotary engine is a swell idea on paper and the clear plastic model of one I built as a kid was fascinating. In practice it’s a wicked nasty heartless beast and in Mazda’s RX3 version the thorns and pox still far outweighed the performance. The last I heard Mazda went as far as the RX7 version and was still putting it in a sports car in the 90s. Based on my little experience with the animal I’d steer clear of any rotary engine for the sake of your sanity. A new fully functioning rotary engine manages to get a whole lot of whollop out of a small chunk of engine block. This made for a lighter zippier car but the Wankel’s inherent flaws (leaky rotor seals and all sorts of details that I won’t bother going into) make the engine a maintenance headache. I learned scads about all this as I tore out my hair. Dad was a font of information. He was never short on tidbits of information about how anything mechanical worked but in this case the information was of little help in breathing life back into the sad RX3.

Mazda RX3 pickup

At one point my dad’s infinite wisdom led us to try locking the choke in a nearly closed position with a small Vise-Grip. Those rotors sucked gas like a lush and blew at least half of it out the exhaust system where it kept burning. I swear I saw a white flame from the tail pipe. Using bubble gum and bailing wire we managed to make the truck hold an idle just enough to convince someone else, who really needed a cheap pickup, to trade it for a wreck of a ’74 Honda Civic. This gem (no really, it was a gem) had lived in a garage or under a tarp for ten years just waiting for the right person to love it. The previous owner had dreamed of turning this…

into this…

resulting in all sorts of missing parts and stupid looking giant tires.


At last I had something I could really work with. Honda’s little 1150cc engine was a dream-boat for a novice mechanic; dirt simple, tough enough to take an over haul with out any sheered off head bolts, and fewer moving parts than I could count on all my fingers and toes. The old Civic made working on my sisters’ VW Beetles seem like a bad dream. The body was mottled with rust after living under a wet tarp, it needed a transfusion of junkyard parts, and the carburetor was full of dried out gasoline tartar, but it was mine. With more guidance from dad and lots of bloody knuckles I whipped that cat till it purred again. This time I had enough horsepower to get up the hill without pedaling. No kiddin’ that little four-banger engine had remarkable kick for its size. I suppose only having to drag my skinny carcass and a small sheet metal body up the hill helped keep the pep. With five people in the car (indeed!) the little Civic showed its weakness and I was introduced to going uphill in reverse.

And then the apple fell really close to the tree…

Here I had a working rattletrap of a car that ran like a top but it was ugly as sin. What to do, what to do…

the funky tail lights are just behind the rear side windows

Way back when my dad was a nincompoop youngster, he had a 1957 Porsche roadster, a swell car that he bought right off the boat from Germany when it arrived in Wilmington, California. Within the first year of the car’s life it received some serious dents and was finally rear-ended badly enough to really need some body work. And what do you suppose Mr. Stephens did with his zippy car that had lots of life left in the engine but was badly scared? Why naturally he went berserk and after fixing the dents, priming, and painting he made some kook modifications. Elephant tusks in front, shark tails in the rear, and new taillight pods on the tops of the fenders. The tusks and tails, by the way, were fabricated of tempered 6061 aluminum for low weight and superior strength. I’m not totally sure what he was after with all this. I suppose he hoped to scare off any potential new dent makers with stupefying weirdness. When the car was sold it left with out its glorious tusks and fins. Those parts lived in the garage storage space well into my teens. I wondered for years about those objects and my questions about them would result in cryptic riddles about big animals with threatening pointy parts.

tusks say Raaarr!

Until I saw these photos of the roadster chimera I never could get a grip on how these things would fit on a car. Eventually one of the shark fin plates became the head of a battle-axe I wanted to make. 6061 aluminum makes a swell shark fin, but it won’t keep an edge worth beans when an angry dwarf starts whacking things with it. This was years before the term LARP had made the rounds. Ah well.

So, how about that apple? My own ugly little car needed at the very least days of sanding out rust spots and a good dose of primer paint. Initially I figured it would end with the white primer, but that big white canvas just ached for something more. The elephant tusks and shark fins translated through some meiosis became non-zebra zebra stripes and a mysterious statement stenciled on the hood in reverse. This could only be read in the rearview mirror of another driver who would have to puzzle out why the little striped car “never needs ironing.” The little black and white civic has long since been recycled for scrap but its legacy and the memory of those weird tusks lives on. Now days they take the form of a rooster comb on my bike helmet.

P.S. Never you mind the little dog silhouettes. I never did run over any dogs let alone any Scotties. That was simply the most recognizable dog shape and I was too lazy to complete the gag by making a stencil of a tree, a mailbox, a chicken, an outhouse, and a fish. The pizza man at La Cañada Imports where we would buy extra greasy pizza slices never tired of greeting me with a hearty, “Hey, Safari Guy!” Now days the rooster comb on my helmet urges every shirtless goof to hollar, "Nice hat!" as though this apple hasn't heard that one before.

Oh Lego, what have they done to you?

chunky homestead

Lego. There was a long stretch of the seventies and a bit of the eighties when my birthday or Christmas wish list was headed up by that brand name, or more likely the incorrect term Legos or Leggos, both officially frowned upon. What a thing those plastic blocks have become. In my day Legoland was a far away enchanted place somewhere in Europe where every roof was topped with rows of squat cylindrical knobs and people had yellow heads. It would be decades before a graft of Denmark was stitched onto San Diego County and the minilands would grow in the Southern California haze.

I hope to avoid making this post a rant about how complicated the Lego sets have become, lousy with special parts and crazy directions, or how so many of the sets are based on one film franchise or another… but they have. The seed thought of this post was about creativity and open-ended construction toys. I wondered if Lego had become closed-ended. There are still clearly open-ended Lego sets available but they seem overshadowed by other sets with glossy photos promising one off models of a chunkified Millennium Falcon or Hogwarts Castle. Even Lego’s “systems” of sets that are designed as parts of imaginary worlds seem to want to be movie franchises. Each set primarily focuses on the construction of one fabulous backdrop or one weird machine. I wonder how many of these sets are used to build only the featured model and then sit on a shelf. I have witnessed kids rooms (and adults’ toy shelves) crowded with these finished models. I have heard tales of frustration when the awkward structure of a Millennium Falcon collapses and small grey blocks scatter under the couch requiring a return to the tedious construction directions. How often do the blocks get recycled into new creations these days? I wish I could make some sort of sociological survey of this. I would hope to find that the majority of Lego blocks in the world are in a perpetual cycle of building and tearing down for recycling… a circle of life kind of thing or one of those diagrams of schistosomiasis making its way from host to host.

My nephew has his collection of Lego blocks in a large storage bin filled mostly with a jumble of individual blocks. He always has one or two constructions that he wishes to save from being scattered into blocky bits, at least for the short term. These sit in the air space at the top of the jumble waiting for the next time the bin is opened. Sometimes these constructions are right out of the direction manuals for a particular model, but more often they are some alien battle cruiser of his design or a skyscraper waiting for the plastic Godzilla’s next attack. Is my nephew’s M.O. the exception or the rule? I hope his way is the rule. It makes me all frowny to think of the gobs of Lego potential going to waste on someone’s shelf. I see those models and struggle against the temptation to modify them… use Yoda as a figurehead on a swamp fan boat or turn Hogwarts into a Tudor cottage…

My second set circa 1975
See the Atari duck?

The conversion of things into Lego language still sort of pixilates them and squeezes details into the limits of small plastic blocks, but the chunkification was much more severe before the addition of wild new colors, slopey roof bits, and articulated figures. Once there were only a handful of block shapes in five colors excluding the wide green foundation platforms. Back then the sets didn’t come with much instruction beyond the pictures on the box and the only special pieces were doors, windows, and wheels with their black axle blocks they fit into one of two ways. Cleverly, these wheels had the standard Lego knobs on their hubs so they could carry a chunky propeller or windmill blade. Building a person or a duck with these early sets produced something akin to a Space Invaders alien or an Atari Adventure dragon. The blocky graphics at the dawn of computer games primed me to be more than happy with my chunkified Battlestar Galactica. It took all the white blocks I had, was devoid of tiny laser canons, and scale problems forced the Cylon Raiders to be represented by paper hole punch confetti, but it flew lots of successful missions none the less. The lack of directions in these early sets didn’t stop me from trying to mimic some of the things pictured on the box. I remember squinting for a long time at that funny looking boat while counting how many little knob-bumps there were from one end to the other. That was the only way to decipher its actual length in Lego world. My second and third Lego sets each had more specialized parts than the last and eventually I had some sets with gears, axles, and universal joints. These last ones indeed came with complex directions for a featured model, but there were always lots of extra blocks and tantalizing other options for building. Making just the one model would be a betrayal to the left over blocks. The bulldozer eventually became a forklift of my own ingenious design and the harvester tractor supplied parts for a dune buggy complete with rear differential and working suspension.

I had other construction toys when I was a kid but none of them had the longevity of the bumpy plastic blocks and the possibilities opened by collecting multiple sets. There was a hodgepodge of hand-me-down tinker toys. They tasted good but the chew marks made the stick-in-hole joints unreliable. There were some Lincoln Logs. These occasionally worked in concert with the Lego blocks for some rustic contrast, but the set was small enough to only make a simple cabin or a one-floor frontier cathouse. Cool stuff, each with merits as creative toys, but they didn’t fire my imagination enough to plead for more sets and an ever-expanding empire.

We never had a big set of the standard wood building blocks at our house, but pop kept me supplied with lots of splintery lumber scrap. I could spend hours bashing bent rusty nails into these struggling to build clumsy bird houses, dog houses, or bug houses. I adored my Lego pile but this didn’t soothe my envy of the smooth wood blocks that one of the neighbor kids had. Nicely made wood blocks still have a strong draw for me. My nephew has a set that is a pleasure to stack and restack. There is something special in the standard shapes with a few wedges and arches. The limitations set by the simple design of the blocks becomes an invitation to creativity, and the possibilities become infinite. It’s something akin to a low-budget black and white film creating dramatic effect using little more than simple lighting tricks.

The new age of Lego with maniacal model building instructions winding through hundreds of illustrated steps has wandered far away from the simple open ended magic of stacking wood blocks. The old sets certainly had a closer relationship to this magic, and they had the added delight of allowing a kid to pick up a creation and fly it around. A rocket made of stacked wood blocks has little option but to blow up on the launch pad. Build it out of Lego and it can go to the moon. The newer sets are exciting and flashy but they may have lost some of their connection to the simple learn-by-playing toys exemplified by Froebel’s Gifts of Kindergarten. These are a series of toys designed to offer children expanding opportunities to learn through physical manipulation of interesting objects. The series begins with a group of soft crocheted balls on strings and grows into sets of, what else, smooth wood blocks! I don’t want to get too far into the details but suffice to say The Gifts are all simple toys that encourage open-ended play manipulating shapes and colors. Back in 1958 when the standard Lego block was patented Froebel might have accepted the sets containing five colors and a few shapes as a logical continuation of The Gifts. The menagerie of special parts added since 1958 make for all sorts of new possibilities but they steal something away too. Still, the creativity that pours out of the Lego box can be wonderful.

I’m a dork for creativity. I get all excited some times just from seeing bursts of creativity in others, like when my nephew balled up tiny bits of a paper napkin for an action figure snow ball fight. My nephew and I will often have Lego sessions, typically ending in an arms race to destruction with layers of Calvin Ball style made-up-on-the-spot rules: “Oh yeah? Well my house has lasers on the roof, see?... and surveillance cameras, so you better keep your Dr. No doomsday juggernaut off the lawn… or else! Oh, by the way, see those little black blocks on the foredeck? That’s the poop your Predator alien left on my veranda last week. You better get that thing house broken or I’m calling animal control.”

If we are at my sister’s house these antics come out of my nephew’s Lego box, but I still have my own old collection of blocks. When my nephew is at our house the old chunky style blocks jumbled with their later cousins, the gears and axles, suffice for our neighborly squabbles. My nephew regularly questions why my blocks are so lacking in sophisticated parts and small articulated figures, but the mechanical and robotic possibilities of all the gears usually make up for the shortcomings of the regular red bricks. Besides, if he thinks too long about the lack of hinged pale green translucent alien space ship wing thingies then my extra chunky Battlestar Galactica will cruise by and drop a teraton nuke on his half completed Neptunian meat processing plant before he can even install the rotating knives. Hey, it’s all part of the circle of life, right?

creativity and paper snow balls

Yes, yes, it's been a while since I posted that first little bit and I swear I plan to pick this up and start writing bits about my pop and all the odd things that came along for the ride but first a tidbit about creativity.

The clan had a family dinner last night and my eight year old nephew was in attendance. He had brought with him a small clone trooper action figure to keep himself entertained while the adults gabbed. He got a hold of some white tissue paper from a gift bag and put it to quick use in what has to be the most surprisingly creative thing I have seen in a while. He balled up two small bits of the paper so that they would just fit into the permanently curled mitts of the clone trooper where ostensibly it was intended to hold a plasma rifle or destructo bomb or the like. Then he mashed up the rest of the paper to make a snow field, put the trooper in the middle, and hollered, "Snow ball fight!"

HA!

I know this will sound like a dumb little thing to most folks (not that anyone is reading yet anyhow) but I was slack jawed. I'm getting old and it feels like creativity is harder to come by these days, so this little display tickled my make-something-out-of-nothing bone.

I need to spend more time drawing cartoons and gluing lint to toothpicks.