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Remember Honey I Shrunk The Kids? Of course you do. How about crackpot inventor Wayne Szalinski's awesome radio-controlled lawnmower? Well, Chuck Copeland of Royal Oak, Michigan's built a sleeker version and this one plows driveways too. More »
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We've hacked together some pretty hairy cars in our day, but a self-proclaimed "Maker" with the nom de plume Proximacentuari has put together a positively amazing home-built version of the Ariel Atom, the track-day speedster. The MAKE mag reader's called it "Z59," and powered by a four-cylinder from an Acura RSX, it's the result of over 800 hours of work. But, that work's been well-placed as the little devil's got a 0-to-60 time of 4.5 seconds. Not too shabby for a little roadster built with parts scavenged from home appliances, a doghouse and the contents of a dumpster. We'll let the builder tell you more about it himself below, but lets just say it's damn inspiring and we're measuring out the square-footage in our living rooms right now. More »
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Those Little Rascals, always building some kind of contraption to haul around their latest moneymaking scheme or the He-Man Woman Hater's Club collection of BDSM toys (oops, wrong movie). The burden always fell on poor Petey the circle-eyed terrier to provide motivation for their homemade vehicles. If only the Rascals were as smart as these scamps from Minnesota, who built a ride-on locomotive out of a bust-ass coal furnace, an old bed frame an oil barrel and washing-machine gear. The early go-kart, profiled in an issue of Modern Mechanix in the 1930s, only produced a half-horsepower (probably a little more than Petey), but it captured the can-do spirit of the Great Depression, by cracky. – Mike Spinelli More »
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We can't help but be in the CalCars guys' corner on their quest to give the Toyota Prius hybrid full-electric capability. After all, as someone once said (Mark Twain? Henry Ford?) "tinkering is the best revenge over those who'd just as soon spit in your eye as say hello." (Hmm, that doesn't sound quite right). CalCars is a non-profit group of "entrepreneurs, engineers, environmentalists and consumers" who take on projects that promote its interest in national security, jobs and global warming. At an upcoming MAKE magazine event, CalCars engineers plan to hack a new Prius to make it plug-in capable, installing a battery pack and tweaking hardware and software so it can go all-electric. We won't tell if you don't. Oh, wait... More »
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