page2 - Thinking Outside the Soapbox

Coasters of conduit are all the rage! All the kids are duing it...well, Peter at least.

Look closely at the photo, and you can see that the brake pedal—which pulls a wooden lever against the right rear tire—is made of pieces stolen from my childhood Erector Set. Yes, when you turn 13, an Erector Set is so last year. The plywood seatback and bottom are laced to the frame with clothesline, and are made from faux-walnut paneling found in the curbside trash. They aren't cut very accurately, because I had no jigsaw. The seat foam, vinyl upholstery and brass upholstery tacks I actually bought brand new from the hardware store. I was trying in my own clumsy way to replicate the look of an Indy roadster seat.

The wheels and tires came from Lee's Hardware store, and are just utility wheels you'd use on a dolly or welding cart. They were non-pneumatic, with hollow cores and rubber that was so hard and dry it came off in chunks. The rubber compound was of a strange, crumbly consistency, like those big peanut-shaped Halloween candies people used to drop, anvil-like, into your treat bag.

The rearview mirror, clamped to the steering support hoop, is off my bicycle. You can see the clamp is too big, so I've got some bicycle inner-tube wrapped around the frame. The tie rods in the steering are pieces of copper tubing that I've hammered flat on the ends and drilled for bolts.

When I first finished this kart, I painted it a light blue, just because we happened to have a can of blue paint. Later I sprayed it red with a rattle-can and painted a yellow Ferrari prancing horse on the back of the seat. The neighbor kids couldn't identify it as a horse, but I assured them it was. Real tifosi were rare in Elroy. Also, I couldn't draw.

I have a photo of yet another coaster kart, an earlier version built the year before my brother was born. This one is similar in design, but made almost entirely of wood. My dad took a picture of me—once again in our front yard, hunched over the wheel in a "speed" pose, and I'm wearing a crash helmet I made out of a war-surplus U.S. Army helmet liner, painted white with crossed checkered flags on the front. Nothing says "Safety" like an Army helmet liner.

Just eight years later, I was in Vietnam, flying around in a Huey helicopter and wearing one exactly like it—sans checkered flag motif—underneath a camouflaged steel helmet. Seems like every time you put one of these things on, life gets interesting.

Looking at these photos now was a nice little diversion for me, and a reminder of how many "shop class" lessons are contained in a youthful project. For instance, in doing those early coaster karts, I learned: Why you should mask off your new vinyl upholstery before you spray red paint around it; why lock washers are a good idea; why GM doesn't use copper tubing for tie rods in its heavy-duty pickup trucks; why lag bolts screwed into soft pine don't make the best axles; and why Colin Chapman shied away from cast-iron steering wheels and tire compounds that were harder than Halloween candy.

The fun part, though, was simply remembering that when I was 13 years old I wanted to drive something—anything—so badly that I raided every corner of our material universe just to have a vehicle that steered and drove. Sometimes it's good to be reminded that the notion of simply getting into a car and ambulating down the road was one of the sustaining dreams that made adolescence—and life—almost tolerable. Still does.

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