When I was in high school, I helped a friend build a car. I am not the most handy of guys and I can't tell a sports fan from a fan belt. But it was one of the most masculine things I have ever done. Admittedly I did little more than hand things to someone else and provide comical relief through the process. I did, however get to paint the car. It was a tiny little thing, a basic shell of some small European car, outfitted with a motorcycle engine, a bare bones bench seat with bungie-cord safetybelts. But it ran. It coughed and sputtered down the road, hardly much bigger than a mini. The awful racket it made, and the god-awful orange basecoat we gave it, earned it the nickname of Orange Thunder (to be fair, the orange was originally going to be the undercoat for a wickedly kitschy tiger-stripe paintjob). Perhaps my favorite part of the car was our MacGuyver'd interior. A ridiculously loud and rather juvenile sound system was installed, taking up much of the small car. Wires and giant subs lined the bare car frame directly behind the main seat. Providing the music for this over-the-top system was a salvaged 8-track player. A portable CD player was run through a cassette deck adaptor, which was then put into a tape deck add-on for the 8-track. A jutting, horizontal totem pole of car audio history pushing between the driver and passenger. And to top it all off, the tiny car, easily going unnoticed on the road for its size (but certainly not because of the noise and bright color), we installed a large semi truck, air horn.
We soon learned all the many ways you can make a completely non-street legal vehicle, but have a helluva time doing it.
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