> Sam said it was okay for me to do a little rambling, so I'm going to tell a story about a Rambler. It was a 1959 Rambler station wagon. I got this story about 3rd hand so I don't know how much truth, if any, is in it. About 1970, two kids in Eastern Kentucky decided to spend the summer touring the great American West. Money was short so they decided to fix up a car from the local junk yard to make the trip. The father of one and the uncle of the other owned the junk yard.
> (They were cousins so it was the same guy.) They found the old Rambler without an engine or transmission, but most of the body was there. Somehow, they rigged up two electric golf cart motors to the drive shaft. They had to remove the back seat and cut out a large piece of the floorboard, but they got them in there, one on each side. Power to the shaft was delivered through short motorcycle chains. They also grabbed eight 12 volt batteries, that would still hold a charge. To keep them charged they used two large lawnmover engines and one small one, turning automotive alternators. With all that mess placed where ever it would fit, there was just enough room for the driver and a passenger. With a full charge and no lawnmower engines running, they got up to 40 miles per hour and covered about 20 miles before they ran out of juice. Then they fired up the engines and started on a 100 mile round trip as a test before heading west. Remarkably, nothing broke, but the trip took most of the day to complete and when they calculated their fuel mileage it was just short of six miles per gallon. Even at 32.9 cents a gallon, they couldn't afford to make the trip.

It's truly amazing what some people can do when they really want to.

There was a show on just recently that told the story of a group of people who lived in central northern Australia. They would travel around by finding cars that people had dumped in the bush, satisfied that they would never run again, and fixing them without tools of any kind.
In the show, they replaced the clutch of a car with one made of WOOD !

One car's gear box slowly disintegrated while they were driving, so they only had 2nd, 3rd, and 4th to drive with.... then 3rd and 4th then.... reverse ! They completed the last couple of hundred kilometres in reverse ! If that's not enginuity, I don't know what is.

ladada(I don't even WANT to know what they did for petrol)dada