Rat Rod Racer: Built From Scratch, Built From SCRAP!

As a fan of “Rat Rods”-and the owner of one, of my own construction-I am very familiar with the idea of putting a junk car on the road by visiting the scrap heap. Often the constraints of finances and time call for you to get your car done by utilizing what is available rather than what you may really want to use, and the true “art” of “rat rodding” is being able to do just that and make the results not only cool, but appear even better than what you may have wound up with if you had had “carte blanche” from the get-go. In other words, a rat rod is more than the sum of its parts. But what’s really cool is when you build a rod or a racer in this way and you wind up with something that not only looks good, but goes good, too! Sometimes this is the result of near wizard-level mechanical skill, and sometimes its just dumb luck; the right crankshaft and the right rods go into the right block and when you finally dyno the finished product you’ve got an engine that everyone would swear was blueprinted and balanced. I’ve seen it happen, and here, we see again that HO scale slot cars can mimic real cars. Case in point: this white Cheetah, recently out of the build shop with every part either used or from the discard pile…and whupping ass all over the track!

I even acquired this body by accident; on one of the few occasions in the last year when I was able to hang out with members of one of the local HO-scale racing clubs (before they clamped down on social activity again because of the virus), my host-a racer of the Lexan bodied Wizzard/Viper/BSRT-type cars, had a bunch of old Thunderjets he wanted to sell and asked me if I was interested in any of them before he put them on ebay. Although I already had a nice pair of Cheetahs, I took a shine to this white one and we agreed on a price on the spot. I originally had it “built-to-to-hilt” but wound up robbing parts from it for other cars until the body went into mothballs for a few months. I took it out one night last week when I was bored and looking for something to do; I figured I’d see if I could scrounge together a runner from the scrap parts bin. I wound up using an older semi-retired Auto World motor on top of one of the rejected transparent red chassis, I took a pair of magnets at random from the magnet bin, used a pair of clipped and ground down AW axles, a set of wheels and tires that had already been pulled off another car long ago, and even took a set of copper pick-up shoes off a long-dead Dash Motorsports chassis. The whole thing was put together from the boneyard, and when I was finished with it I didn’t think it would run at all, let alone be competitive. Well, stick a fork in me: what I had was a screaming banshee of a racer that immediately wiped out 3 of my faster cars-2 Jaguars and a Corvette-in rapid succession! It nearly beat my black Cobra too, one of my fastest cars, only being roundly beat in its 6^th race by a twin, the yellow “King Of The Hill” Cheetah. So, you could say it was dumb luck, or you could say I’m a mechanical wizard! As to which is really is, I’ll just quote the sagacious Pee Wee Herman: “I meant to do that!”