More Member Perks: Hand-Painted Wooden Cars Based On Strange Rear-Engined Concepts And Imaginary Stuff

As you well know, we treasure all of our Autopian members, from the filthiest, lowliest, most barbaric Cloth-tier members to the most exalted Rich Corinthian Leather members, whom are effectively the closest thing we have to royalty here in these States, united. All are equally important to us, and we want to thank each and every one of you. Of course, we want to, perhaps, thank our Rich Corinthian Leather members just a bit more, which is why I was hand-painting some little wooden cars to send to those members.

Want to see what they look like before they get sent off? Too bad! I’m going to show you, anyway.

The cars are made from our partner Candylab’s Castor Set™, which is, essentially, a bunch of blank, disassembled Candycars, ready to be DIY’d into existence. Don’t forget, Candylab has plenty of already assembled and painted cars ready to go, including our Autopian exclusive model!

I had other plans for these blank wooden cars, though. I wanted to make something personal for our RCLs, and I wanted to do something different from Candylab’s usual clean, bold, minimalistic design. Also, I wanted to turn the models around, backwards from their usual orientation, because I had some specific sorts of cars in mind for inspiration. Very backwards-looking cars, like this Renault Project 900 concept:

The Project 900 was from 1959, and was a development of Renault’s more conventional rear-engine designs like the Dauphine:

The Project 900 used two Dauphine inline-four engines siamese’d together to make a 1.7-liter V8, shoved way at the rear there, which looks a lot like a station wagon’s front. This was a dramatically cab-forward design, and while I love the strangeness, I’m not certain just how successful it really was.

The Soviets tried something similar even earlier, in 1952, with the NAMI-013, their first real all-new postwar design and the first Soviet car with an automatic transmission. It used a triple-carb’d inline-six at the rear but was found to be a bit too radical for actual development or production.

It wasn’t too radical for me to flip around Candylab’s fastback car and make a similar sort of car, a bit more angular and with conventional front doors and gullwing rear doors.

I imagine this one, which is called, let’s say, the Menkus Foal 8, thanks to it’s 3.2-liter flat-8 air-cooled engine mounted under that low rear deck. It’s the most popular car in the People’s Republic of Clamsylvania, and has even been exported to the state of Idaho in large numbers, for unclear reasons.

It’s quite fast, but oversteers like a yo-yo on ice.

Of a similar basic design but far more advanced is this electric concept car powered by a powerful but experimental Pasta/Anti-Pasto reactor:

Built in 1975 by the Italian Culinary Energy Research Institute (ICERI), this car was the first mobile application of the now-famous pasta/anti-pasto reactor, which combines pasta and anti-pasto in a magnetic containment torus, where the two diametrically-opposed foodstuffs annihilate one another, releasing vast amounts of energy.

The car worked incredibly well, and you can see the twin containment pods on the rear, but the power was far too great for mobile, public use and the ever-present threat of a full, delicious-smelling explosion of farfalle and olives and salami chunks (which were needed for data storage, anyway) made further development of the concept impractical.

I decided I wanted to try making a pickup truck as well, so I used a pair of chopsticks, suitably cut down, to form the bedsides on this truck. The truck is interesting, a 1984 Pythagoras Motors double-cab mid-engined Stevedore 550D, which used a 5.5-liter inline-three diesel engine mounted transversely between the cab and the bed of the truck.

Large air intake ducts on the C-pillars funnel air to the ducted radiator, and engine access is available via those side panels and a panel in the floor of the bed. Built by the biggest carmaker in Independent Quebec, these trucks are a common sight on North American roads.

This last one is a bit of a departure, as it’s a Star Wars bootleg sort of thing. This is a Rebel Alliance ground transport, driven by the R7 droid whose head you see mounted atop the roof.

Like any good Star Wars universe vehicle, this one is a little ragged-looking and covered with greebling. Just like how I like my romantic partners.

I hope our RCL members enjoy these slightly crude little three-dimensional sketches. They’re hardly precision things, but I hope they feel personal and fun, and I appreciate you indulging me to share them with you, too.

If we get more RCL members, I’ll make more! Maybe I’ll make some and we can pick some random other members to send them to? Why not?

Ugh, I have to wake up for a flight in two hours. Oy.