If you started with a pile of junk you picked up at any average flea market in America, including a chainsaw, a hand truck, a toolbox, a circular saw blade, and a little Razor Powerwing push scooter, could you turn it into a running and driving go kart over the course of a weekend? That’s the challenge that the small-bore maniacs at Cars And Cameras set out for themselves, and by golly they made it happen, too. Given a welder and enough bad ideas, you can absolutely drive yourself around with a small 1.8-horsepower two-stroke motor.
It’s a bit optimistic to call this thing a go kart, because it isn’t exactly fast or good or safe, but it does exist and it does move under its own power. If you wanted a bare-bones toy that might kill you on a good day, built for a couple hundred bucks and a few hours of labor, this is definitely the way to do it. Just make sure your chainsaw chain and saw blade brake disk have some strong guards on them to keep it safe.
Oh, this is really, really sketchy
OK, so the $30 chainsaw wasn’t up to the task of pushing the contraption around for a full lap of the Cars And Cameras course. There just wasn’t enough power or clutch longevity to push that kind of weight. So they grabbed a free engine off the shelf out of their collection of detritus and got it moving again. That’s when things got really sketchy. With a single brake and one-wheel drive it wasn’t ever going to be fast or good, but it definitely stops and goes. That’s probably more than I could accomplish with a limited budget, limited parts input, and a whole lot of fabrication.
“It may not look that fast, but trust me, for a tool box, that’s fast!”
At the end of the day, this is just an excuse for a bunch of dudes to hang out building dumb stuff and doing even dumber things with the finished product. Don’t you wish you could spend a weekend this way? I know I do.