Dwarf Cars: Mechanic Hand-Builds Mini Motors

In Maricopa, AZ you can find a large collection of small cars. This is the Dwarf Car Museum and it's all the work of Ernie Adams. I built the first metal dwarf car in 1965 out of 9 old refrigerators. Ernie hand builds these small vehicles and honed his skills making hundreds of dwarf racing cars. From there he progressed to the more time consuming business of constructing scaled down replicas of classics. It was in 1992 I built a street Lego 39 Chevy dwarf car that was a complete car. It had everything the real car had in it. On average it takes anywhere from 2 1/2 years to five years to build a car that would be somewhere between 3004 thousand hours. This was my first car I ever built as a steel model car. Something you could ride in and drive. It's got full instrumentation, the seats in it and fold up like an old model A so you can walk into the back seat. Amazingly, only scaled down cars are fully Rd. legal. My cars are not hard to get street legal because they're not built from other cars. They're all built from scratch so there's no other car body numbers or anything involved in mine. People ask me how they ride, I always tell them they ride like a Corvette on a good Rd. They ride real smooth on a rough Rd. They're a little choppy, but they all get out and travel highway speeds 7580 miles an hour all day long. Ernie is understandably proud of the fact that he builds the cars himself, even if people don't always believe him. The first car I drove down the road and somebody stopped me to ask me about my car. He said, wow, where did you get that car? I said I didn't find it, I made it. And he said, you made it. And he said, wow, you must have a pretty elaborate shop to build something like that. I said, I live in a trailer park and I build it out behind the house. He was instantly very upset. Pretty soon he turned around and walked off and he turned his head and he said, Sir, I've been a body and Fender man all my life, and you don't tell me you just go out in the backyard and build something like that. The way he went, I was a little embarrassed because I just got chewed out, you know, but I guess I should have lied to him. Despite several generous offers, Ernie insists his creations are not for sale. He even had a man in California offer to trade me his house. I have been offered anywhere from 50,000 to 450,000 for one, but they're not for sale. And and when you get up that high, you're just blowing smoke. So setting up a museum to let the public see the collection was the idea of Ernie's sons. When people would come in the shop, they would naturally say this is like coming into a museum. So I told him, let's just make it a museum. I really love to see the people's reactions when they come in. My favorite is one lady come in and she's speechless. All she could say was wow. And Oh my God, when I see reactions like that from people, it makes it all worth of what we do here. When we're driving down the road with them, people will come up and and they'll hang beside you or behind you. They're looking at the car or taking pictures of it. A lot of thumbs up, all kinds of gestures. With the building seemingly at capacity, does there any plan on adding any more cars to his museum? I'm done building cars right now, but I have to finish the last one I'm building. Everybody says I'll build another one afterwards and I know as soon as the last one's done I'll get antsy and have to start something so.