Hi all,

I was given a present from my SIL who has just been to Africa.

The local kids play with these as toys.

Pretty cool eh.

[ Edited on 26-12-2005 by jeremy ]

Doors, boot and bonnet all open

that is cool. the opening doors and bonnet etc are particularly good. amazing what low budget, basic materials and ingenuity can do. Australia used to be more like that but now we have too much cash and not enough time.

That reminds me of the wire bicycle that I bought on the streets of New Delhi in 1973. I watched the man make it completely from memory. It is made from one piece of wire.
I saw kids all over Africa with wire cars that they would push down the streets on the end of a long piece of wire with a wire steering wheel on it. The cars were so well made that you could recognise what they were.
Interestingly enough, in Africa abandoned cars were thoroughly stripped of all useful sheet metal such that the only thing left was the steel skeleton of the welded monococque frame. Sometimes it was almost impossible to identify the car from its skeleton.
We used to stand around discussing the make and model of a car skeleton and sometimes failed to identify it with certainty.