On a (almost) midnight train

"area man" (hurrburgring) 09/26/2014 at 22:22 • Filed to: None

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Fortunately, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . But as you can see, it's empty and I'm bored as fuck. You know what that means - story time! After the jump you'll find the tale of me and my buddy trying to turn a flatbed furniture dolly into a downhill racer.

The year was 2006. The place - desperate, suburban Connecticut. My buddy Peter and I were seniors in high school, so you think we'd have more important things on our minds, but one day we spied a janitor pushing a well-worn flatbed dolly out to the curb and we immediately had a common thought - we must take this simple device for moving large objects and ride it down a massive hill.

The dolly was probably 3 feet by 6 feet, three 2x4s that had been bolted together and fitted with a thick U-shaped metal bar on one end to serve as a handle. It had four caster wheels, two swiveling and two locked. We asked the janitor if we could take it, he muttered something in oldmanspeak, and presto, two minutes later we had detached the handle and were busy trying to stuff a tabletop with wheels into the back seat of my Avalon. Peter lived at the base of a series of very large hills, so we elected to use his house as a staging area and I dropped the racer-to-be off that afternoon.

Fast forward to the weekend - I arrive at Peter's house for the big day. His mother was not pleased with our plans, but there was no stopping us. The first (and only, honestly) step was to figure out a steering system, and Peter somehow threw together a mickey-mouse setup involving bungie cords attached to the housings for the swiveling wheels, which crossed over the top of the front and created a setup marginally similar to !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . It felt very, um, temporary, but on a few test runs in his driveway we managed to steer with a surprising amount of control. We were in business.

His older brother, having taken an interest in our "project" offered to drive us to the top of the hill and trail us in his truck to get a reading on our speed. This was a stupendously dangerous idea, but since we were doing this all without helmets or pads anyway, the promise of knowing exactly how fast we were hurtling down the hill on a piece of wood was too tempting to pass up.

I won't keep you waiting, the first run was awesome. We ran it like a two-man bobsled, with Peter in the front and me in the back. The steering worked well, the soles of my shoes melted when I used them to brake, and according to his brother, we came close to 30 mph! Way faster and way more fun than we thought possible. It was obviously time for a second run.

New hill this time - not quite as steep, but much longer, almost a full quarter mile of sloped asphalt. We were confident that with the extra room we could break 30, maybe even 40 mph. We eased the dolly over the crest of the hill, holding ourselves in place with our feet.

Things started out fine. Peter deftly swerved around a few large sticks that could trip up the plastic wheels, and soon I could feel we were going just as fast as before, maybe even faster. It is at that point that I hear "Oh, shit" from in front of me. "What?" I ask as we fly down the street, going a little too fast at this point. Peter holds the remains of his bungee-cord steering system up above his head so I can see that it's broken and basically, we are fucked.

We immediately put our feet down, but between our shoes getting destroyed on the last run and the higher speed this time it did nothing. We were drifting towards the curb - fast - and before I could blink we were straddling it with two wheels still in the street as mailboxes and shrub branches whizzed inches overhead. The timing could not have been better - we hit the curb right when it dipped for someone's driveway, which allowed us to half-mount it and saved us from being thrown into the street with no protective gear at 30 mph.

After an eternity, we ground to a stop, checked ourselves (still have heads!), and got up to survey the scene. The wheels on the left side has gouged long lines along the edges of several front lawns and the air smelled like burnt shoes. The impact with the curb had bent the wheels on that side, and since we had just almost killed ourselves, we decided that was probably it for that project.

Oh, and once he stopped laughing long enough to breathe, Peter's older brother confirmed we hit 35. That's a win in my book.

PatBateman > area man 09/26/2014 at 22:52

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I used to run into burning buildings for fun, but this story makes me feel like a librarian. Bravo.

area man > PatBateman 09/26/2014 at 23:02

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Thanks! This effort was proceeded by an unsuccessful one to turn a wheelchair purchased at goodwill into a racer, but the wheels wobbled too much at speed. We were determined to make something work!

718Rogue > area man 09/29/2014 at 17:36

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When I was young and lived next to a hill in New York City, I used to do something like this with my friends. We had a handbrake system though. We probably hit around 30 most of the time. The one time a cop saw us, he just told us to be safe and drove away.