One Piece at a Time

The title of this post refers to the Johnny Cash song, but it’s what Boris Karavkin actually did. Karavkin is a retired artist in Minsk, Belarus, which was part of the USSR. The wait to buy a new car in the Soviet Union was ten years or so back in the ‘60s, and he couldn’t have afforded one anyway, so Karavkin took matters into his own hands and built his automobile- which he still drives!

When assembling the car, Karavkin used sliding doors, a swivel chair for the driver’s seat and anti-theft nuts for hubcaps (the latter have always been popular with car thieves, the world over).
In 40 years, parts of the car have been replaced several times: the engine has been changed three times, the suspension and the air intake system were improved. But the ‘Fantasy’ has now travelled 300,000 km, and Karakvin says it has a maximum speed of 140 km/h.

Karavkin traded sign and poster work for car parts to assemble the vehicle, which took five years and was completed in 1973. Read the story of the homemade car at The Guardian.