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In Maricopa, Arizona you can find a large collection of small cars
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This is the dwarf car museum and it's all the work of Ernie Adams
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It's the first metal dwarf car in 1965 out of nine old refrigerators
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Ernie Hand builds these small vehicles and honed his skills making hundreds of dwarf racing cars
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From there, he progressed to the more time-consuming business of constructing scaled-down replicas of classics
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It was in 1992 I built a street legal 39 Chevy dwarf car that was a complete car
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It had everything the real car had in it On the average it takes anywhere from two and a half years to five years to build a car That would be somewhere between 3 and 4 hours
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This was my first car ever built as a steel model car, something you could ride in and drive
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It's got full instrumentation. The seats in it fold up like an old Model A so you can walk into the back seat
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Amazingly, Ernie's scaled down cars are fully road legal. My cars are not hard to get street legal because they're not built from other cars
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They're all built from scratch, so there's no other car body numbers or anything involved in mine
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People ask me how they ride, I always tell them they ride like a corvette
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On a good road they ride real smooth, on a rough road, they're a little choppy
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but they all get out and travel highway speeds, 75, 80 miles an hour
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80 miles an hour all day long. Ernie is understandably proud of the fact
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that he builds the cars himself, even if people don 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 find it I made it
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And he said, you made it. He said, wow, you must have a pretty elaborate shop to build something like that
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I said, I live in a trailer park and I build it out behind the house
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He was instantly very upset. Pretty soon he turned around and walked off and he turned his head and he said, sir
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I've been a body and fender man all my life. You don't tell me you just go out in the backyard
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and build something like that. The way he went. I was a little embarrassed
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because I just got chewed out, you know. But I guess I should have lied to him
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Despite several generous offers, Ernie insists his creations are not for sale
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He even had a man in California offered to trade me his house. I have been offered anywhere from $50,000
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to $450,000 for one. but they're not for sale and when you get up that high you're just blowing smoke so
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setting up a museum to let the public see the collection was the idea of Ernie sons When people would come in the shop they would naturally say this is like coming into a museum
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So I told them, let's just make it a museum. I really love to see the people's reactions when they come in
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My favorite is one lady come in and she's speechless. All she could say was, wow, and oh my God
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When I see reactions like that from people, it makes it all worth of what we do here
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When we're driving down the road with them, people will come up and they'll hang beside you or behind you
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They're looking at the car or taking pictures of it, a lot of thumbs up, all kinds of gestures
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With the building seemingly at capacity, does there any plan on adding any more cars to his museum
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I'm done building cars right now, but I have to finish the last one I'm building
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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 finish
