COMM: In Maricopa, Arizona, you can find a large collection of small cars.
COMM: This is the Dwarf Car Museum and it's all the work of Ernie Adams.
ERNIE: I built the first metal dwarf car in 1965 out of nine old refrigerators.
COMM: 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.
ERNIE: It was in 1992 I built a street legal
'39 Chevy dwarf car. That was a complete car, it had everything the real car had in it, on
average it takes anywhere from two and a half years to five years to build a car.
That would be somewhere between three thousand and four thousand hours.
ERNIE: This was my first car I ever built
as a steel model car. Something you could ride in and drive and it's got full instrumentation,
the seats in it fold up like an old model A, so you can walk into the back seat.
COMM: Amazingly Ernie's scaled down cars are fully road legal.
ERNIE: 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 road they ride real smooth, on a rough road they're
a little choppy, but they all get out and travel highway speeds, seventy-five, eighty miles
an hour all day long.
COMM: Ernie is understandably proud of the
fact that he builds the cars himself, even if people don't always believe him.
ERNIE: 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?"
and 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" and I said "I live in
a trailer park and I built it out behind the house" and 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."
ERNIE: Away he went. I was a little embarrassed
because I just got chewed out y'know, but I guess I should have lied to him.
COMM: Despite several generous offers, Ernie
insists his creations are not for sale.
ERNIE: I even had a man in California offer
to trade me his house. I have been offered anywhere from fifty thousand to four hundred
and fifty thousand for one. But they're not for sale and when you get up that high you're
just blowing smoke so.
COMM: Setting up a museum to let the public
see the collection was the idea of Ernie's sons.
KEVIN: 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 favourite
is one lady come in and she's speechless, all she could say was "Wow, oh my God"
and when I see reactions like that from people it makes it all worth the work we do here.
ERNIE: When we're driving down the road with
them, people will come up 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.
COMM: With the building seemingly at capacity,
does Ernie plan on adding any more cars to his museum?
ERNIE: 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.