Dude puts a jet engine on his Volkswagen.
But check this out, too:
his own front yard may very well be the site of his next project, after he’s through fiddling with his current one — a Honda motor scooter powered by twin Cruise missile jet motors.
The front yard experiment goes like this: A year or two ago, Patrick, through his connections in the surplus military equipment world, found himself at a “secret, but now defunct air force base in Poland,” one that had been used by Warsaw Pact forces during the Cold War. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Soviet-era armaments began showing up on various black and not-so-black markets.
The men running the Polish air force base were trying to sell Patrick an SA-2 missile. This is the ubiquitous surface-to-air missile used by the Soviet Union and nearly all its military allies. It was an SA-2 that shot down Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane in 1960.
Not only were the guys at the air base trying to sell Patrick an SA-2, “they were saying, ‘you want a MiG 21 (fighter jet)? I’ll sell you two tanks and a MiG.’ ” .
“So they wanted $2,000 for the missile,” Patrick said, “and I had a bottle of ouzo and after a while I got them down to a grand.” He still hasn’t got the 35-foot-long missile, but he does know what he’ll do with it once it clears U.S. customs. (Good luck.)
“I want to build a missile silo on my front lawn,” he said. “It’ll have those electric-opening silo doors and I’ll have a set of lights for it. Then, at night, I open the silo doors and raise the missile up, with those lights on it.”