Toolies, start your engines. Competing contraptions driven by circular-saw blades awaited the starter’s signal at a recent power tool race in San Mateo, Calif.
By JESSICA BRUDER
TEN feet short of the finish line, Barbie Airplane was stranded.
The cheerful contraption — a Craftsman belt sander crowned with a powder-blue toy plane — had been careening down the 75-foot racetrack moments earlier. Then the sander’s rotating belt came undone, stopping it dead.
In the neighboring lane, Heavy Metal Waste, a circular saw souped up with skateboard wheels and flaming antennas, had already rocketed past. Cheers of victory rang from the bleachers.
“Time waits for no one!” heckled the announcer. So Randy Lisbona, a 47-year-old air-conditioning engineer from Dallas, hauled his broken-down belt sander off the track to make way for the next heat.
That’s how it goes at power tool drag races. The premise is simple: Take a hand-held power tool. Rebuild it into a racing machine.
Will it run? Maybe. Will it crash? Could be. Will it entertain? Most definitely.
In the six years since a pair of San Francisco Bay area artists held the first power tool drag races, technophiles have exported the tradition to three continents, holding similar competitions in Sacramento, Seattle, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Israel. They’ve raced everything from power drills and grinders to upright vacuum cleaners, leaf blowers, chain saws and even the occasional fire extinguisher.
The creator of Heavy Metal Waste, 40-year-old Darrick Servis of Sacramento, insisted it didn’t take much science to beat Barbie Airplane.
“It’s a lot of zip ties, bailing wire, and clamps. It’s pretty lo-fi,” he said after a race in May at the Maker Faire, an annual summit of tinkerers and their inventions. But that’s what Mr. Servis likes about these races: “The ingenuity of it all, it’s kind of a MacGyver sort of thing, a lot of bubble gum and duct tape.”
That do-it-yourself spirit makes the races disarmingly accessible. You don’t need an engineering degree or a fat wallet to race power tools. All you need is a tool with a simple motor, along with a daredevil streak and a little spare time.
Take the simplest racing tool of all: the humble belt sander. Out of the box, it’s a ready-made racer. Put it on a flat surface with the belt facing down, lock the trigger into the on position, and your tool will automatically propel itself forward like a tiny tank. (For belt sanders that don’t have trigger locks, you could make MacGyver proud by cinching down the trigger with a zip tie.)
Need more traction? Try a belt with a coarser grade of sandpaper.
Other power tools take more patience to convert. Since they’re intended for hand-held use, most tools aren’t race-ready off the shelf. For example, if you plunk a circular saw down on a wooden racetrack, you might manage to saw the track in half, but your tool won’t go anywhere.
The solution? Build a chassis. Some folks like angle iron, while others prefer welded steel, wood scraps or PVC piping. Bolt on some wheels — skateboard and in-line skate wheels are cheap and popular — and mount the saw on the frame so it bites into the track. Instead of slicing downwards, your contraption will zoom full force ahead.
If this kind of tinkering sounds tricky, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel, or the saw blade, for that matter. A detailed tutorial at Instructables.com (www.instructables.com/id/Power-Tool-Racer.-Quick-&-On-The-Cheap!) gives step-by-step directions for converting a circular saw into a racer, courtesy of Jeremy Franklin-Ross, co-founder of the Hazard Factory artists’ collective in Seattle.
Hazard Factory has a trove of online building resources, including a chat forum, at www.powertoolracer.com. Make magazine, the guide for tinkerers who want to make rodent-powered nightlights or jam-jar jets, has an instructional podcast on the subject of power tool drag racers on its site, blog.makezine.com; the host, Bre Pettis, offers a valuable reminder: “Power tools are very dangerous. ... it’s just a good idea in general to keep your hands away from anything that could cut them off.”
Beginner builders can also find plenty of racing videos on YouTube and dozens of photographs at powertooldragraces.com/photogallery.html. Some regional racing groups hold build days, where novices learn skills alongside veteran tool freaks. Information on race schedules is at powertooldragraces.com and hazardfactory.org.
So far as hobbies go, this one is cheap. A serviceable power tool from a thrift shop, garage sale or Craigslist shouldn’t set you back more than $20. The add-ons — wheels, frame, eclectic decorations — can be scavenged for even less.
Mr. Lisbona said Barbie Airplane, his belt sander racer, cost next to nothing to build. The sander was a hand-me-down from a friend. The toy plane was a $2 find at a garage sale. The Barbie doll in the cockpit was on loan from a 4-year-old neighbor who, after handing it over, voiced second thoughts.
“She turned back and said, ‘The rule is: Don’t break it.’ ”
Belt sander racing has been a backyard hobby for decades, but full-fledged power tool drag racing didn’t crop up until six years ago in California.
Charlie Gadeken, who started the haphazard sport with a co-conspirator, Jim Mason, saw the races as a way to get more people involved in creating — and not just watching — mechanical art.
Even the best builders can bomb out on race day. Part of the races’ charm — and occasional terror — is their volatility. One year, a racer with a vertical flamethrower fell sideways, huffing out a fireball that threatened to fry members of the scattering crowd.
During another rally, a dapper fellow in a seersucker suit raced a can opener, which set the record for slowness. In five minutes, it crawled about a foot and a half, delighting the audience.
“You can come to the event with no intention of winning,” said Mr. Gadeken. He calls it “failing in style.”
When the power tool drag races ran at Kinnernet, a creative technology gathering in Israel, one of the most unusual entries wasn’t a speedster. Yedidia Vardi, a tinkerer, and Michal Levy, a musician, combined a cordless drill, roller skates, and a couple of mallets. They lined the racetrack with about 100 wine bottles filled with different levels of water. As their racer paraded down the line, it struck each bottle in turn, pinging out the tune of “Oh! Susanna.”
Other races have been less melodic. Rusty Oliver, the professed “chief lunatic” behind Seattle’s Hazard Factory, said his group wanted to create more aggressive challenges, so power tools leap though flaming hoops, and smash into each other in head-to-head runs.
After all, showmanship is half the fun. Few things are more practical and plainspoken than power tools. There’s a subversive glee in elevating them from mundane life on the workbench to speedy, stylish glory.
“The idea was to come up with something anyone could make, and make it funny, and silly and that kind of thing,” Mr. Gadeken said. “That’s how it got started.”
Mr. Oliver added: “We’re quietly attempting to create an opportunity for people to take chances. If you think you can get away with it, we think you can get away with it.”
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