What to do with old autos?-sugestions from 1905

[Guest Casper Friedrich]

"It doesn't mean that a car has only scrap-value when it´s use as a pleasure vehichle for as much as eight or ten years is finnished. There is still much use for the it, but of course we are only speaking of high quality machines. Undoubtly in the larger cities there will be soon companys that buy and modifies them to suit different trades. In America there was already such companies."

Convert your old car into a mobile laundry, shoe-repair and sissor grinder...

Found this in Austrian Allgemaine Automobil-Zeitung, but as you can see fron the illustrations the story must orginally been publized in English:ÖNB/ANNO AustriaN Newspaper Online The Barber-shop car on the latter page is the most amusing, part of the charm is that the drawings have a children's book quality.

Edited September 23, 2012 by Casper Friedrich (see edit history)

[MarrsCars]

Thank you for this, with the useful images and tutorial I was able to successfully convert my coupe into a scissor sharpening machine! I can't wait to try her out.

Seriously tho, that's a cool article and fun to see how they were already looking forward to ways to "recycle" old iron, tho many of us forget that it is a recent phenomenon to have disposable products, not like when you could perpetually rebuild or reuse almost anything you bought.

[Rusty_OToole]

Two uses from the teens and twenties for old powerful luxury cars: Cut off the back of the body and build a tow car or service car for garage use. Or, discard the body entirely and turn the chassis into a giant vacuum cleaner. No kidding, they did this. Attach a blower to the engine and connect it to a big box or tank with vacuum hoses running out. Tow the chassis to the client's house, run the hoses inside, and do their spring cleaning. These giant portable central vacuum cleaners predated the home vacuum cleaner.

[Joseph P. Indusi]

It was quite common to use Buick straight eight engines from rusted out cars to run saw mills or chop machines.

Joe