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hey me and my friends thought of a neat idea. We plan on going to a junkyard and getting 2 (running) pieces of junk and have a destruction derby. We only plan on paying like 75 and under for both cars. anyone ever done this before, we dont plan on hitting eachother at speeds above like 30mph.
Hmmm, not my idea of a clever thing to do, but I suppose if you wear helmets, seatbelts and tape the glass you might survive. See Car and Driver for an interesting article about demolition derbies, I think it was the May or April issue. Lots of tips on removing parts of the car for safety reasons.
Keep in mind if both of you are going 30mph and have a head on collision, that will be like hitting a wall at 60mph, not a high survivability scenario.
I would assume you have a private property dirt lot in mind.
Sounds like fun, but may not be very safe unless you know what you are doing. Like the commercials say "kids don't do this at home, and professional stunt drivers used".
One thing that bothers me about demo derbys is this: In most of them, you back your car into the other guy(s), right? That can't be good on your neck, having it twisted around to look behind then slamming into another car, in my opinion. My friends in high school had a better idea. Put a brick on the accelerator, aim the car off a sand cliff. Kinda fun. Untill the car caught fire.
You should remove all the glass and think about modifying the gas tanks. I believe the big guys use tanks that only hold a couple gallons and are relocated for destruction derby runs.
Primary rig is:
95' F-150 XLT 4x4, 302, 5 spd, MSD 6A, Sunroof, and some kablamo Firestoner Wilderness ATs .
Pictures are in!!
Then theres:
99' Mustang GT 4.6L
88' F-250 Superduty 4x4 351/c6
95' Mercury Cougar 4.6L V-8
80' E-350 300/6 with a
3 spd column shifter. Top speed is 65mph, Go Baby Go!
One thing you'll want to be sure to have is a fire extinguisher - I did this sort of thing a few times when I was younger, and it wasn't unusual for one of the vehicles to catch on fire. It happened two times that I can remember, and one time we didn't catch it early enough and the entire car went up in flames...if you don't catch a vehicle fire early, they are darn near impossible to put out (not to mention the possibility of explosions - battery, gas tank, tires).
When I was in high school we really wanted to try this, but places to do this were few and far between in Kenmore. Actually, what we really wanted to do was stage a wreck, and have someone video tape it. We ended up not doing it due to the great illegalness of it, but it would have been fun. I had a buddy who's Citation or Chevette or what ever it was was just beat to heck. He literally made a hobby out of running his car into things. He especially liked going into the rural areas and finding cars up on blocks and then running into them to knock 'em down. We wanted to stage a wreck in the parking lot of the safeway where we each pretended to be inattentive drivers and we'd run into each other. I'd be driving my rusty '74 F-250. We though it'd be hilarious if we pretended to just go ballistic on each other. He'd take a crowbar to my already burnt-out headlights and I'd bury an ax in his already wholy hood. Then we'd just pretend to beat the heck out of each other. Again, we ended up not doing this since none of us wanted to spend a night in jail, but it would've been absolutly hilarious.
The Law
1989 F-250 HD 4x4
460, C6, BW 13-56
Almost Stock
Demo sounds like fun. If you were near me I'd join ya.
Gut the whole interior. move the battery were the front passenger seat was. about a 2 gallon gas tank were the rear seat was. and knock out all the glass. don't forget the fire extinguisher like stated above.