Shortly after we heard about Crosthwaite and Gardiner’s two Dymaxion projects, we found out that Jeff Lane of the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, also has been working on a Dymaxion replica project for the last couple years.
“We’re definitely into streamliners here at the museum – we have a Tatra T87 and a McQuay-Norris – and I’ve always been interested in the Dymaxion,” Jeff said. “We got going on it gung-ho when we started it about two years ago, and we actually have a running, functioning chassis without a body now. The economy has put the project on hold for the last six months, but we still hope to have it done by spring of 2011.”
Unlike Crosthwaite and Gardiner’s projects, Jeff has been plugging away at it without any hard deadlines, which has allowed him the freedom to tinker with Buckminster Fuller’s design and create an amalgam of the various versions of the Dymaxion with his own slight modifications.
“We talked about keeping the steering by cable, but to turn the car, that would’ve meant 25 full turns of the steering wheel. Our chassis guy said that would be suicide, so we changed the steering to hydraulic. That was the only major change we made; everything else, we tried to pick the best of what Bucky did.”
So, for instance, Jeff chose a chassis design more like Dymaxion No. 3, with a shorter swingarm, and a body design more like No. 1, with the single headlamp, though dimensions for the body were taken directly from No. 2 before it left for England. A standard Ford flathead V-8, Ford gearbox and Ford rear axle (flipped to drive the car forward) make up the drivetrain.
“At about 45 MPH, this thing gets a little scary,” Jeff said. “I can’t imagine going 70 in it.”
Jeff has amassed quite a bit of information on the Dymaxions (including unearthing Buckminster Fuller’s original patent) and has been in touch with Crosthwaite and Gardiner to compare notes, so we’d expect to see a great replica as a result of Jeff’s work. Until then, some videos of the original Dymaxion(s):