Paul Bacon Made A Catchy Rat Rod From An Old Taxi

The Rat Rod That Could Have Wasted Away Is Now A Head-Turner

Englishman Paul Bacon from Leicestershire set out to transform an old London taxi into something that you can give a second look. When it was done, he had not only a transformed little thing to transport him to work but in an ingenious way of advertising his mechanics workshop.

“So I bought a taxi for around $590, I cut the back end off, built a timber frame and then started to construct the new shape,” says Bacon. That sounds easy enough for a career mechanic and good enough, all work was done in a flat seven days. When he was done,he got all those amusing reactions.

“A lot of people smile, people wave, people come out and ask me a lot of questions about the van.” With a rusty paint exterior, Paul added a cyclone-style cooler on the side of his front window to maintain the rat-rod theme.

The driver’s seat is taken from a 1974 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow that Paul predicted would fit perfectly. The engine is a standard 2.7 Nissan diesel that comes in all London taxis and whilst the van was never built for speed, Paul has managed to reach 105 kmh.

“And by the way, all this happened in sort of mere chance,” Bacon explains, “Initially, I was looking at taxis to use their chassis, but then it occurred to me I could actually take one and convert it into a van.”

The next time you drop around in London and come across those old time taxis, give a second thought as to what you could probably do with one other than waste it off in your garage.