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Cardboard DeLorean

Susannah Haldeman discovered this corrugated wonder
in front of Hopkins hall on the oval at Ohio State University
in the Spring of 2005.

(click images for more detailed shots)

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
A brief Q & A with Alex Heberling, who worked on the Cardboard DeLorean project called "DeLorean Team Racing".
 
What class was this project for?
The project was for Art 206, 3-D Foundations. It's one of the first core art classes needed to apply to OSU's College of Art. It was on display outside Hopkins Hall on the OSU campus for several weeks, until the end of the quarter.
 

How was the DeLorean chosen for the project?
My teacher had a penchant to pick interesting, well known things to do for the cardboard project. In past quarters, his classes also constructed Alien and Predator models, and our class almost did the Millenium Falcon from Star Wars, but we ended up settling on the DeLorean, because our teacher wanted to do something that wasn't from a sci-fi movie, neccessarily. Believe it or not, the DeLorean was MY idea! I had the idea to do the DeLorean from Back to the future, with the flux capacitor and such, although my teacher decided instead to get the normal DeLorean model, since it was less complicated.

 
How long did it take?
As a class, we took about three weeks total making our seperate pieces. We all chipped in a few dollars for a die-cast model of the DeLorean, which our instructor then chopped into pieces with a hacksaw and distributed amongst us. It was a challenge to scale up the size of the pieces, since the model we used was only 1/18th the size of an actual DeLorean. Putting together the DeLorean took about five hours, give or take.
 
Does the car still exist today?
The car is no longer in one piece, sadly. Some people just abandoned their pieces, but others, like myself, detached their pieces and submitted them as part of their Bachelor of Arts portfolio. After my review, I pitched the majority of my piece (I did the dashboard) but kept the steering wheel. I was especially proud of the wheel, so I wanted to hang on to it.
 

Any other interesting anecdotes about the project?
In the process of making our seperate pieces, our class would often joke that we should actualy hook up a real radio to the dash, put a real engine in it and drive it around, and all sorts of silly things.

The DeLorean was also featured in the Spring issue of a UK car magazine. I'm not exactly sure which one. No idea how they found out about it, but shortly after we'd put it on display outside Hopkins, our teacher was contacted about the article and asked for pictures of the car.

[The magazine saw your project posted here and asked for more information. At the time all we knew was the location of the car and that Josh's sister found it. With that they found your class.]

 
More images from "DeLorean Team Racing" can be found here.