When Marcus Tripp wanted to get around the farm in a drive-from-wheelchair vehicle he couldn’t find quite what he was looking for. So he turned to a mechanic friend who came up with a perfect, if quirky, solution. Here Marcus tells how a new ‘car’ was born.
I live on a farm in Weston Super Mare and getting around can be difficult in my wheelchair so I decided to try to find a vehicle that I could use to get across the fields but drive from my wheelchair. So I arranged a test drive of the Rural Pursuits Vehicle (RPV) and was very impressed with the design and controls of the vehicle. Unfortunately the 11hp
engine was a little underpowered for me and the price tag was a bit steep at around £8,000.
So after chatting with my friend Terry, a retired mechanic, we decided to try to put something together ourselves. Terry managed to pick up a 1984 Honda Prelude that was an MOT failure. It was automatic, it had power steering and a fantastic
1800cc twin-carb engine.
At this point plans had to be put on hold while I went to visit my brother for the Easter holidays. When I got home I was a little surprised to see the chopped up remains of the Prelude on the back of a trailer. I went into the garage to be greeted by what looked like something from Scrapheap Challenge and a Mad Max film! The front of the Prelude had been chopped off and welded to a homemade box chassis. Box
tubing was used to support the rear suspension and also to make a protective cage.
The “car” fired up on the first turn of the key to a deafening roar – the silencer hadn't been a priority fitment. Terry had worked out almost everything but had to wait until I got back before he could sort the tricky bits, such as steering, accelerator and brakes.
Ingenuity and a tight budget were two very important factors.
The steering was handled using an old electric wheelchair motor to turn the original steering column via a pulley. All I had to do was turn my control stick (liberated from an old exercise bike) which would make an electrical contact to turn it one way or the other. Steering was “lively” and took a few modifications and apart from not having any self centering it happily served its purpose.
The accelerator pedal was relocated and matched to the height of my footplate so that a simple tilt of my foot on the edge of the footplate made the beast roar.
The brakes were operated by the steering control stick via pivots and rods connected to the master cylinder using bits from a lawnmower. To apply them I simply push forward on the control stick. The brakes have an added safety feature which is that if I let go of the control stick a spring pulls it in and the brakes softly apply, to release them I pull back on the spring loaded control stick. Terry had attempted to test drive the vehicle by borrowing a kitchen chair to sit on.
Unfortunately the chair had no fixings and as he accelerated the chair tipped back and he almost went rolling out the back.
So it fell to me to be the official crash test dummy. Terry welded in some clamps and supports to hold my wheelchair and bolted in a couple of seatbelts to prevent me from trying to dive on to the bonnet.
I drove my wheelchair up the ramp at the back and set off.
The test drive went very well with only a small modification to the steering required to make it less sensitive. A couple of days later I got to test it through a muddy field. The wide VW Golf alloys may have looked good but were useless through the soft mud. We managed to get hold of some narrower,
knobbly tyres and these really did the trick, so much so that when we had snow in the fields I managed to get to the top of a nearby steep hill, plenty of wheel spin all the way up but I felt like I was Sir Edmund Hillary reaching the peak of Everest.
The project was just about finished and we decided we needed a name for this creation. Well it's a Honda Prelude and it looks a bit ludicrous so we called it Preludicrous.
It really is fantastic fun to drive and there are still a few modifications I'd like to try involving a Rover V8 and 4WD, but Terry needs some convincing. As for a road legal vehicle,
well I don't drive on the roads because I simply don't have the money needed to pay for a “properly” converted vehicle but thanks to Terry I do get a small idea of what the independence of driving feels like. 
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