Billy Cart Bliss
Sun Herald
Sunday April 12, 1998
The old billy cart with pram wheels nailed to a piece of wood has undergone a hi-tech transformation. By Jonathan Hawley.
Ah, yes, those were the days. Back before the carefree fun went out of driving and serious responsibility took over. The time before seatbelts, speed limits and booze buses were invented. Before cars, actually. Not that cars weren't around, just that at the age of 10 or thereabouts we were too young to drive.
The alternative? Build a billy cart out of whatever could be found in the back shed or down at the tip. Vehicle design didn't come more simple than this: if it had wheels and somewhere to sit, it was transport. Add to the equation a piece of road with a decent slope, and the need for a few more sophisticated modifications quickly sprang to mind: that steering and brakes aren't just luxury items. Even with the ability to stop their home-built billy carts, many kids have been introduced to the wonderful world of road accidents at an early age.
As the turn of the millennium approaches, even the humble billy cart has had a high-tech modification. Kids of today can buy a purpose-built cart that owes more to a Formula One racing than it does to backyard engineering. The Eracer, as it is called, is designed to travel on all types of surfaces and, with a top speed of 70 km/h it's a serious piece of gear. At around $895 the Eracer is not a purchase most youngsters will make out of their piggy banks. According to Aqua Design, who conceived the Eracer, it is bought mainly by parents who can see the sense in their children hurtling down a grassy slope instead of a suburban street.
Because most of these parents tend to be middle-aged males, and the Eracer is also capable of carrying an adult, there's a suspicion that Junior will be occasionally shoved aside as Dad averts a mid-life crisis in a downhill blast of gravity-fed thrills. That's not bad value when compared with a $43,000 Mazda MX-5.
The Eracer has steering operated by cables and a flexible bushing, and proper brakes working off the back wheels. It's obviously a cut above the average soap box on wheels. The Eracer is not the product of a large toy company, however, rather of three enthusiasts who operate out of a garage. Michael Heathcote and Craig Macdougal make up Aqua Design, which conceived the Eracer as a "99 per cent safe" way of giving kids and adults the non-motorised ride of a lifetime.
Heathcote says his billy cart is selling to recreational users and drivers hell-bent on winning local billy cart derbies organised by councils and charities. "We had one guy from Cooktown in Queensland desperate to buy one because he was sick of the local Air Force guys always beating him with a high-tech unit they built using aircraft materials."
The secret to the Eracer is that it is just complex enough to work properly, but simple enough to be virtually indestructible. It weighs 15kg, yet can easily carry 150kg - if someone that hefty could wedge themselves into the seat. "I've stood on it and jumped up and down," says Heathcote, "and there's no way it's going to break."
It does flex, however, which is part of the reason why it can be used on grassy slopes. The flex in the Eracer's body works as a kind of suspension, meaning it will roll over any surface. What look like aerodynamic wings at the front and rear are there more for looks, although they double as handles when it comes to the non-fun part of downhill driving, which is dragging the cart back to the top. The tiny "nose-cone" on the front of the cart is made of machined alloy, which protects the rest of the vehicle from damage just in case the worst happens, and forward progress is halted by a tree.
In designing and building the Eracer, Heathcote
and Macdougal called their pal Ron Stuchbery, who was not only a maker of children's ride-on toys, but who had once worked for the British sports car manufacturer Lotus in the 1970s. Funnily enough, the billy cart has a few similarities with a Lotus: it gets its performance and handling from the simple tenet of keeping weight down, and it is mainly constructed of fibreglass.
Although the Eracer's designers have done what they can to maximise safety, it's obvious that responsibility rests largely with the driver. A helmet is highly recommended, as are gloves, decent footwear and a grain of common sense. Clever design features include a rounded undercarriage to stop the driver's legs from folding back if they drag on the ground, and the cable operated brakes are far better than any home-built contraptions. The centrally mounted brake lever is recessed so it won't come forcefully into contact with a certain bodily part in a crash.
Today's Eracer pilot might not become Australia's next Formula One world champion, but there's no reason why the junior downhill racer might not progress into go-karts, Formula Ford and onwards to greater glory. At least a couple of Australian champion racing drivers had a start in billy carts. John Bowe, who has won open-wheeler championships, as well as Bathurst in a V8 Falcon and turbo-charged Ford Sierra, distinctly remembers cobbling together a billy cart out of a crate and pram wheels, and then hurtling down a dirt track near his home town of Devonport, Tasmania.
"We had some fearful prangs, but I seemed to get out of it all right," he says. "One of the big modifications we made to this cart was with a car steering wheel we found in someone's shed. We used a broom handle as a steering column, then wound a rope around it to turn the front wheels. The only problem was we somehow did it wrong so that if you turned right, the cart steered left, which made things interesting."
Some drivers who started billy carting on dirt roads never really made it back to the tarmac. Believe it or not, Canberra's Neal Bates, who has won multiple Australian rally championships and has driven in international rallies against the world's best drivers, had his first taste of driving sideways on dirt roads in a gravity-powered billy cart. He built his own billy cart, but quickly swapped to one built by his twin brother Rick because it suited his driving style. "My billy cart had rubber wheels on the back, but his had these solid pram wheels which meant it slid around a lot more on the road. I could slide it around corners and loved it, so he never got it back."
So if you're young, relatively fearless and fancy yourself on four wheels a billy cart's not the worst place to start. It's all downhill from there.
© 1998 Sun Herald