While his cars may be immovable works of art, Vinnie Bentley’s creations are no less a feat of creativity and engineering than the real thing.
The Perth, Australia native has built a series of life-sized automobiles out of K’NEX children toys, including a dragster and a “rat rod” street rod. K’NEX are a rod and connector system that allow you to build virtually anything you can dream, and Bentley, well….he dreamed really big.
Bentley, who explains that he suffers from dyslexia, envisions and builds his creations in his head and sets off to building them — there are no drawings, no measurements, and certainly no manufacturer instructions for projects of this magnitude. In fact, he says he doesn’t even use photos for reference.
Bentley has acquired an untold number of K’NEX parts/kits second-hand through eBay and similar online yard-sale platforms, and while he does not have a count of the number of pieces that went into each of these builds, he does weigh the collection of pieces as he takes them down; the “rat rod” tipped the scale at 445-pounds, and using a 2-gram average per part, that would equate to just over 100,000 individual pieces. Three months was spent building the dragster, and four on the street rod. The end product is certainly incredible.
As Bentley says of his innate ability to build these from memory from the ground-up: “dyslexia is a gift, not a curse.”
