Cosmotron Car - Designer Builds Sci-Fi Vehicle In His Backyard

This purple vehicle may look like a spaceship from a sci-fi film, but it's actually a one-of-a-kind custom car. The Cosmotron. The whole car is perfect and more I drive it I realize that the car is perfect. This kind of car has never been seen in this country before. The Space Age car was designed by Paul Bacon, who spent 18 months building the car in a shed in his back garden. Once the project started. I always liked to keep it moving and never let it stand still. If you do just a little bit every day it will always get done. In the 60s in America there was a few cars like this but not too many and when I was a kid I was always told that by the year 2000 this is what cars have looked like and they don't. So incredibly disappointing. The 41 year old sat down and drew his dream car, then worked out how to make his dream a reality. I went and bought a BMW Z3 with the 2.8 litre straight 6 around about 1998 and I took every single body panel off it so I was left with just the rolling chassis and floor pan. I then braced that with extra steel just to make sure it was stiff enough so there'd be no flexing in the fibreglass body. And onto that I bonded polystyrene and expanding foam. Then I sculpted the shape of the car. I used a piece of 10 mil steel rod and ran it from here down to here and that gave me the basic lines of the car. Once I'd got it to the shape I wanted it in polystyrene, I covered that in fibreglass and then smoothed it all out to the car that you have now. I also made the tooling for the Dome, the Dome rings made of steel. I made the tool for the Dome and sent it to a place called Dupless Domes. It used to be in Leicester and they pumped up the Dome. The Dome sits on a steel ring that rises and falls on a hydraulic ram and hinge system. The Dome itself is made of the same sort of acrylic plastic used in glider canopies. Paul stayed true to his design throughout, even if it meant using unconventional materials. We've got the two eight straight 6 modified so it's running the six SU carbs. They're topped off with salt and pepper pots from John Lewis because they look like cool Chrome bullets. And the interior, we've got the crazy gear shift. Got the one off dashboard, one off steering wheel. My wife actually stitched all the interior. The rear grill here. During the 50s people would modify cars with anything that was around and this kind of grill became popular using a draw pull off of a old chest of drawers. Those draw pulls are very hard to get now, so almost looking the same. These are actually lids off of a lot of tubes of moisturizer which I found in a charity shop for about 5 lbs and then cleaned up and they now on there. These are plastic and they won't go rustic. Paul and his wife Kirsty took the Cosmatron to car shows around Europe, but after two years, they were ready to move on to a brand new project. I sold it in order to build another car because for me, the building of the car is better than the final owning of the car. Paul's always doing projects, crazy projects. He's he's not happy unless he's making something. He's on to his next car project now, and Cosmatron's actually his second car. Luckily for Paul, car enthusiast Martin Smith had been covered in Cosmo for two years. I decided to buy the car because the years I wanted a different sort of car. What I like about the car so much is that the way it looks, the space age look of it, the craziness of it, the actual bubble top, the colour, the whole way the car's built, the 60 crazy look is what I really go for. And Martin had fallen in love with the bizarre motor. They've done about 800 mile in it and it's been brilliant. It's like being in a goldfish bowl looking out on the world. Luckily, Martin's wife Kathy shares his enthusiasm. We're a bit crazy in our family. We give them all names, so he's Cosmo to us. But I do love him. He's a lovely car drive. So nice. People's reaction to the car when you drive it down the road, everyone stops, everyone stares, everyone wants to take a picture. I think just general amazement is very, very, very eye-catching. Unique as well. I find. I pull up into a petrol garage, people come up to me what sort of cars this? Is it a kit car? Who makes it? Is it production line car? Don't understand how it works. If I took it down the part, my mates would love that. There'll be photographs taken, it'd be in the papers. I mean it would be splashed everywhere. And now Martin has the Cosmotron for himself. He has no intention of letting it go. It's probably the 1st bubble top car that's ever been made in England. I think it needs to stay in England, you know, So I'm going to try my best to keep it in England and never sell it.