Meet America’s biggest creator of Dwarf classic cars

In the sagebrush of southern Arizona, Ernie Adams has spent more than five decades building a platoon of miniature vehicles from nothing more than junk and his own hands. Dubbed Dwarf cars, they're the result of a lifetime of tinkering and using materials others had thrown away — an approach that's made Adams the godfather of an entire racing subculture, and a singular American craftsman.

A mechanic by trade, Adams, 72, says he began building things as a boy in Harvard, Neb., where his family lived near a landfill, and ever since has kept an eye out for metals and parts and supplies that he could make use of where others could not. (His son Kevin tells in the video below of how his father would give him a bicycle: "We'd have a huge pile of bicycle parts in the backyard, and Dad would point to it and say 'there's your new bike.'")

As a kid, Adams would occasionally putter around with salvaged motors, cobbling an engine onto a bicycle at age 11. But it wasn't until 1962 that he first started tinkering with the idea of building a car from scratch — a replica of a 1928 Chevy, reduced to roughly five-eights scale. After a few years of scrounging, Adams began building in 1965 with three tools: a chisel, a hammer and a homeade hacksaw. Since Adams had little experience in bending steel nor the proper tools for doing it, he grabbed metal panels from nine old refrigerators for the body — and set to work, using nothing but his eyes and hands for measurements.

Since then, Adams has finished six other Dwarf cars, all street legal, all careful recreations of classic models built only from photographs for reference. Take his 1949 turquoise Mercury sedan, which he calls the "Rebel Rouser." The engine comes from an old Toyota; the grille, body and fenders were all fashioned over a hand-built tube frame; the rear window was taken from the windshield of a '66 Chevy pickup. The dash — which has all the standard functions, including radio, dashboard lights and defroster — came from a refrigerator door, as it has in all of his cars.