Dymaxion redux — Buckminster Fuller’s legendary car is back in the news. | Top Down Auto Blog | an SFGate.com blog

Dymaxion redux — Buckminster Fuller’s legendary car is back in the news. | Top Down Auto Blog | an SFGate.com blog:

Dymaxion redux — Buckminster Fuller’s legendary car is back in the news.

By miketttt@att.net (Michael Taylor)

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Dymaxion redux

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This is Car #2, the only surviving Dymaxion of the three that were produced in 1933-34. 
(Photo courtesy of dymaxionfilm.com)

For fans of the late architect and inventor R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller, news that somebody found blueprints of Fuller’s pre-war Dymaxion car in a Massachusetts attic was akin to hearing that Indiana Jones had found the Ark of the Covenant – something so long lost that it had become the stuff of legend.

The blueprints were found recently by the owner of a house in Dudley, Mass., about three miles west of the Waterhouse Co. facility in Webster, Mass., where some parts of the Dymaxion were made. Fuller had been living in a rooming house in Dudley. (The cars were assembled in a factory in Bridgeport, Conn.)

The Dymaxion (its name is an amalgam of Dynamic Maximum Tension) was a streamlined aluminum-bodied three-wheel car that was way ahead of its time. It could carry up to 11 people and on a good day could get as much as 30 miles per gallon from its Ford flathead V8 engine. Only three Dymaxions were built, between the spring of 1933 and the fall of 1934, and only one survives – it’s on display at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada.

After the homeowner, who wants to remain anonymous, found the blueprints, he trawled the Internet and soon discovered that Noel Murphy, a filmmaker who lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., had spent years working on “The Last Dymaxion”, a documentary about Fuller’s quixotic car project. The homeowner called up Murphy and told him of his find.

In a telephone interview the other day, Murphy said that the person who discovered the blueprints decided, after a long chat about the Dymaxion, to give the drawings to Murphy and told Murphy he approved of the film maker’s plan to put them up for auction so he can raise enough money to finish his documentary. The auction will be held by the Wright auction house June 6 in Chicago, and the estimate of what Lot #145 might fetch is between $20,000 and $30,000.

Murphy, who turns out to be a fount of knowledge on all things Dymaxion, said Fuller built only three of the revolutionary cars. According to Murphy, Car #1 was destroyed by fire on a highway between Raleigh and Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1941 after an improperly secured fuel filler cap allowed gasoline to somehow get sprayed onto the hot engine. Car #3 was commissioned for renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski by Stokowski’s wife, but after they took delivery they found out they didn’t like it and eventually sold it. Murphy said Car #3 ended up in Wichita, Kan., and ultimately wound up in a junkyard, where it was cut up for scrap.

As for the lone survivor, Car #2: Murphy said Fuller hadn’t completely paid Waterhouse Co. for work the firm did on the car and so Waterhouse eventually repossessed it. A Waterhouse employee was given the car and, after the usual twists and turns of a fabled car’s journey, it somehow found its way to a farmer’s barn in Arizona. The farmer sold it to three college students for $3,000 and they decided to make a bundle by selling it to noted Nevada car collector and casino magnate William Harrah. They told Harrah he could have the Dymaxion for $90,000. Harrah laughed and walked away, Murphy said. A few years later, unable to get their price on the open market, the students came back to Harrah and sold it to him for $20,000.

After Harrah died in 1978, Holiday Inns bought the casino empire and the 1,450 cars in Harrah’s personal  collection. Most of the cars were auctioned off in the mid-1980s, but Holiday Inns donated 175 of them, including the Dymaxion, to the nascent National Automobile Museum.

In 2009, noted British architect and car collector Norman Foster, who had worked with Fuller for a dozen years, was allowed to borrow Car #2 from the Reno museum and use it as a model for the re-creation of a new Dymaxion. Car #2 went to England, where it spent two-and-a-half years as a model for Crossthwaite and Gardiner’s construction of the new Dymaxion The quid pro quo, according to Jackie Frady, executive director of the Reno car museum, was that Foster would have Crossthwaite and Gardiner do a partial restoration of Car #2. The car has since returned to Reno and is back on display. Frady said the other day that the restoration firm “did an excellent and thorough job. It was absolutely correct – the paint and the interior were done the way they had been done originally.”

Now the museum is trying to raise $12,000 in donations so the Dymaxion’s drive train and wiring can also be restored.

As for Murphy, he hopes the blueprints sell for enough money to allow him to finish up his documentary.  He admits that he’s “obsessed a little bit” with the Dymaxion, “but I still find it fascinating.”