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In Maricopa, Arizona you can find
a large collection of small cars

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This is the dwarf car museum and
it's all the work of Ernie Adams

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It's the first metal dwarf car in
1965 out of nine old refrigerators

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Ernie Hand builds these small vehicles and honed
his skills making hundreds of dwarf racing cars

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From there, he progressed to the more time-consuming
business of constructing scaled-down replicas of classics

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It was in 1992 I built a street legal 39
Chevy dwarf car that was a complete car

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It had everything the real car had in it On the average it takes anywhere from two and
a half years to five years to build a car That would be somewhere between 3 and 4 hours

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This was my first car ever built as a steel
model car, something you could ride in and drive

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It's got full instrumentation. The seats in it fold up
like an old Model A so you can walk into the back seat

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Amazingly, Ernie's scaled down cars are fully road legal. My cars are
not hard to get street legal because they're not built from other cars

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They're all built from scratch, so there's no
other car body numbers or anything involved in mine

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People ask me how they ride, I always
tell them they ride like a corvette

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On a good road they ride real smooth, on
a rough road, they're a little choppy

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but they all get out and travel
highway speeds, 75, 80 miles an hour

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80 miles an hour all day long. Ernie
is understandably proud of the fact

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that he builds the cars himself, even if people don always believe him The first car I drove down the road and
somebody stopped me to ask me about my car He said wow where did you get that car I said I didn find it I made it

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And he said, you made it. He said, wow, you must have
a pretty elaborate shop to build something like that

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I said, I live in a trailer park
and I build it out behind the house

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He was instantly very upset. Pretty soon he turned around
and walked off and he turned his head and he said, sir

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I've been a body and fender man all my life. You
don't tell me you just go out in the backyard

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and build something like that. The way
he went. I was a little embarrassed

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because I just got chewed out, you know.
But I guess I should have lied to him

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Despite several generous offers, Ernie
insists his creations are not for sale

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He even had a man in California offered to trade me
his house. I have been offered anywhere from $50,000

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to $450,000 for one. but they're not for sale and when
you get up that high you're just blowing smoke so

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setting up a museum to let the public see the collection was the idea of Ernie sons When
people would come in the shop they would naturally say this is like coming into a museum

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So I told them, let's just make it a museum. I really
love to see the people's reactions when they come in

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My favorite is one lady come in and she's
speechless. All she could say was, wow, and oh my God

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When I see reactions like that from people,
it makes it all worth of what we do here

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When we're driving down the road with them, people
will come up and they'll hang beside you or behind you

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They're looking at the car or taking pictures of
it, a lot of thumbs up, all kinds of gestures

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With the building seemingly at capacity, does there
any plan on adding any more cars to his museum

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I'm done building cars right now, but I
have to finish the last one I'm building

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Everybody says I'll build another one afterwards, and I know as
soon as the last one's done, I'll get antsy and have to finish

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start something so