I spent the summer designing and september transforming my 1998 Subaru Outback into an ectomobile for Halloween. The project lasted a total of about 5 months (starting with research and lightbar shopping), and culminated in early October with the completion of the car.
The finished product… a sort of hybrid of the original car and the 1A. The whole outfit was removable, took about 10 minutes to set up and left the car without a scratch.
And then five days before Halloween it all went horribly wrong!
I was driving in Old Town and I was rear-ended by a semi truck… damage to the exterior of the car as well as interior (including the frame) rendered it totaled.
*Mr. Bill voice* OH NOOOOO!
The accident and our antics brought local attention from the newspaper, we had a pretty neat article on Halloween.
Anyway, mid november I bought a 2003 Outback and started working on it's conversion. Bits I dislike about the new car is that it is off-white (this bit drives me fucking nuts…. it is SOOOO close to being white), and that the accent trim is a deep bronze (whereas the accent trim of the original 1K was grey/black).
Improvements included having all the wires for the lights and sound system tucked neatly under the carpet and out of the back seat (which was occupied by a rather cumbersome subwoofer) and building the lightbar controls into the dashboard. The end result is a toggle switch panel underneath the cd player that is unbelievably shiney and looks ike it came with the car.
The new car was completed on the 12th of December (I think…).
Along came the big Blizzards right before Christmas. Most of Colorado was shut down and snowed in. People were stranded on the streets and in their homes.
But this Ecto is all-wheel drive, baby.
We spent our days and nights during the blizzard driving around looking for stranded motorists and people in need. We mostly got out and pushed their cars unstuck, but sometimes we'd rig up a tow rope to my frame and pull them out of drifts.
This garnered us a lot more attention. Here is the newspaper article(complete with picture of the original car) that appeared on December 30 (I think..)
http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061230/NEWS01/612300321
That's the *ahem*Resurrecto-mobile in all it's glory during the second blizzard. The thing is a bloody tank on snow and ice, and we build the roofrack to be weatherproof, so no harm done.
Now we're having a full coverstory being done on us that will come out in a week or two… gonna be awesome!
Anyway, tons of fun. I'll try to get “official” pictures of the new car sometime this week.
