This is the Roth Conestoga Star Wagon from 1992, it’s one of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s smallest creations, built around a child’s wagon and powered by a 1 bhp Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine.
This pint-sized vehicle is 100% drivable, you simply sit on the rear wing and place your feet on either side of the steering column. It has coil spring front suspension, a rear disc brake, and it rides on slick go kart tires on all four corners.
This is Ed “Big Daddy” Roth (with the top hat) and Paul Conroy (an Australian musician) at Roth’s home on San Feliciano Drive, in La Mirada, California in 1987. Image courtesy of Paul Conroy.
History Speedrun: Ed “Big Daddy” Roth
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was born in Beverly Hills, California, on March the 4th, 1932. He was the son of Henry and Marie Bauer Roth, he grew up in a German-speaking household in nearby Bell, where he attended Bell High School and split his time between auto shop and art class – two disciplines that would come to define the rest of his life.
His father, a cabinet maker by trade, kept Ed and his younger brother Gordon busy in the family workshop, and it was there that Roth first learned to build things from scratch. He bought his first car, a 1933 Ford coupe, at the age of 14. After high school he studied engineering at a Los Angeles college, then served in the United States Air Force before returning to civilian life and beginning to experiment with fiberglass modeling in the early 1950s.
Roth first made a name for himself in the late 1950s by airbrushing “Weirdo” t-shirts – these were grotesque, bug-eyed monsters typically driving outlandish hot rods – and selling them at car shows and through the pages of Car Craft magazine.
The shirts were an absolute sensation, and the revenue they generated helped bankroll his real passion – building custom cars that existed in a netherworld somewhere between artistic sculpture and automotive engineering. Standing 6 ft 4 in tall, Roth was given the nickname “Big Daddy” by a corporate publicist, and it stuck like glue for the rest of his life. The average height of an American male at the time was 5 ft 9 in, so Roth would have towered over almost everyone.
His first major show car was the Outlaw, a fiberglass-bodied custom built on 1929 Ford Model A underpinnings and powered by a Cadillac V8, which debuted in 1959 and was featured in the January 1960 issue of Car Craft.
From there, Roth’s output became increasingly wild. The Beatnik Bandit followed in 1961, with a clear bubble canopy (famously said to have been shaped using a plexiglass sheet heated in a pizza oven) and a central joystick that controlled steering, acceleration, braking, and shifting. It was painted by the legendary Larry Watson, with Roth trading a supply of Rat Fink t-shirts for the work.
Then came the twin-Ford-engined Mysterion in 1963, the space-age Orbitron in 1964, the surf-culture Surfite in 1965, and the Dodge-powered Druid Princess in 1966, with its gas tank and battery housed in a child-sized coffin at the rear. They were show cars first and practical vehicles a distant (very, very distant) second, though Roth usually built them as fully-functioning machines rather than static sculptures.
This is the Roth Conestoga Star Wagon from 1992, it’s one of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s smallest creations, built around a child’s wagon and powered by a 1 bhp Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine.
Roth’s cars caught the attention of toy company Revell, which began producing plastic model kits of his builds under license in 1962. The partnership was enormously lucrative, in 1963 alone, Revell paid Roth a one-cent-per-kit royalty that totaled $32,000 USD (the equivalent to $353,000 USD today), meaning 3.2 million kits were sold in a single year. The Beatnik Bandit, meanwhile, was chosen as one of the original 16 Hot Wheels cars when Mattel launched the line in 1968.
But ultimately it was Rat Fink, the drooling, bloodshot, anti-Mickey Mouse, that truly established Roth’s place in popular culture. Commercially launched in 1963, the character spawned a merchandising empire of model kits, t-shirts, and even a series of novelty records by a band called Mr. Gasser and the Weirdos.
Roth also created an entire supporting cast of monsters including Drag Nut, Mother’s Worry, and Mr. Gasser. The imagery was later adopted by punk and alternative bands including The Cramps and Rob Zombie.
In the mid-1960s, Roth turned his attention to motorcycles, launching Choppers magazine, the first publication dedicated exclusively to custom motorcycles, and building what’s now believed to be the first VW-powered trike.
He converted to Mormonism in 1974, shaved off his trademark goatee, and spent much of the next decade working as a sign painter at Knott’s Berry Farm. He returned to car building in the late 1980s producing a handful of later creations, including the Roth Fink Mobile in 1992, the Beatnik Bandit II in 1995 and his final build, the Stealth 2000.
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth died of a heart attack on April the 4th, 2001, in Manti, Utah. An annual Rat Fink Reunion is still held there each summer in his honor.
The 1992 Roth Conestoga Star Wagon
This is the 1992 Roth Conestoga Star Wagon, and at this point I’ll turn it over to its creator Ed “Big Daddy” Roth to explain it a little in his own words:
“Started with a child’s wagon and added a 1 horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine. The handmade suspension and steering are of tubing, water pipe, and scrap metal pieces. The front suspension are Chevy big block valve springs.
“The rear axle is from a lawn tractor. The Go-Kart tires and rims come from K-Rims, Azusa, CA. Metal Masters of Salt Lake City did the chrome plating. Bruce Nells, Manti, UT painted it and “downtown” Willy from Concepts, Buena Park upholstered it. – Ed “Big Daddy” Roth
This little wagon is undoubtedly the coolest 1bhp vehicle we’ve ever featured here on Silodrome, it’s also the only one that has front suspension coil springs that started out as big block valve springs on a Chevrolet V8.
This little wagon is undoubtedly the coolest 1bhp vehicle we’ve ever featured here on Silodrome, it’s also the only one that has front suspension coil springs that started out as big block valve springs on a Chevrolet V8.
It’s now due to roll across the auction block with Bonhams on the 13th of June with no reserve, and you can visit the listing here if you’d like to read more about it or register to bid.
Images courtesy of Bonhams
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
