“As a kid, I used to pester my parents for toy cars but my carpenter father couldn’t afford them often. Then, one day, he got an old tricycle from the junkyard, made three wooden wheels and fitted them to the cycle. I used to ride it during playtime in the evenings as a five-year-old,” recalls Arunkumar Purushothaman, who works as a nurse in the Idukki District Hospital in Kerala.
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Today, he is popular for creating scaled-down models of automobiles that are not just showpieces but are working toys. With his experience in carpentry, interest in science and passion for automobiles, he first made a jeep in 2014 as a gift for his son who was a toddler then. “I didn’t want to lift a toy car design from the stores; I wanted to create something using my skills.”
So, he spent around three months cutting open and moulding metal sheets from old items, sourcing the motor and battery, designing accessories from plastic material and so on. “It took me back to my school days when as a Class X student, I made a working miniature of a backhoe for a science exhibition and won an award. It was always in me to put together seemingly unrelated things to make something new and aesthetic that could also move,” he says.
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“I could make a better-looking jeep than the ones I saw in the showrooms. And it wasn’t just my son who enjoyed driving the jeep, everyone in my family did! They were all excited to see the two-feet jeep trundle around in our backyard.” He uploaded a video of it on YouTube and gradually the views and subscribers for his videos grew.
Arunkumar has also made a bike, and his latest is an autorickshaw that is all of three feet. His video on the mini auto starts with his seven-year-old son, Madhav Krishna, and three-year-old daughter, Keshini Krishna, dancing to a peppy song from the famous 1990 Mohanlal-starrer Aye Auto . “The mini auto model is an exact replica of the auto ‘Lalettan’ rides in the movie; even the number plate is the same,” says Arunkumar, a die-hard fan of the Malayalam star. “I also pasted pictures of the actor inside.”
Fitted with a 24-volt DC motor, Arunkumar’s auto weighs about 70 kilograms and can pull a weight of 150 kilograms. “Even an adult can sit on the back seat and ride the toy auto, once the leather top is removed,” says Arunkumar. The maximum speed is 20 kmph and the auto can run continuously for four hours after charging the battery fully, which takes about five hours.
The front body of the toy vehicle is made from an old satellite dish, while the kicker and accelerator are made of gas stove pipes. “I heated and shaped them to suit my requirement. As stove pipes are stainless steel, they are easy to bend,” says Arunkumar, who took seven months to finish the auto. The headlight of the auto belonged to an antique bicycle. “I retained its hood, but replaced its dynamo light with LED. I always prefer wood for making wheel discs, so that they are strong and sturdy. On top of the disc, I pasted rubber lining that’s used for resoling car tyres. I worked at my own pace and the idea was to not use any new metal/material as far as possible. I made it with junk material, except for the battery and motor which I bought.”
Now, Arunkumar gets enquiries from all over the country from parents and kids. “But as this is not my profession, I have restricted myself to making toy vehicles for my children,” he says. “However, I couldn’t turn down a request from a 10-year-old cancer survivor in Thiruvananthapuram. So, I am making a car for him and hope to gift it to him in a few months. In future, I want to design an affordable, convenient and multi-functional wheel-chair for paraplegic patients.”
He adds that the biggest challenge in making models is getting the measurements correct. “Otherwise, the model won’t look proportional and the final shape may not be accurate. I measured and rode a real auto to understand the size in comparison to an adult human before scaling it down for children.”
For details, call 9500461595 or watch his YouTube channel ‘Arunkumar Creativity’.