Is or Isn't - Did or Didn't

[REAR]

A few days ago I stopped down at fellow historical karter John Berkys shop to review a project were working on and while there John gave me a early Christmas present in the form of a nice color copy poster of a 1962 Rupp Dart Kart ad that was featured on the pages of Karting World magazine.

As John and I looked at the ad and were discussing Rupps designs it all of a sudden struck us that we might be looking at a hand drawing of the karts and not a actual photo copy of the karts.

At first glance you don't really notice it but the wheels where the hub caps go appear thicker then normal and the motor on the single engine kart looks alittle bit out of proportion also. The art work on the helmet, trophy and gloves plus the dart logo is hand drawn for sure but what about the karts ? The Chilton tank looks spot on.

Whoever or however this ad was made did a super job on one of the classics from the early days. Take a good hard look, what do you think?













Merry Christmas...R.E.A.R.

[Dick Teal]

Back in the day we had a free lance artist that worked for Fox. He could create a drawing like this in short order. If you look at some of the Fox literature you'll see the same things you mention. The 1961 satellite seat Mak-Kart is a good example. Most of the kart was the real thing but the seat wasn't available so he drew it in place. I'll bet that the wheel tooling wasn't done and that's what happened to the Rupp literature.

Dick Teal

[Ronald Cubel]

Dick,

You are good!!! Dart did not have the wheels done for the first karts in early 62 / late 61 the first production run came with go power wheels because of this. This is fully documented by the catalog they produced showing the production line and the very early original abone deuce hanging in my garage.

Ron

[ted johnson]

Dick's spot-on. My first NASA job was for Hayes International Corp. at Kennedy Space Center. I was doing the drafting on high pressure gas consoles at the time. There needed to be a booklet made for each console that showed the configuration: front operating panel and rear view with all the pneumatic components. We had an airbrush artist there who would take photos of the incomplete consoles and would airbrush in all the missing components, fittings and tubing on the back, and the handles, gages and tape schematic on the front, along with the engraved laminated plaques below each component. He'd "Greek" in the lettering with lines that sort of looked like lettering. The trouble was, when they'd shoot down the pictures in size to put in the booklets, you could read a lot of the ident plaques.... "Lydia Pinkham's Pink Pills for Pale Pussycats", "Lucky Strike Green Goes To War" and a lot more! He caught Hell from the brass at NASA, I can tell you. Other than that, his airbrushed pictures looked just like photographs-until you spotted the little scaffold hanging from under one of the tubes way in the back, with the little man painting the tubing with a brush! This guy's illustrations were fantastic. His paintings hung in a lot of NASA bigwigs' offices, and in the KSC Headquarters lobby and on each floor in the elevator area. All of his paintings had wooded areas on Kennedy, and there'd always be a tiny teepee with Indians and a fire, as well as a sea serpent in every body of water. There'd often be Martians with their flying saucer, too. Ted

[Dick Teal]

The other cool thing this artist and his company did was to create our exploded drawings for parts catalogs. I would give them a prototype that included most of the parts and drawings of the other stuff. We would get the finished work back in a couple of days. It would include the bullets and arrows pointing to each part and all we had to do was insert the part numbers. I've got some original mini-bike layouts but nothing for karts.

Dick Teal

[REAR]

So the consensus is that these are retouched photos ?

The Grand Prix wheel was based off of Pontiacs Gran Prix wheels which also debuted for their 62 model year so that might explain why they were not available early in the model year.

Heard the 'J' model line of karts was also named after a Pontiac product.

R.E.A.R.