September 2019 GCOptions Sep19 MG | Page 28

Golf Cart Powered by the Spirit (and Engine) of a Truck Reprint: www.popsci.com One day late last year, Bill Rulien decided he’d had enough of people boasting about how they had modified their golf carts with hotrod paint jobs or monster-truck tires. “I thought, I’m gonna build some- thing that will say, ‘Well, top this.’ “ Rulien owns several golf-cart sales shops in the Midwest, so he had his choice of bodies. What he needed was a bigger en- gine. He picked out a cart that he’d been selling for parts and yanked the electric motor, transmission and drivetrain. Then he bought an old International Harvester Scout truck that had been rusting in a yard nearby and brought it to his shop.(The brakes were shot—when Rulien backed the truck off the trailer, the Scout immedi- ately rolled through a fence and halfway up a berm.) 28 WWW.GOLFCAROPTIONS.COM Rulien kept the V8 engine, drivetrain, steering and transmission from the Scout but removed all the other parts, and he began cutting up its chassis to fit the tiny cart’s body so it wouldn’t just look like a toy car sitting on top of a truck. He short- ened the Scout’s driveshaft as well, but he still had to connect the two vehicles. With steel he had lying around, he fabricated a frame that joins the cart’s body with the truck’s chassis. The two parts seemed to get along with each other, except for one serious glitch: the cable from the gas pedal didn’t reach down to the engine. “I figured that would be the easy part,” Rulien says, “but it end- ed up as a lot of going back and forth.” Once he had finally mated cart and truck