What starts with a simple game on the Xbox ends in one of the most beautiful car stories of recent years. An American father decided with his son to simply build their dream car, a Lamborghini Aventador, themselves using 3D printers. After years of toil in the backyard, the phone rang. On the other end of the line: Lamborghini headquarters.
It began in 2018 in the US state of Colorado with an innocent question from a child while playing a racing game. “Dad, can’t we build a car like this ourselves?”
Where 99 percent of parents would dismiss this, engineer Sterling Backus saw a challenge. Not a professional car builder, he had a passion for mechanics and the emerging technology of 3D printing. Together with his son, he decided to do the impossible: build a replica of a Lamborghini Aventador, just in the backyard.
Years of printing for a driving replica
The project was a titanic task. Backus pulled a 3D digital model of the Aventador from the Internet, enlarged it to true scale and cut up the virtual car into hundreds of tiny pieces.
Then the home-grown 3D printers worked overtime for months to produce all the body parts. Some parts required more than fifty hours of continuous printing time.
After four years and about six thousand hours of work, there stood a car that could hardly be distinguished from the real thing from a distance. To avoid legal problems with Lamborghini, Backus added no official logos and made subtle changes to the design.
Under the skin, moreover, the car was thoroughly American. The iconic Italian V12 was missing; in its place was a V8 engine from a Chevrolet Corvette (LS1), mated to the gearbox of a Porsche 911 and fitted with two turbos. This still produced a serious six hundred horsepower.
The dream meets reality in the night
The project went viral on the Internet. Backus even received an offer of $100,000 for his creation, but resolutely declined. For him, the value was in the bond he formed with his son while building it.
However, the Internet fame did not go unnoticed in Sant’Agata Bolognese, Italy. One day Backus received an unexpected phone call from Lamborghini itself.
Instead of sending a battery of lawyers with a claim for trademark infringement against him, the manufacturer decided on a brilliant PR stunt.
In the middle of the night, while the Backus family slept, a team from Lamborghini arrived. They quietly parked a brand new, real Aventador in the driveway, right next to the 3D printed replica.
The morning’s surprise was complete. It turned into a heartwarming video for the manufacturer, who rewarded the passion of father and son by giving them several days to enjoy the real dream car they had spent so much time recreating.
Image source: Sue / Adobe Stock
