1935 Bugatti Aerolithe Coupe

Scott sent me a link to an episode of Jay Leno's Garage about this car. They ramble on and gush about how wonderful it is. It's pretty enough, but there are a lot of very pretty cars out there. I am not impressed that somebody spent a lot of money getting it built. Lots of very rich people spend enormous sums of money on exotic automobiles.
    I am impressed that the people involved were crazy enough to build it out of the original material, which is magnesium. Nobody builds cars out of magnesium, at least not any more. There's this one, and there was a magnesium race car that crashed and burned at Le Mans in the 1950's. The magnesium body caught fire and burned for 8 hours.A magnesium Honda F1 car crashed and burned in 1968.
    People do make magnesium parts for cars, pieces that can be cast and will benefit from the high strength to weight ratio of the material. The engine crankcase in the original Volkswagen bug is magnesium.
    There was a big fad for mag wheels (that were really made of magnesium) a while back, but now mag wheels are almost always aluminum alloy. I think you can still get real magnesium wheels, but it's hard to tell because of the corrupted terminology, plus it's hard to tell a magnesium wheel from an aluminum one. I found one motorsport outfit that offers them, and a Chinese company that makes them, along with a description of the process they use, which is pretty interesting all by itself.
    But back to the car. See the fin running over the roof and down the back? It's full of rivets, it's how the two halves of the body were joined together. Welding magnesium is a bit of a trick, after all the stuff will burn in air or even underwater, so you need to exclude air from the weld. A room full of nitrogen would work. Lincoln Welding has a video that shows a guy welding magnesium without catching fire, though he is using modern equipment. Some welding was used to create this replica, and the original builders might have also used some welding, but it would have been a bit of a trick.

Update: I don't know where the problem is, but the YouTube version of the video was would not play smoothly on my computer, so I changed the link to point to Jay's site.