Say you’ve got a spare jet engine laying around, some spare time, and a mother-in-law away on vacation who foolishly left you her wheel chair. What do you do? Well, if you’re Giuseppe Cannella you mount the jet engine to the wheelchair and raise the art of tempting fate to new levels.
“Originally it was a gimmick. I had a jet engine and I was going to put it on a go cart.
“But the missus says put it on something unusual and so I put it on the mother-in-law’s wheelchair,” said Mr Cannella, who is from Luton in Bedfordshire.
“She was on holiday at the time so she didn’t know what I was doing until she came back.
“She actually thought I was doing it for her.”
The newly modified chair will hit top speeds of 60 MPH which will probably make for an entertaining, and very painful, crash someday when one of the wheels hits a pebble on the path. At least he’s risking life and limb for a good cause as he’s collecting donations for the Parkinson’s Disease Society as his mother-in-law suffers from that disease. Still, it’s good to know that Americans don’t have a lock on making bad ideas into dangerous realities. Anyone want to place bets on how long it’ll be before we move this from the Neato category to the Ouch category?
Posted on 08/30/2004 at 01:19 PM 
Posted on 09/01/2004 at 05:47 AM 
For your general geeky amusement: tiny jet engines.
100,000+ rpm, about the size of a small coffee can, sounds like all the bees on earth pissed off and after you.
did