Remember when you bought that Motoped kit with every intention of building it? Yeah, it’s still sitting in your garage. Remember when you bought that rusty Kawasaki with every intention of turning it into a café racer? Yeah, it’s also still in your garage, gathering dust on top of the rust. Here’s one more toy to add to your build list that you might actually finish: the PlyFly Go-Kart.
A DIY go-kart kit, it comes with all the parts you need to build a gas-powered four-wheeler that you can take down to the local indoor and outdoor tracks. Unlike typical go-karts, it uses an all-wood structure, allowing most of the parts to ship flat-packed, just like your favorite Scandinavian brand of reasonably-priced furniture.
The PlyFly ships in three boxes: a flat one with all the wooden parts (30 x 60 x 3 inches), a large box for the engine (20 x 20 x 20 inches), and a slightly smaller one for all the hardware (18 x 18 x 18 inches). Designed to facilitate an organized build (estimate build time: one day), the wooden parts are all laid out on CNC-cut plywood sheets, allowing you to just break off whichever part you’re building next, while leaving the rest still neatly tucked in their respective sheets. Construction is 13-ply Baltic birch plywood, making for a very strong material that should survive even the roughest rides.
Two models are available: 2.5 hp and 4 hp. The former can run at speeds of up to 15 mph and go an entire hour on a single full tank, while the latter can do 25 mph with a larger tank that holds 2.5 hours’ worth of gas. Features include rack and pinion steering, disc brakes, foam-filled tires, adjustable seat, and a smartphone mount because… well… we need phones everywhere. It can support riders up to 250 pounds.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for PlyFly. Pledges to reserve a unit starts at $745.
