A while back, we showed you our Honda CT70s that we purchased and I made mention in that article that they sent us down a rabbit hole. Well, this is strangely where they sent us, to a go-kart! We have long wanted to own our very own karts, but it didn’t really make sense when we didn’t have anywhere to drive them. Once we realized that the empty parking lot next door was a great test track for our motorcycles, the logical thing to do was to go out and buy a go-kart! And here is what we bought, well the first one at least.

When this kart popped up on craigslist, we thought it looked too cool to not at least go look at. Once we arrived at the seller’s home and they pulled it out of their garage, we knew we would be leaving there with it in the back of Jesse’s Volvo wagon. They fired up the newer Predator 212 engine and we took it for a spin. The seller bought it in California prior to moving here and then it just sat until they decided to sell it. They assumed the previous owner custom built it, but we are fairly certain this was a manufactured kart, the welds, frame construction, and engine plate are extremely precise. There are lots of custom touches and modification that were clearly added at a later time, more on those in a moment, and chips in the gold metal flake show the bright red paint that is commonly seen on go-karts.

Our best guess is that the previous owner customized this two-seater to hang on the wall of their shop when it wasn’t zipping around the dragstrip. The bottle opener grille would be at the perfect angle to crack open a bottle with the kart hanging on the wall from its rear axle. The Predator is a great engine for a budget go-kart build, but it isn’t exactly period correct. To mount it and have clearance for a torque converter, it appears they built a platform to get it sitting up higher. While the welding job is alright, it’s nowhere near as nice as the welds on the frame. We aren’t too worried about originality though, we just wanted a fun to drive go-kart that we could potentially teach our kids how to drive on and this one definitely checks those boxes, plus it just looks awesome!

So, we made a deal with the seller and loaded it up in the Volvo. As soon as we got it back to the shop, we took it for a spin on our test track. And not 10 minutes after we finished our drive, an alert popped up on Jesse’s phone about a Manco kart that had just been listed for sale on the outskirts of Boise, so we parked this beast and headed off to check the other one out. I’ll keep that story for another day, but let’s just say that we are now deep into the rabbit hole!

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