Dime Machine : Van Nuys Man Fashions Dream Car From a Used Honda and 25,000 Coins
Fabio Rodriguez has been pouring a lot of money into his 1979 Honda Civic lately.
There’s money on the hood, the roof, the steering wheel, both doors, the back and the bumpers.
And the dashboard.
And the hubcaps.
And the window frames.
In fact, there’s money just about everywhere on the car, and it’s all in one denomination: dimes.
Rodriguez says there are 25,171 dimes in all, plus a lone quarter that was a gift from his 14-year-old son, Julio. It took Rodriguez and his wife, Martha, four hours just to count the coins, after he spent 298 hours over six months meticulously gluing each of them to the car that he now affectionately calls Hondime.
“The first thing my wife said is, ‘You are completely nuts!’ ” Rodriguez said. But once she saw the final product, he said, she was so enamored, she asked Rodriguez to display the car for her co-workers at the Phoenix courthouse where she is a Spanish-language interpreter.
Rodriguez commutes between Phoenix and his condominium in Van Nuys, which doubles as an office.
The car, which Rodriguez currently parks in the garage of his condominium, is an instant attention-grabber when Rodriguez takes it out for a spin. But he does most of his driving in a Buick.
And it has a lot of people asking, “Why?”
As Rodriguez tells it, the car is the fulfillment of a childhood dream to own a car unlike any other.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute. Maybe I can cover a car with coins,’ ” Rodriguez said. “Of course, at the time, I didn’t have any money or any time. I didn’t have anything. It was a dream.”
But by last year, Rodriguez, 44, who does voice-overs for commercials on Spanish-language television, had the time, the money and the patience. So he payed $1,000 for a used Honda with 93,000 miles on it.
Rodriguez said he chose a used car because he didn’t want to ruin an expensive car in case the experiment failed. “I wasn’t going to do it on a Lamborghini,” he said.
In September, Rodriguez began experimenting with a variety of glues to see which was best suited to his unusual endeavor.
One glue, intended for woodworking, proved to be a disaster: The dimes came loose and left a sticky mess.
He finally settled on a mixture of two glues that together were so strong that, “if you try to pry one dime from the car, your fingernail will break,” he said.
Getting the dimes to fit the contours of his compact car was probably the hardest task, he said. The effort involved painstaking hours of bending and cutting coins.
He said he frequently worked through the night gluing 500 dimes at a time in the garage of the family’s home in Phoenix.
Why dimes?
Rodriguez said he had heard of a car that is covered in silver dollars. “I wanted something more difficult,” he said. “I saw that the dime is the smallest coin in the U.S., so that’s what I wanted. I wanted the most difficult.”
The dimes have a combined weight of about 120 pounds, he said, not enough to significantly affect the car’s gas mileage.
He said each hubcap has 75 dimes, and the interior has 998 dimes.
All the coins are heads-up, except one.
“Try to find it,” he said. “Good luck.”
Rodriguez said he eventually hopes to display the car on a long-term basis at a Las Vegas casino. For now, he’s busy promoting Hondime on television shows such as NBC’s “To Tell the Truth,” which will air a segment on the car in early April.
During videotaping of the segment, called “One on One,” a member of the audience was asked to guess which of two stories told by Rodriguez was true: that he glued more than 25,000 dimes to a car or that he makes music using plastic packaging materials.
“The guy didn’t believe me about the dimes,” Rodriguez said, “so I won a thousand bucks.”
What will he do with the money?
“Now maybe I’m gonna have to buy a trailer” to cover with dimes, he said.
