Here’s a link to a Car & Driver article about a one-off hand-built beauty of a car based on a BMW 850CSi, built buy the Russian firm A:Level.

I find this thing really interesting for a couple of reasons; first, because the guy who commissioned it wanted it to look like an old-style Gaz Volga, which was the sub-par commodity vehicle of the 1960’s USSR. It was the car driven by the few Russians who could afford to drive. So apparently, the guy who designed it had a special place in his heart for those vehicles.

Secondly, I find this interesting because the car’s body is hand built, using little more than hammers & anvils to shape the parts. It’s a far cry from mass production, but it seems to me that the skills required to do this sort of work are pretty uncommon these days. The C&D article says it took 17 months to build the car; two weeks to shape a fender, and a month for a door skin. I find it a bit hard to relate to a job that takes that long to see results, but fascinating that someone can actually take a flat piece of steel and shape it into what we see in this car.