‘Big Banana’ comes to Florida
Steve Braithwaite an Ohioan with some skill and time on his hands decided to create a new car of some kind. After quenching his wander lust by riding across India on a motorcycle one time, Steve decided to ride with something bigger on an aRround The World tour. He could not just drive any car or even ride the motorcycle. He had to have something that would be different enough to get noticed. “My goal has been to do what’s called an ‘RTW,’ and that’s the Holy Grail for travelers,” he explained. “It means ‘Round The World.’” But Steve had a difficult time brainstorming the best vehicle for the task, so he instead pondered what kind of vehicle would be the most “ridiculous to use to drive around the world.”
After lots of brainstorming and think testing Steve decided he would remake his 1993 ford F-150 pickup truck into a banana mobile. Steve then had to study bananas in order to make a faithful reproduction of shape and contours of the actual fruit. He was not content to make a yellow tube. To make a driving banana, he stripped all the sheet metal to off the chassis, then used banana slices from the grocery store to figure out the dimensions of the skeleton. “I then covered the entire thing with chicken wire — and that’s all still in there, the chicken wire and the rebar skeleton — sprayed it with urethane foam (like you insulate houses with), sculpted that into a nice banana shape, fiber-glassed over the top, and then spent forever sanding, sanding and sanding,” Steve said.
The Big Banana Car was built by Steve and a close group of friends over a 2 -1/2 year period beginning in 2008. Working mostly on Sundays and occasional weeknight the original 1993 Ford pick up was converted into a rolling banana. The build was started in Bowling Green Ohio, continued in Quakertown Pennsylvania and completed in Coopersburg PA. It has been on the road since 2011 and in that time has driven coast to coast and north to south. Steve had named his creation the “Velos-a-nana.” Being a creature of the media, Steve then made sure to find any celebrity he could to slip into the seats lined up behind him as the driver. He has piloted around famous figures like Howie Mandel and Simon Cowell. “One of them saw the car driving around Hollywood and asked if they could use it on their TV show,” he explained. “Which is cool. It has nothing to do with their TV show whatsoever, but they filmed it, and it was broadcast.”
These days Steve and his fruit flyer are working out of Planet Smoothies in Orlando and giving rides between 11 and 6. He takes people of all ages who can climb into the cockpit style seats for a trip through their neighborhood for some photos. When he leaves people notice his vanity license plate it reads “Split.”
Appealing banana banter
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas.
The state of Florida is a navigational anomaly…
The further North you go the more Southern it gets.
Obesity is such a problem in Florida…
They had to add a SIT your ground law
In the 2001 film “The Planet of the Apes” David Warner plays a primate named Senator Sandar which means the whole planet is probably a Banana Republic.
January 8th Birthdays
1982 – Genevieve Padelakci, 1981 – Rachel Nichols, 1971 – Brook Lee, 1937 – Shirley Bassie
1935 – Elvis Presley, 1938 – Bob Eubanks, 1996 – Khylin Rhambo, 1980 – Sam Riley