Franken-vehicle

"Ugly" by name, and "ugly" in performance, too.

"Junk? Why, the Jenny Haniver is built from bits of the finest airships that ever flew! An envelope of silicon-silk from a Shan Guo clipper, twin Jeunet-Carot aero-engines off a Paris gunship, the reinforced gas-cells of a Spitzbergen war-balloon... It's amazing what you can find in the scrapyards..."

— Anna Fang, Mortal Engines

A Franken-vehicle is a vehicle that was constructed by taking salvaged pieces of other vehicles and MacGyvering them together, much like Dr. Frankenstein famously created his Creature by combining pieces of various corpses.

Depending on the parts used, the result can be fantastic and outperform any of the individual vehicles used. Or it can be The Alleged Car to the point where the only sane reason anybody would actually use it is because they can't obtain a proper purpose-built vehicle.

These are sometimes seen in post-apocalyptic settings where new vehicles aren't being manufactured anymore due to the collapse of the economy, so the only way to keep them running is to cannibalize other machines and jury-rig them together.

Subtrope of Franken-X and MacGyvering. Contrast the Military Mashup Machine, which hybridizes other combat vehicles' functions in a single purpose-built machine, rather than being literally made of other vehicles. Compare to the Theseus' Ship Paradox, which is built around the idea of a vehicle having all of its components replaced with spare parts over its working lifetime.

Not be confused with a starring vehicle for Al Franken.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Gundam:
  • Unlike the snazzy Super Prototypes that inhabit other series, the Gundam Ground Types of Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team are just made from leftover spare parts, which the support crew repair with whatever they have on hand. Karen's Gundam gets its head knocked off and embarrassingly replaced with that of a GM unit, while Shiro's overhauled Ez8 only accidentally becomes an Ace Custom because they just happened to find the spare room to fit a larger reactor. Its front chest plate is also made from Zaku armor welded in place.
  • The South Seas Alliance in Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt relies on scavenged parts from both Zeon and the Earth Federation, combining them into the Zanny (or Dahle in the Animated Adaptation) to build a reasonable Mobile Suit force. Furthermore, one late twist is the appearance of its take on the Perfect Gundam. Rather than being a upgraded RX-78-2, the "hero's mecha", it's the frame of the Psycho Zaku Mk-II mated with the armor plating, propulsion, and head unit of a Gundam, giving it the best of both worlds in terms of performance.

Comic Books

• Go Go Power Rangers: The Gravezord is a Megazord created by mashing various broken Thunderzords together, originating from a dark alternate timeline.
• The Jigsaw Tank from The Haunted Tank — Russian T-34 hull, Christie suspension and a Russian Y2 engine.

Fan Works

• Avengers: Infinite Wars features the Avengers being transported to the Star Wars galaxy during the Clone Wars. Even after they regain the ability to return to Earth through use of the Infinity Gates, Tony Stark is shown making plans to give the Avengers more mobility in this galaxy by building what he terms the Avengers Astro-Carrier a vessel combining traits of the old SHIELD helicarriers and various other ships used by the Republic fleet (Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Scott Lang/Ant-Man mention that they had been considering creating something like that themselves before Tony joined them, but at the time they lacked the technical expertise to design such a ship properly beyond the concept)
• The Star Trek: Voyager/Stargate Universe crossover "Destiny and Voyager: Crossroads" features a minor version of this when the crews of Destiny and Voyager decide to join forces to get both crews home. Part of the plan involves Destiny taking both crews back to Earth in the Star Trek universe, as its superior FTL speeds mean that a trip that would still take Voyager over thirty years will just take Destiny three months. As part of this journey, the Delta Flyer is modified and equipped with docking clamps that will allow it to use the shuttle docking ports on Destiny, giving Destiny a warp-capable shuttle that can also transport people to any planets they pass by.
• In I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts (Kung Fu Blaziken), after the Box Ghost brings the components of the Fenton Speeder to Ghostbusters HQ, the Ghostbusters and Danny are able to adapt it with their own weapons to create the Ecto-Speeder.
• The Star Trek: Enterprise/Battlestar Galactica (2003) crossover "Reunion” features Enterprise NX-01 forming an alliance with the Colonial Fleet during the search for the Xindi superweapon. As part of this alliance, Enterprise engineer Trip Tucker and Colonial pilot Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson have the idea to basically dismantle one of the shuttles on Enterprise and a Colonial Raptor, taking parts from each to design a new ship that combines the best traits of both. With the combined efforts of Trip and Chief Tyrol, using the manufacturing facilities on the Battlestar Pegasus, the two crews are able to create a vehicle capable of FTL jumps and more conventional warp drive, with more advanced sensors and weapons than either ship could have created on their own.
• Through the Looking Glass (Firefly/Battlestar Galactica) features an attempt at this after the Demetrius is basically destroyed and the survivors are picked up by the crew of Serenity. With the Raptors on the Demetrius damaged, Helo and Athena try to strip out the FTL drive, along with the navigation and communication systems, from one of the Raptors and adapt it for use on one of the shuttles on Serenity. As of the last chapter, this plan hasn’t been successful, but the potential for it is still there.

Film — Animated

• Conversed in the audio commentary for Evangelion: Death and Rebirth. The cast and crew joke that the change in paint scheme for Eva Unit-00 was due to not being able to find matching parts after it was damaged.
• Titan A.E.: Akima grew up in New Bangkok, which is composed of spacecraft welded together into a livable habitat. New Bangkok is one of many Earth ships that arrive at the newly-made Planet Bob at the film's conclusion.

Film — Live-Action

• The Flight of the Phoenix (1965): A team of oil workers are riding in a C-82 Packet cargo plane in Libya from Jebel Akhdar to Benghazi when it flies into a sandstorm and crash-lands. One of the survivors designs planes for a living and figures they can build a new plane from the wreckage and the mining equipment, and fly that to safety after a series of misadventures.
• The Flight of the Phoenix (2004): In this Setting Update, a team of oil workers are riding in a C-111 Flying Boxcar (the direct successor to the C-82 from the original) from their shut-down oil field in the Gobi Desert to Beijing when it flies into a sandstorm and crash-lands. The survivors fashion "a flying sled with people on the wings" out of the wings and one of the tail booms (containing the remaining engine) and some of their mining equipment, and fly that to safety after a series of misadventures.
• All of the vehicles in the post-apocalypse setting of Mad Max: Fury Road have parts of other cars used in their construction such as the War Rig driven by Imperator Furiosa, Immortan Joe's Gigahorse and the Bigfoot that is used by Rictus Erectus.
• Race for the Yankee Zephyr. After their helicopter crashes, Gilbert gets some friends to transform its cabin into a caterpillar-tracked all-terrain vehicle.
• In Snowball Express, Johnny is confused about the bodywork and sponsors ("Standaroule's Plumbarmacy") on Wally's snowmobile. Wally explains that he built it out of the wreckage of two snowmobiles used for racing (their sponsors were "Standard Plumbine" and "Sproule's Pharmacy"), then adds that he got the engine out of a third snowmobile.
• The film Water World is full of examples, as humanity must scavenge whatever they can that floats to build their boats or atolls. Special mention goes to the Smokers' vehicles, some of which look like a mish-mash of different land, sea, and air vehicles.

Literature

• Cinnamon Bun: From "Chapter Four Hundred and Sixteen - Talking Shop" about the current Shady Lady airship, having been pieced from various parts found at the edge of civilization:
  "The Shady Lady has been rebuilt a lot, you know? And a lot of the rebuilds were kind of ... improvised. I said the starter doesn't go with this model of engine, right? Well, that's true of everything in here." [Awen] gestured vaguely into the engine bay. "When you're out on the edge of civilization, it can be hard enough to find spare parts for a new engine. So, Uncle used whatever he could find to get moving again. The current engine is secondhand, but the exhaust manifold is brand new — except it's for a different model so someone beat it with a hammer to make it fit. The driveshaft looks like some kind of Sylphfree military castoff; they cut it down to size and ground the ends to fit. Each part of the hydraulic system was manufactured by a different group, even the main reservoir, which is a two-hundred-year-old whiskey cask. The wiring is a customised patchwork. Half the gears are worn down. The propeller is unbalanced, and I am pretty sure it was looted from pirates."
• The Dresden Files has Harry Dresden's Volkswagen Beetle, complete with a cute nickname: The Blue Beetle. It used to be all blue, but due to monster attacks, he's had to use scavenged pieces of bodywork in other colors.
• The Flight Of The Phoenix by Elleston Trevor: A party of oil workers are flying between sites when their plane crashes in a sandstorm. They cobble together a jury-rigged plane using their mining equipment and pieces of the old plane and fly it to safety.
• The General (Foundation): When the Emperor and his Privy Secretary are discussing General Riose's fleet, they note that three of the ships have engines or weapons "salvaged from the old Grand Fleet", which are considered superior to those built more recently.
• Mortal Engines: Anna Fang's airship, the Jenny Haniver, was built from what Tom dismissively calls "junk" and Anna proudly describes as "bits of the finest airships that ever flew".
• Star Trek Expanded Universe: In the Star Trek New Earth novel miniseries, the Belle Terre colony builds the USS Challenger (a "composite frigate" of the "mongrel class") from the wreckage of several vessels. Its crew was a similarly motley collection of misfits.
• Star Wars Legends
  • "Uglies" are first introduced in The Corellian Trilogy, and then featured more prominently in X-Wing Rogue Squadron and the X-Wing Series. Built by shadetree mechanics from salvaged parts of other ships, there are several common variations that hybridize Rebel/New Republic and Imperial ship parts. These range from reasonably competitive designs such as the Invids' "Clutches" and Twi'lek chir'daki, to the utterly horrible TYE-Wing, also called the "Die-Wing" or "Why-Fighter", which mates the weak engines of the Y-Wing bomber to the poorly armed and unprotected cockpit section of a standard TIE fighter.
  • The Han Solo Trilogy:
    • The Hutt Gambit: Han Solo has a bunch of maintenance problems with his first starship, a SoroSuub Starmite-class freighter he leases from Lando Calrissian. He's finally introduced to a mechanic who realizes that the root of the problem is that the Bria was modified with a bunch of non-SoroSuub parts, which ships from that builder tend to react poorly to having done to them.
    • Rebel Dream: After winning the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian, Han Solo salvages some armor plate from the wreck of an Imperial Navy Neutron Star-class bulk cruiser destroyed in the Battle of Nar Shaddaa and welds it onto the YT-1300 freighter for added protection.

Live-Action TV

• Ocurrs in the 1980 and the 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica:
  • Galactica 1980: "The Return of Starbuck": After ending up stranded on a barren world, Starbuck manages to cannibalise the pieces from his crashed Viper and a crashed Cylon Raider to build a spaceworthy ship from their parts.
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003): "Flight of the Phoenix" has a depressed Tyrol trying to build a brand new ship after he had to write off one too many Vipers. His original plan was to build a brand new Viper from spare parts and chassis. However, this proves too ambitious for what he has at hand. As the episode progresses, he manages to scrounge up other materials such as civilian engines and carbon fiber plating. The end result resembles a Viper but is not quite one. The "Blackbird" is subpar as a conventional fighter (weaker engines and prone to excessive vibration), but its carbon fiber hull gives it Stealth in Space, which is used in a subsequent Colonial surprise attack on a Cylon resurrection ship in "Resurrection Ship, Part II".
• Counting Cars: A lot of the Count's Kustoms projects involve putting parts intended for one car into another car. In one episode the team is commissioned to upgrade an elderly customer's old Cadillac convertible, but Danny is hesitant because the car is in such perfect working order as it is. Another team member compares the serial numbers and realizes the motor has already been replaced once with an engine from a different model of Cadillac, allaying Danny's concerns about ruining a seemingly all-original car, and they install a new engine and safety systems from a modern Caddy.
• CSI: In "Man Up", Hodges buys a used motorcycle that conks out shortly into his first ride. Upon closer inspection he realizes that it has a lot of fresh welding on it, and he finds old bloodstains on some of the parts and a piece of someone's thumb in the air filter pan. He realizes the bike is a "Franken-bike" that was built with pieces of several destroyed motorcycles, and furthermore suspects that one of the crashes involved an unreported fatality, which leads to the arrest of a crooked junkyard manager (the thumb turned out to be his, chopped off by accident while he was rebuilding the bike).
• Pimp My Ride: One episode features a 1989 Ford Escort that was actually two separate Escorts that were welded and "gummed" together. It was because of this that the car was deemed too dangerous for the owner to continue driving, so West Coast Customs and Xzibit decided to compensate him with a pimped 2004 Scion xB.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In a meta-example, many episodes during the Dominion War featured background shots of ships whose physical models had obviously been kitbashed together, without any In-Universe explanation ever being given. One of the more absurd was the USS Yeager, which in real life took the saucer section of a model kit for the USS Voyager and put it atop the hull of a Maquis raider (the name and registry numbers were anagrams of Voyager's). This kind of kitbashing was common among Star Trek's modelmakers but was rarely so obvious.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Implied in "The Broken Circle". The ship used in the False Flag Operation against the Klingon battlecruiser has the saucer section of a Crossfield-class starship (e.g. USS Discovery), but a ventrally mounted bridge like a Walker-class (USS Shenzhou) and a twin-boom after section and nacelles resembling an inverted NX-class, suggesting that the conspirators built it from several different salvaged wrecks. An enforced example, as the ship originally was going to be an NX-class, but budget constraints forced the reuse of sets from Star Trek: Discovery.

Music

• In the Johnny Cash song "One Piece At A Time", the singer tells how he kept stealing pieces from the auto plant he worked at one piece a day for years.
  Well, it's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56
  '57, '58' 59' automobile
  It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67
  '68, '69, '70 automobile

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: "FrankenMechs" are BattleMechs that have been jury-rigged from the parts of two or more 'Mechs. They became somewhat common during the Succession Wars due to supply problems and the destruction of factories. Some even ended up becoming standardized and marketed as new models such as the Merlin and Cataphract.
• Paranoia adventure "The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues''. The High Programmer Duke-U has a vehicle created out of equipment from a variety of Old Reckoning cars. It includes a grille from a Rolls-Royce, many VW and Toyota parts, a tailfin from a Cadillac and a cracked 427 cubic inch stock Chevy block, all on a Saab chassis.

Video Games

• Battlefield V: The titular tank of "The Last Tiger" is, notably, a mishmash of several different Tiger tank variants, namely having the turret of an early production Tiger and using the hull of a much newer late production example. Truth in Television, as the Germans actually created a number of these "new" Frankenstein Tiger tanks to bolster their increasingly-depleted forces late in the war.
• BattleTech (2018): Downplayed with the salvage system, which lets the player collect remnants of destroyed BattleMechs after completing missions (you can also purchase them from vendors). Get three of the same type and you can have your engineering crew construct a new 'Mech for your use. They do all have to be the same make and model, though: you can't mix and match.
• Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius: The GTD Sanctuary is a Sleeper Starship holding the last survivors of humanity hidden from the Omnicidal Maniac Shivans. Apart from a few paltry gun turrets, its only defense is a squadron of equally paltry space fighters visibly cobbled together from bits of other fighters and bombers that failed to withstand fifty years without resupply or proper maintenance, deployed only as a last resort after the Shivans finally penetrate the nebula they were hiding in.
• Brigador: Corvid vehicles are made out of salvaged vehicles, broken war machines, and pieces of scrap welded together to create something that's just barely functional enough to mount weapons and a shield generator onto. The most shining example of this trope is the Treehouse, a heavy tank that's essentially a pair of treads with several passenger cars stacked on top of each other.
• Dead Rising:
  • Dead Rising 3 introduces Combo Vehicles, which are made by combining two vehicles together. One example is the RollerHawg, made by combining a Steamroller with a Motorcycle.
  • Dead Rising 4 features an all-new selection of Combo Vehicles like the Cryonic Commando, which is made by combining an Antique Car with a Snowmobile.
• Brahmin carts in Fallout 2 are made out of parts of at least three pre-war automobiles.
• Front Mission: A staple across the entire franchise is the ability to mix and match parts from various wanzers you obtain or find in shops. The torso, left arm, right arm, and legs all have individual HP values and their own stats that makes certain parts more effective for certain builds.
• Gundam Breaker allows players to throw together kit-bashed Mobile Suits from the Gundam franchise. Given the premise is that these are actually just animated GunPla models fighting each other, customizing parts really is as simple as pulling the legs off a Zaku and plugging them into the sockets of a Wing Gundam, or whatever other monstrosity you aim to make.
• RayStorm: The R-GRAY ships in this game are made from 13 wrecked alien ships that crashed onto Secilia and then were reverse engineered to these new ships.

Web Original

• Cheat Commandos: Parodied in "Two Part Episode!, Part 2", where the mercenary counterpart to the Cheat Commandos, the Topplegangers, have a giant boat-like vehicle known as the "Ramshankle" (the name itself being a take-off on "Ramshackle"), further parodying the commercialistic nature of the show:
  Background Singers: It's the Ramshankle! And you know dang well... It's made out of old vehicles that we couldn't sell!

Western Animation

• Futurama:
  • "The Honking": "Project Satan" was an attempt to build the most evil car ever from pieces of other evil cars. The first car the project created included the steering wheel from Adolf Hitler's Mercedes-Benz limo, the left turn signal from Charles Manson's Volkswagen van, the windshield wipers from the Pontiac that played KITT in Knight Rider (allegedly while KITT wasn't evil his windscreen-wipers were but it never came up in the show), and the electric motor from Ed Begley Jr.'s car.
  • "Where No Fan Has Gone Before": The Planet Express crew are stranded on a planet with the cast of Star Trek: The Original Series. After learning that the former group's ship has broken engines but a working life support system while the latter's has the opposite, Leela attaches the engines of the Star Trek group's ship to the Planet Express ship to get off the planet.
• Recess: In "Operation Field Trip", the kids' school bus, nicknamed "Old Smokey", breaks down near an abandoned farm while taking the kids on a field trip. The kids gather parts from the farm machinery and use them to fix Old Smokey's engine and give her some other enhancements such as replacing her back wheels with a set of tracks. The driver, Bertha, previously upset about the thought of Old Smokey getting scrapped, triumphantly radios her depot and declares "You can't wreck my baby now, she's a collector's item!"
• Sonic Boom: In "If You Build it, They Will Race", Sonic and his friends compete in a race against each other and Dr. Eggman to see who has the best car. Near the end of the episode, Eggman manages to destroy Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Sticks' cars, guaranteeing him victory at the finish line. Fortunately for them, Eggman is so confident at his victory that he goofs off near the finish line, giving Sonic enough time to gather pieces from each of his friends' cars (Sticks' body, Tails' chassis, Knuckles' wheels, and Amy's hammer) so that he can repair his car and be able to win the race.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • Resting in one of the USS Cerritos's repair bays is Sequoia, a shuttlecraft built by the main four out of salvaged parts, with Class 6 nacelles mated to a 6A body, dinged panels with mismatched colors, and markings drawn on by hand. Although it hasn't been put into regular service because it's more of a passion project than anything else, Shaxs and Rutherford are forced to use it when the Cerritos is attacked by one of the Pakled warships and a boarding party prevents them from getting to the normal shuttlecraft to board and disable the Pakled ship.
  • In "No Small Parts": The Pakleds' new war spaceships are made from parts of other ships. They even show that they can use grappling hooks to attach pieces of wreckage from other ships like the Solvang to their hulls to upgrade and repair on the fly.

Real Life

• Due to the state of its economy and the socialist system not being friendly to private car ownership, Cuba has a large inventory of pre-1959 classic cars, as well as some later batches of European and Soviet-bloc cars. Many of these vehicles have been refitted with motors, steering wheels, dashboard instruments or even entire body panels from whatever is available - even parts of boat engines or door handles from actual house doors are fair game. Because of this, many Cuban drivers do not care for or even lack the concept of a "car brand" or "model" and will just describe their vehicles with their specifications, as pretty much every automobile is unique at this point.
• The SR-71 had a variant, the SR-71C, made from the rear fuselage of a YF-12A (a prototype interceptor based on the A-12, the precursor to the SR-71) and the forward fuselage from an SR-71 static test unit. It got nicknamed "The Bastard" because it had a four degree yaw until it was fixed.
• HMS Zubian, the bow section of HMS Zulu mated to the midships and aft of HMS Nubian after the two were badly damaged in separate instances in late 1916. Despite being sister ships, Zulu and Nubian had (due to minor differences in construction) ended up 3.5 inches different in beam, making it somewhat complicated to fit the two partial hulls together. She served valiantly through the rest of World War I before being scrapped postwar, reportedly greatly confusing the Germans for not having been formally ordered.
• World War I era ocean going monitors ^note  ships built around a single battleship turret were usually built using whatever major components were in inventory. You might have something like the spare turrets from a class of battleships mated to the engines from a canceled cruiser, left over destroyer boilers, and armor from the scrap yard. However, since the hull was a custom design, this chimeric nature was usually not obvious.
• World War II-related:
  • The Soviet Navy destroyer Storozhevoy, originally a Project 7U design (once known as the 'Soobrazitelny-class in the West since they were unaware that Storozhevoy was the actual first ship), had her bow blown off by a German torpedo boat. She managed to make it back to the besieged Leningrad without sinking. There a new bow and bridge from a Project 30 (Ognevoy''-class) destroyer were welded on. Notably, this new arrangement gave her a single double barreled turret rather than two single barreled turrets.
  • The "Swoose" was a B-17D-BO Flying Fortress that was patched up as best as its crew could and then had the tail of another B-17 to replace it's shot up tail. Named after the novelty song "Alexander the Swoose" about a bird that was "half swan half goose," Nose Art of a "swoose" and the words "it flies" were added as a joke. The Swoose went on to have a storied career during World War II and is currently at the National Museum of the US Air Force.
  • A less famous but weirder example is a B-24J-15-CO Liberator with a B-17G nose of unknown origin◊. It seems to have been an attempt to improve the the flight characteristics and while it was mildly successful at this (8.5 mph faster than a standard B-24J^note There's no record of whether its low-speed handling, something notoriously bad in the B-24, was improved at all.), it couldn't fly nearly as high (engines would start overheating at 19,000 feet, compared to normal B-24s operating at 25,000 feet and B-17s at 35,000 feet) and thus the hybrid was a failure.
  • Late in the War in Europe and Africa, the Germans, in desperate need of new tanks, began creating new Tiger I Heavy tanks, using parts (mainly turrets) from various broken down examples and mending them with the hulls of late-production vehicles. The end result, the so-called "Hybrid" tanks, were issued to various units and saw action in the final months of the war. Estimates vary, but sources claim that at least 54 of these Tigers were built.
  • The US M4 Sherman tank came in multiple hull variations, some made of cast steel and others welded together from multiple steel plates. This was done so that multiple factories which had different equipment could all make Shermans. In addition to the basic hull variations, there was the M4 Composite which used the welded hull of the M4 except for the frontal section, which was of the cast type used on the M4A1. In British service these were known as Sherman I Hybrid, since the British Army referred to the M4 as Sherman I and the M4A1 as Sherman II. Since the more rounded frontal hull of the M4A1 was the most visually distinctive different from the M4, these were often mistaken by soldiers in the field and sometimes even in official reports for M4A1/Sherman II variants instead of M4/Sherman I variants. There was little difference in performance between the M4 and M4A1, but cast hulls could be manufactured quicker than welded ones. However, since not all factories were set up for steel casting, some hulls were made partially from welded parts and then the cast front section was shipped to them to be welded on, creating the M4 Composite.
• In many instances, a wide variety of American and British tanks have been built with identical turret ring diameter, which theoretically make it possible to swap out the turrets. And sometimes this theory has actually been put into practice. For example, the American M48 Patton, M60, and M1 Abrams and the British Chieftain and Challenger all have 85 inch turret rings. This resulted in the 120S, an M60 hull with an M1A1 Abrams turret mounted on it, which was offered as an upgrade package for old M60 tanks. More successfully (at least in terms of somebody actually buying them) are the CM-11 and CM-12 of the Taiwanese military, which use M60A3 and M48A3 hulls combined with a heavily modified version of the M48A3 turret that mounts the M60's 105mm gun and the fire control systems of the M1 Abrams.
• When turret rings *don't* match, one tank's turret can't simply be dropped onto another tank. But with a little bit of work, it's still possible. For example, the French Army altered some AMX-13 light tanks with a "collar" on the turret ring to adapt it for the turret of the American M24 Chaffee. The "AMX-US" as it was called was considered more useful in the infantry support role, because the AMX-13's autoloader drums could only be reloaded (including to change ammo types, such as to load high explosive or cannister shot for anti-infantry use) by getting out of the tank. But the AMX-13 was smaller, lighter, and more fuel-efficient than the M24, so converting some AMX-13s for this role was more desirable than keeping the M24 in service for infantry support. And previously, the opposite conversion had been tested as well: mounting the AMX-13's turret on the Chaffee in an attempt to upgrade its anti-tank firepower. While functional, this conversion was decided to not be worth pursuing.
  • The FL-10 turret of the AMX-13 in fact proved remarkably adaptable to being mounted on almost anything. If the turret ring was the wrong size, just make an adapter. If the vehicle didn't already have a turret ring, just cut a hole in its roof to make one. Some examples include [https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/m4a4-fl-10/ Egyptian Shermans modified to mount the FL-10]] and [[a river patrol boat mounting it](https://www.usarmygermany.com/Units/USNavy/Partials_RRP%2045.htm).
• In 1993, an engineer named Emile Leray found himself stranded in the Moroccan desert after hitting his Citroen 2CV on a big rock. With the nearest village too far to safely walk to, he came up with a different solution: He cannibalised the pieces of the damaged car to build himself a motorcycle. He succeeded, not only managing to drive it to a safe village, but all the way back to France.
• The GWR 3200 class steam locomotives were built by combining the boiler from a Duke-class loco with the chassis of a Bulldog-class. They were universally known as "Dukedogs".
• In 1854, the Norfolk Navy Yard replaced the original 38-gun frigate USS Constellation with a 20-gun sloop-of-war by the same name. When the sloop was converted to a museum ship in Baltimore Harbor after serving as flagship of the Atlantic Fleet in World War II, record-keeping mistakes led to her being confused for her predecessor, and she was partly "restored" to match the original frigate's blueprints. However, in the 1990s, new research proved that they were indeed two different ships, and a second restoration in the 2010s returned her to her 1854 configuration.
• The SilEighty was a popular modification of the Nissan 180SX among 80's and 90's Japanese street racers. Those who crashed their 180SX would frequently repair the front end using cheaper and more plentiful Nissan Silvia parts. Silvia front + 180SX rear = Sil-Eighty. It was so popular that a Japanese tuner sold souped-up "official" Sileightys through Nissan dealerships. Conversely, there also exists the Onevia mod - a 180SX front with the Silvia rear- which is much less common and more of a novelty.

---