Big Or Small? World’s Largest Teenager Restoring World’s Smallest ‘K-Van’

How do you get a 150kg man mountain into a van that looks like a scale-model? Before we get there… as regular New Matilda readers would know, we’ve stopped using our social media accounts to share NM investigations, stories etc. Because toxic dumpster fire.

Instead, we’re using our Facebook and Twitter profiles to promote positive initiatives that we think readers might support if you knew more about them.

Young people doing interesting things, particularly in regional and remote Australia, is one of our main areas of interest. By way of example, here’s a link to a recent NM post about a young man based in Cairns who is trying to build a social media presence before he loses his sight from a rare skin condition (he’s been battling it for more than a decade now).

In the same vein, here’s a story about Nathaniel Graham (nephew of NM editor Chris Graham), an impressively large teenager from the Barrington Coast region of NSW, who does a lot with a little… and also, big things with little cars.

Nathaniel is 6’6” tall (that’s almost two metres in the metric system), which is startling enough for a 16-year-old… until you realise the direction he’s decided to take his career. With Dad’s help, Nathaniel started his own business at age 12 detailing cars. Four years on, he completely rebuilds and reconditions them. Literally. The kid can pull apart and re-assemble any vehicle, although he does already have a speciality – ‘Kei Vans’ (pronounced K-Vans), a class of very small Japanese vehicles.

Suzuki Carry’s are the most common in Australia, but the class also includes the Daihatsu HiJet and the Honda Acty… which is the one pictured above and below. Nathaniel picked it up from Brisbane earlier this year, and he’s restoring it to its former glory.

For the car nuts, here’s some interesting but slightly ridiculous facts about the Acty: The car Nathaniel is rebuilding has a two-cylinder engine (for the uninitiated, a standard Ford Falcon has six cylinders), with a capacity of just 545cc. That’s about the same CCs as a large ride-on lawn mower.

The Acty produces about 43nm of torque… and as another guide, that’s about one-tenth of what a Holden Commodore V8 produces. Its engine is, quite literally, half a modified Honda Gold Wing motorcycle engine.

The vehicle is under 10ft in length, so if you tipped it on its end it would fit under a basketball ring. Width-wise, it’s just under 1.4 metres wide, thus you could fit two of them side-by-side in a standard Australian freeway lane (3.5 metres), with room to move.

The tyre rims on the Acty are 10 inches across, so about the width of the steering wheel from a dodge’em car. The engine – which weighs about 40 kilograms – sits under the floor, at the rear of the vehicle.

The whole kit weighs less than 700 kilos (the weight of an average dairy cow) but notwithstanding its modest stats, the Acty has a top speed of around 90km an hour (considerably faster than the average dairy cow). It costs less than $50 to fill the bastard up (tank size is 25 litres), and will give you back about 450km.

Basically, the Honda Acty is the ‘ultimate poke around town vehicle’, except of course, Nathaniel is planning to add a custom mini-motorhome build, and then drive it around Australia. As you do. This is an artist’s impression of what that might look like… if he took NM editor Chris Graham and the two official NM mascots, Pucky and Frankie.

“I like working on Actys,” says Nathaniel. “Honda somehow managed to make everything that needed to be strong, as strong as possible, while still keeping the weight down.

“They’re definitely higher quality, and a better design. They’re just very unique, although it’s very hard to find parts for this one specifically.”

For his trip around Australia, Nathaniel has big plans for a little car.

“I’m going to try and lift it a little, put all terrains [tyres]on it, and try and keep it off road most of the time.

“Inside, I want to do a proper camper build. Drawers. Fold out bed. I want to try and keep the rear seat, so make it that it folds away into the back.

“The length inside is roughly exactly my height. But if I keep growing, I’ll just have to sleep diagonally.

“For the front, I don’t fit in the driver’s seat, so I have to change it from two single seats to a bench seat, because that allows me to get away from the right wall a bit, to sit more in the middle when I drive.

“I also need to move the seat back a bit, and get a smaller steering wheel, so I can fit behind it.”

So why would one of the world’s largest teenagers want to travel Australia in one of the world’s smallest vans?

“For the memes.”

New Matilda is donating ongoing advertising to Nathaniel to help him build his business. And we’ll provide updates on his Honda Acty rebuild as it proceeds. In the meantime, you help support him by:

1. Ordering custom auto jobs (i.e. ideally, someone pays Nathaniel to find and build them a custom K-Van: “I’d love a K-Van commission build. I’ve got all this knowledge on K-Vans, so I’d love to use it.”)
2. General repairs and reconditioning of other vehicles;
3. Donating used vehicles (which, depending on condition, Nathaniel either scraps or re-conditions/rebuilds).

For enquires, you can email Nathaniel direct here.

And the answer to the question in the first paragraph of the story? With a lot of motivation and determination. Or a blender.