Well, to be honest a friend gave it to him, otherwise he would have used house paint, probably oil based and not latex:) I also had a pickup that broke the foot feed and used a cable I hooked to the linkage to drive it. Did that for about a month until I could afford to fix it. Used a box for a driver's seat once also, and don't get me started on the Model A my brother and I owned back in the 50s in high school.
That reminds me of my ‘61 Corvair Monza. I was sitting at a light and when I stepped on the gas, the cable from the gas pedal to the rear mounted engine snapped. So there I am sitting at the now green light with a line of rush hour traffic behind me, starting to beep.
I got a brainstorm! That car had a manual choke so I pulled it out a bit and the dang car started to move. Slowly, and people were still not happy, but it was better than sitting still.
I drove it 3 miles home carefully adjusting the choke so as not to make the mixture too rich. I loved that car. It was so weird. You had to learn all kinds of tricks for it.
Your box story reminds me of the time two buddies and I were hitchhiking downtown to see a baseball game (two hid behind a tree until the other gets someone to stop). Anyway, as we all three piled into the front seat of his rusty old pickup, the guy told us to be careful. There was no floor on the passenger side. It was so cool watching the road go by at 60 on the freeway. It kind of made you want to put your foot down there to see what would happen to your shoe. We didn’t do that.
Then the guy pulls off the freeway and parks in front of a crappy old house. He tells us he’ll be out in a few minutes to take us to the game. We figured he was some kind of pervert going to get a couple of his buddies to rape us (we didn’t even know what that meant, but we figured it wasn’t good) and kill us and bury us in the backyard (we knew what that meant!) so we bailed out of the truck and ran like hell.
A few blocks away we got another ride from a normal guy.
That scene is going to be in the movie of my life.