As each car disassembles itself in noise and fire, the crowd gets to its feet and cheers.
"Someone at Gold's would laugh at this place," said Julien Spencer, 34, a burly bodybuilder who was lifting weights last week at the Temple of Pain, where the machines are made from scrap metal, car batteries and disassembled car engines, a testament to Haitian ingenuity.
During the rebuilding, the car was disassembled, stripped to the bare metal and repainted in the original color, he said.
A large rideable toy car, for example, might have recyclable plastic in it, but if the plastic's attached to metal parts, wires, batteries or other materials, it isn't recyclable unless the car is disassembled.
After a small discussion about whether the aroma was, in fact, "weird" or "just bad", reinforcements were brought in with inadequate tools and a sniffer dog, travellers were evacuated and the next two hours or so were spent hanging about and listening to the noises of a train car being disassembled.
When they arrive in New Jersey, the cars are disassembled and sandblasted to remove corrosion.
Surprised to see the wipers on even foreign cars, Kearns disassembled a wiper system that his son had bought from a local Mercedes dealer and discovered that it contained the very same technology that he had developed and patented.
The kind of interchangeability achieved by the "American system" was dramatically demonstrated in 1908 at the British Royal Automobile Club in London: three Cadillac cars were disassembled, the parts were mixed together, 89 parts were removed at random and replaced from dealer's stock, and the cars were reassembled and driven 800 km (500 miles) without trouble.
* Check the part's mileage: recyclers inventory each car they disassemble, and know the mileage of each part.
Post-use, the car can be disassembled and either returned to the earth or rebuilt.
"The car had been disassembled in a barn, and of course the wood from the carriage body and wheels had rotted away, so there was much work to do," Babaian says.
