I had the great pleasure of meeting Art Arfons once when he was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America. He was talking about how everything was done on the cheap as he didn't have any big-money sponsors. He was from Ohio and bought his engines and other parts for their scrap value from Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton Ohio (Hence I mentioned Dayton in my guess).
If you look closely at the suspension. you'll see that the struts are actually scrapped landing gear struts from jet fighters!
He told mushe didn't know anything about jet engines at first - so he just bought three scrap ones and started swapping parts out between them until he figured out which parts worked, and ended up with one good engine from the three. For a 'dynamometer' to test the engine, he just chained it between two trees, fired it up and noted how much the trees bent. He said the neighbors got a little concerned about the noise and flames, but Arfons' farm was large enough that they couldn't do anything about it.
If the Air Force had scrapped an engine because it had ingested a bird or something that bent a compressor blade, then he just removed the bent blade and the opposite blade to keep it balanced. An observant engineer once noticed the missing blades and was all upset that the two missing blades would mean an efficiency loss of 2%!!! - to which Arfons responded, "I figured that since I was starting out with 17,500 horsepower, I wouldn't miss the two percent very much, but apparently he did because to get more power, he later wanted to add an afterburner. The air force considered afterburners to be top secret technology and wouldn't sell him any scrapped ones, so he designed and built his own. I have a fuzzy memory of him saying his was successful enough that the Air Force wanted to classify his design as well, but I'm not as sure about that part of it.
The Cyclops car that I mentioned was used to break both the Land Speed Record and the water speed record -with the same vehicle!!! - he just bolted pontoons onto the suspension struts. I do not recall if he succeeded in breaking the water speen record, but the Cyclops still holds the Land speed record to this day for an open-top (exposed driver) car. Pictures of it are available at the Motorsports Museum and Hall of Fame website here:
http://www.mshf.com/index.htm?/museum/cyclops.htm
