[STORIES] Kálmán Szabadi's Festival

Dec 02, 2010

#Featured

Kálmán Szabadi was born in 1921. As a child he witnessed the Zeppelin airship and was fascinated by it. His father worked at a Hungarian ship company and the family moved to Vác in 1942. Kálmán lived there ever since then.

Due to family influences and childhood memories he went on to learn about mechanical things. He also had a passion for arts so eventually he graduated from the Iparrajz Iskola (School for Industrial Drawings). In 1948 he became a movie poster graphic and a theater scenery painter. He was drafted into the Army in 1950 and spent three years on a ship.

Afterwards he returned to his workplace and read all details about the Hungarian microcar attempts. Eventually he decided to build one for himself. He got hold of an Isetta 300 cc engine. Construction was started in 1956 at the Vác Shipbuilding company and lasted for four years. It had motorcycle parts and though it looks big on pictures but it had a length of just 3150 mm and was 1150 mm tall and a had a weight of 380 kg. As Kálmán was quite tall it necessitated the gullwing door solution of the Festival.

As recycling was all the rage then, he, together with his advisor, DezsQ Olly came up with a novel idea for the body: a resin made out of pig's blood, chicken feathers and nitro shellac!! It had quite a smell, but it worked! It wasn't as elegant as GRP, but it worked. Kálmán used the car for a few years (in the process it was repainted and received an automobile number plate, instead of its orignal, "motorcycle with a sidecar" plate) then sold it. Its attractive body was eventually replaced with a van body but after a crash it was disposed of.

From the 1960s Kálmán returned to the family "business" and went on to design ships, water taxis and other such machinery.

Text and pictures: Pál Négyesi