The obligatory what, why and how...
Building your own car has a certain lure to it. Not only the car enthusiast, but almost everyone without exception, when told about my plans, reacted with something similar to 'cool!'
What?
So, what are these plans? In short, building me one of these:
What you see there is an AC Cobra Replica, Gardner Douglas style. This car is a replica of a 60's sports car originally manufactured by the British 'AC Cars', but made famous when Carroll Shelby got his hands on it to combine it with an American V8 Engine.
The first phase to building a car apparently is to spend countless hours browsing the internet to get a grip on costs, supplier info and the differences of all the offerings. Especially in the beginning of this process, it is easy to lose whole weekends just doing that.
Two things stood out in this search process as being more important than any supplier info:
- talking to people who have already built one;
- reading the excellent build logs of other people who are building.
So, part of the plan is to document it, inspired by Simon's excellent blog I linked to above. The journal will be mostly for myself, but if it can please others like Simon's site helped me, that will be very good.
Why?
I am not one of those car builders having a long outstanding wish to build a Cobra kit car, although the thought has been on my mind on and off for a couple of years. I am the owner of a small software company and my daily work mostly consists of sitting behind a computer screen, either communicating or programming. While I love the job, it lacks a component which makes my body ache, dirty and smell bad; this project will fill those gaps nicely.
Another part is just the curiosity if I can do this. It is a project of reasonable complexity with a certain element of (financial) risk attached to it. I guess if I just wanted to have a nice car, buying one far outsmarts building one.
Luckily there's no real obligation to be rational on all of this, since many elements of it are not. Having fun just doing it is enough.
How?
We are in the fortunate situation to be living in a rural area where our home and my office are combined. Behind these is a reasonably big garage. It isn't in a very good shape, in terms of weather protection, so part of the project is to rebuild part of the garage, making it suitable to build the car. Part of the journal will be filled with the activity on rebuilding the garage.
Anyways, enjoy!
marcel