Looking at building a kitcar
Wednesday 3rd July 2006 - Friday 10th August 2007
After taking my friend's Tiger Cat E1 out for the day I have decided I would like to build my own kitcar. As a trained mechanical engineer this is no challenge, rather a an exciting project. I have always dreamed of building my own car to my own spec, totally designed by myself BUT in reality unless you have a well established workshop and tooling, realistically you can only build a pre-designed kitcar with hand tools. I really want to build a muscle car like a Cobra but I don't have £30k available, so I will be looking at Caterham 7's and other copies.
Deciding What 'Seven' to buy...
With so many choices of kitcar manufacturers my head was spinning trying to decide what kit to buy. Ultimately the decision will be based on overall cost, but cockpit width and the aesthetics plays an important part too. I had spent 100's of hours searching the web looking at people's builds/blogs which helped alot in the decision making process. Infact this was the most important part of the decision making process. Perhaps kitcar manufacturers should appreciate this and offer more support and/or sponsorship for such enthusiasts. Back in early 2006 I started looking into which kits were around £5k to buy. It didn't take long to work out that a £5k kit ends up being £8-9k in total! After the dreaded 'reality check' I set myself a £9k budget for pre-SVA costs to put me in good stead for the final decision making process.
I was looking at various manufacturers from Caterham to Robin Hood, all of which struggled to list ALL components and options for me to accurately calculate costs for the complete build the following list is the manufacturers I was looking at for a sub-£10k project:
* Westfield
* Tiger
* Dax
* MK Racing
* Stryker
* Robin Hood
I visited Westfield's workshop and was rather impressed. The guide was informative, the showroom was useful, the workshop tour was brilliant and the cars looked like a decent quality. Shame their prices are so high.
Westfield and Dax were the most expensive out of the list, and to build a sub-£10k 'Seven' would mean I would be aiming for a 'cheap' build so I opted out on looking further with these two manufacturers.
Tiger, MK, Stryker and Robin Hood were in the right 'ball park'. Robin Hood was the cheapest setup but I didn't want a 'basic' kit, so that manufacturer was dropped. Tiger was the most established manufacturer out of the remaining three so I felt happier spending my money with a firm who had been around for such a long time. Further conversations with Tiger owners and Tiger Racing themselves gave me the guarantee I needed so I have booked a time slot to visit the workshop and have a chat with Jim Dudley (the Managing Director).
After taking my friend's Tiger Cat E1 out for the day I have decided I would like to build my own kitcar. As a trained mechanical engineer this is no challenge, rather a an exciting project. I have always dreamed of building my own car to my own spec, totally designed by myself BUT in reality unless you have a well established workshop and tooling, realistically you can only build a pre-designed kitcar with hand tools. I really want to build a muscle car like a Cobra but I don't have £30k available, so I will be looking at Caterham 7's and other copies.
Deciding What 'Seven' to buy...
With so many choices of kitcar manufacturers my head was spinning trying to decide what kit to buy. Ultimately the decision will be based on overall cost, but cockpit width and the aesthetics plays an important part too. I had spent 100's of hours searching the web looking at people's builds/blogs which helped alot in the decision making process. Infact this was the most important part of the decision making process. Perhaps kitcar manufacturers should appreciate this and offer more support and/or sponsorship for such enthusiasts. Back in early 2006 I started looking into which kits were around £5k to buy. It didn't take long to work out that a £5k kit ends up being £8-9k in total! After the dreaded 'reality check' I set myself a £9k budget for pre-SVA costs to put me in good stead for the final decision making process.
I was looking at various manufacturers from Caterham to Robin Hood, all of which struggled to list ALL components and options for me to accurately calculate costs for the complete build the following list is the manufacturers I was looking at for a sub-£10k project:
* Westfield
* Tiger
* Dax
* MK Racing
* Stryker
* Robin Hood
I visited Westfield's workshop and was rather impressed. The guide was informative, the showroom was useful, the workshop tour was brilliant and the cars looked like a decent quality. Shame their prices are so high.
Westfield and Dax were the most expensive out of the list, and to build a sub-£10k 'Seven' would mean I would be aiming for a 'cheap' build so I opted out on looking further with these two manufacturers.
Tiger, MK, Stryker and Robin Hood were in the right 'ball park'. Robin Hood was the cheapest setup but I didn't want a 'basic' kit, so that manufacturer was dropped. Tiger was the most established manufacturer out of the remaining three so I felt happier spending my money with a firm who had been around for such a long time. Further conversations with Tiger owners and Tiger Racing themselves gave me the guarantee I needed so I have booked a time slot to visit the workshop and have a chat with Jim Dudley (the Managing Director).
posted by Jon King at
6:10 AM
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