Well I kind of got into this by accident, sitting in an MOT waiting area browsing the magazines and an advert caught my eye for kit car parts, not that this a usual area of interest for me so cant really say why, but I did some googling and one thing led to another and the next thing I know is I’ve got all excited about building a kit car.
Now it’s not really a kit car in the sense of buying all the bits and bolting them together but more of a case of literally building as much as possible myself from raw materials and utilising parts from other cars. I’ve bought both MIG and TIG welders second hand with a combined cost of £800 + about £200 on consumables, ironically for around that money I could have bought a fully welded chassis complete but that’s not the point, a large part of the drive for me is to learn the skills and fabricate and finish as many parts as I can myself, an undertaking which I am not taking lightly.
Over the past 12 – 18 months I’ve been gathering tools and a few bits and pieces, creating a decent man cave to work in and although its not big enough to do the chassis in it’s a nice enough area to work on all the small parts.
Apart from all the usual spanners, screwdrivers and socket sets etc etc that are obviously going to be needed I either already had or collected quite a few bits, some of the main ones are:
• Compressor
• Murex 245A Mig Welder
• PortaMig 220A Tig Welder
• Angle grinder (could do with 2 or 3 to save switching discs)
• Sand Blast Cabinet
• Pillar Drill
• Battery Drill x 2
• 110v Mains Drill
• Various Air Tools
• Metal Chop Saw
• Old Cooker
Lots of confusion to start with in terms of choice of running gear, in the end it was decided by opportunity, a set of Granada Scorpio Cosworth running gear including front uprights, rear hubs, disc brakes all round, koala diff and driveshaft’s came up on ebay and I bagged the lot for £100 so that decided that. The guy also had the wheels off the car with legal tyres which I also had for an extra £50. I also kept the BMW diff, shafts and prop as an option.
Choice of engine, this got me for a while but I finally chose the BMW 3.0 V8, Why? Cos it’s a V8
and it looks good. Simples!I chose to buy a complete car even though I only wanted the engine, this was so I could drive it round a bit, make sure everything was ok and be 100% sure I wasn’t missing any bits. Also this way I could sell all the other bits to recoup some money, in the end the car including transport and other fees owed me about £850 and I managed to get about £2000 back over 6 months of breaking it and still have the engine as well. The extra money was used to pay for the extra tools and stuff above.
Donor BMW, 1994 E38 730i
Engine Removed From Donor
As I knew the engine was going to be a tight fit I made up a wooden frame to the same dimensions as the book chassis, the first trial fit proved that the odd shaped sump would definitely be in the way, as would the alternator. Unfortunately the sump also contains the oil pump which is chain driven below the crankshaft so modifying the sump is not going to be an option so the plan is to go with a dry sump system, this will mean another expensive outlay but at least I can put it off till much later in the build. Also the alternator is going to be in the way so will have find an alternative arrangement for that as well.
or am I talking sh**e
