Buying a Kit Car EP.05

all right folks welcome back to forged space this episode is a very special episode we are going to pick up the kid car so let's go ahead and get there [Music] we have arrived [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] come on [Music] right [Music] now [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] all right guys made it back [Music] so we'll go ahead take the crate off and then we'll talk a little bit more about the project one thing uh looks like in shipping it did receive some damage there's supposed to be another panel across here and it's that piece of plywood right there and then there was another 2x4 coming across here reinforcing the whole thing it looks like somewhere along the lines in shipping it got hit or damaged or otherwise and then same thing on the inside you can see that board is broken and this board is broken as well so whatever happens this corner right here was pretty substantial man let's see oh yeah and then this piece of plywood they somebody thought it was a good idea to uh put it on backwards after it got knocked off because that's the spray paint so that's supposed to be on the outside on this corner right here anyways as I said we'll we'll address all that uh gonna need to get a new windshield too because uh that took damage as well um man hopefully I can get this done before that Monsoon comes through but we'll go ahead take off all this paneling and get a better look at the car [Music] foreign [Music] well I thought I was gonna make it I didn't make it monsoon's coming it's raining so we're gonna leave it and then pick it up tomorrow all right guys so for this episode I want to go back and go through my experience of purchasing a kid car back in November 21 I was like ah kind of feeling like buying and building kid car besides from a 944 and everything else and I started looking around and started to look real hard I figurion GT or the DDR uh it just it was very appealing to me from the looks it it is an F1 McLaren F1 inspired kit car and I I really fell in love with design so I took a trip down to Miami uh to actually go see uh the grion production facility so I met with Diego gruyon down there and we sat around we chatted for a bit about the kid cars what they do they don't do and then I actually got a tour of the entire facility uh see all the work of pieces that he had in work at the moment and he had a backlog about four kid cars that he was currently building which wasn't too bad uh at the time that was a 12-week lead time for getting one built and put together I Diego I really appreciate you showing us the car uh hopefully we'll be ordering it one shortly and uh look forward so after all this got back moved to New Mexico and then um the mid-February of this year so February 22. I decided I'm gonna go ahead and pull the trigger and buy the kit car so did my deposit which is a 50 deposit on the kit and that got him working on it throughout the entire process I stayed engaged with Diego and the company made sure you know I got updates uh how everything was going and it was pretty good so once the kid car started wrapping up and they started finishing up all the little pieces there was a couple of outstanding long lead items that still needed to come in if that was okay so I finished off the payment paid it off and then um finally after about six months so August of this year uh I was notified that it is 100 done I went ahead and uh scheduled the shipment for it and got it shipped out here so that's how we got it right now so start to finish from placing border to receiving it six months time frame so just manage your expectations uh make sure you check with Diego as to what the current backlog is so you understand what how long it's going to take to get your car foreign so let's go ahead and take a look at what car it does come with and what it doesn't come with so it comes with a fiberglass body and a steel space frame it normally comes with the radiator Plumbing from a front to the rear it comes with all your hinges for your doors latches uh quick latches for the rear uh the hinges it comes with basically the the core of the entire build a couple other things but it does include your fuel tank your tail lights your headlights and where all dot certified so you won't have any problems down the road now with the chassis there's three different chassis options here so there's one for receiving basically a Toyota suspension there is one for receiving the C5 C6 Corvette suspension and then there's one for the uh oh goodness I want to say Impala SS with a LS where it's mounted transversely so you you have options here as to how you want the suspension configured and what the chassis is going to be but the outside body is almost the same for all of them you have a couple different options for the rear where you can get the gtss uh rear clam shell which is the one that I ended up going with the regular gt8 clamshell has a much smoother transition but I think the ss1 looks more aggressive so that's the one I went with so I went through looked at the entire quality of workmanship the welds are great the fiberglass looks really good I didn't see any real big defects uh minor surface pitting which is all within workmanship quality where we can just fill it in with blazing putty if we wanted to um but we'll get the rest of that when we get to it but from a kid car perspective this is close to paint ready so overall that the quality of the build is really good and I would definitely recommend it so as it stands today the current price of use is 18 995 and that will get you one of these right here you however have a second option so the second option it does carbon fiber inlays in the side panels the roof scoop you get aggressive uh Fender Vents and then you get a big beautiful massive wing on the back of a car so that is an option if you choose to select it and that option will run you 28 500. so just be aware of it these are your options the one we went with is the cheaper one and we're going to do some aggressive looks on it aggressive Aesthetics but that's going to be on our own with a kid car being a kid car it doesn't include everything for red price so make sure you're budgeting appropriately for it you're gonna have to get your Corvette suspension you're going to have to get steering uh steering column AC you have to get your radiators you have to get fans you have to get your entire wire harness you have to get the engine transaxle so make sure you're budgeting properly the number one killer of kit cars is you don't budget properly and you end up running out of money so you stop working on him and it goes in the shed and then it just sits there for years as you slowly Peck away at it and then you give up on it so before you get started on a kid car make sure you budget properly for it to understand what the build is going to cost you you have several options too as to how you're going to approach this you can you can go and buy used components from eBay or a junkyard the suspension components the 80 arms I mean those are solid aluminum a arms they're not really bad and that's what Brad we went the best route that I'm going is I bought about an entire suspension setup off of eBay and it has all the a arms uh the the hubs everything that we need to get things moving or if you want everything to be pristine and brand new because you're building a new vehicle and you don't feel like refurbishing we're cleaning up old parts you can always go down to the GM dealership and because these vehicles that uh these components come from are still fairly new new-ish but within the last 20 years you can still get components straight from the dealership brand new so just be aware of that all right so we talked about what comes with it what doesn't come with it let's talk a little bit about my build over here so there's a couple of goals for this build one keep the budget under 62k so right now uh we're getting pretty close to 40. and build goals so I want to keep this build under 3 200 pounds uh not sure what that way is on its own I'm hoping it weighs about 1200 pounds but I would have to wait and I don't have a skill for that so we're going to assume that it doesn't weigh as much as I think it does I know the battery weighs almost a thousand pounds I know what the motors weigh they weigh about uh 150 pounds a piece so we have known weights for some of this stuff uh when we put it all together at the suspension in Verve interior everything else that's what's really going to drive the entire weight of the whole build either way I want to keep it under 3 200 pounds because that's going to be about a thousand pounds lighter from the Tesla Model 3. and that's the drivetrain that we're using we're using an electric drivetrain out of Tesla Model 3 Performance so that's looking at 480 horsepower coming out to the wheels for the steering we're going with an electrically boosted unit we are going with uh probably a Prius module which is a plug and play without the input wire aojust defaults to being a regular power steering but there's adjustability built into that where if you put a rheostat in there you can adjust it down to how much assist you're getting brakes for the brakes we're going to use an electrically boosted uh brake master cylinder from Bosch so these are used in a lot of BMWs newer Priuses a bunch of other cars nowadays especially ones that are hybrid or otherwise they're switching to these because you don't have vacuum available at all times so this is a much simpler solution than running a vacuum pump in addition to your brake booster it's just if you're going to have electric unit assisting something by creating vacuum or otherwise you might as well just have it directly coupled to the brake cylinder and then the brakes themselves uh right now I have the C5 uh brakes however we're going to go to the C6 Z06 brakes which are direct bolt-on and their six piston up front and then four piston in the rear and they go with uh 14 inch front rotors so you can you can opt for a will wood or a stop Tech or whatever else this just seems like the cheapest and easiest solution for a big brake kit on this setup suspension on the suspension piece this is set up for C5 suspension with that being said uh you're not going to be able to use your C5 leaf spring that goes across your wheels it is going to have to go to coil over so there's a little bit of a difference right there uh in my instance I'm actually going to switch over to air suspension on it and probably use rytek or some other similar brand for of entire setup where I can have several levels preset and then just go to those levels from ride height because scraping over speed bumps is never fun and with the air suspension hopefully if we have enough room we are going to make it a uh cantilever design so push rod suspension air conditioning so this beside windows don't open they're not going to open we're not going to make them open what we are going to do is we're going to make sure that we have a good AC system in there so that roof scoop on there that's going to be our air intake for our AC unit and that is going to feed in and utilize a high voltage pulse whip modulation controlled uh AC unit it's an electric AC unit they're about at 480 dollars and then we're going to run a and then we're going to run an evaporator and a blower motor from uh one of those Universal Brands um just to get the air flowing through there so there's not not anything that's very high tech and bad solution uh and it shouldn't be for heating we're gonna run uh two uh PTC ceramic heaters and with those uh it should be 200 Watts a piece on the 12 volt system and it will get us enough heat where it will keep the cabin warm it's not a large cabin it's only a two-person vehicle and as long as we're properly insulated yeah it's not going to be an issue and then on the rear we're gonna take and uh get ourselves a spoiler we're gonna make sure that it's a nice big aggressive spoiler I'm not gonna build it from scratch uh I've seen people do it uh seems a lot of work for something that you can just buy off the shelf and modify so we're gonna take uh one of the spoilers probably a six foot wide one uh a solid amount the front edge of it but then on the rear end we're going to have active Arrow so as you're braking it's going to swing up to provide an air brake uh as you're accelerating and you're going high speed it's going to start to level out so we're gonna have all this programmed in on an Arduino I'm not sure if we're going to use linear actuators or if we're going to use servos yet but it's going to be one of the two so that's gonna be a wrap on this episode thank you for watching on my next episode we're gonna see how we're gonna get this off of a trailer because uh that is definitely way too heavy for me to lift on my own and playing the game with a uh um playing the game with an engine hoist to try to get it off here we would have to remove the whole body I just want to move a whole thing at once so we'll see what we do I'll catch you next time thanks for watching foreign [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Forge Space

Views: 21,325

Keywords: Tesla, tesla powered, teslapowered, teslaswapped, tesla swapped, ddrmotorsport, ddr, grullongt, grullon ddr, gt8ss, red is faster, redisfaster, ingenext, model3, model 3 performance, kitcar, kit car

Id: 92eQiyo7CsY

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022