Have you always dreamed of having a custom roadster but think that it’s out of your price range? You might dream of the air blowing through your hair as you speed around the race track in a road and track car. Maybe you want a custom roadster because a muscle car attracts the ladies (no judgement if so… that’s one reason we love our custom roadster). Maybe you’ve always dreamed of having the bonding experience of building a performance driving replica car with a son or daughter or mother or father. Whatever the reason, you might find that building a kit car is the way to go!
You might not know that it is possible to build a custom roadster that is identical to the “real deal,” but at a fraction of the price! Not to mention, the possibilities for upgrade parts are infinite when you build your own kit car.
However, when you’re undergoing a project that has a hundred million components, like Cobra kits, there is a lot of opportunity to totally screw it up. You aren’t really saving any cash if you spend several thousand buckaroos on a custom car kit that you never drive. To help you avoid this nightmare, check out our list of common mistakes that people make while building kit cars:
Three Mistakes to Avoid While Building a Kit Car
- MISTAKE: Assuming the Kit is All-inclusive
Not all car kits are created equally. Some kits include everything that you need except the oil and fluids. Some kit cars randomly expect you to source a few parts yourself. On top of that, the type of cars that you buy a kit for aren’t the type of cars that you can just grab parts for at your local Auto Zone. Many times these parts take months of research to track down, or require you to find a custom fabricator. It’s a giant bummer when you pour your funds and hours upon hours of work into a custom car, only to find that you need this one-off part to proceed and the whole project has to sit on hold until you find it.
Before purchasing a car kit, make sure to look into what comes in the kit, and what you’re going to have to provide. Read reviews from other people who have built it, so you know if they had trouble sourcing the parts that are not included. You’ll thank yourself for this extra bit of due-diligence. - MISTAKE: Not Recording the Journey
It happens more often than you care to know. You think you can just buzz through the steps because they seem simple. Then when you get close to the end, the car should start doing things (you know, such as turn on), but it doesn’t. You went wrong somewhere, but it’s anyone’s guess where. Instead, use your smart phone to take pictures of each step of your work. Especially take pictures of the wiring you do (it’s easy to make a mistake here, and hard to track it down if you can’t just look at the pictures). This makes it much easier to figure out where you need to make a correction than if you have to undo all your hard work until you find the problem.
We’ll throw this in for free: Use a Sharpie to mark the bolts after you twerk them. Then it’s an easy glance to identify the ones that need to be tightened. - MISTAKE: Acting Like You’re Building Your Car on a Desert Island
Technology is a beautiful thing. When our forefathers hit a roadblock with their kit cars, they were up a creek without a paddle. However, you have all the resources in the world and hundreds of people who have been down this road before at your fingertips. Participate in message boards and join online groups for people who build kit cars. When you hit an issue, you’ll have tons of people who have had that issue and went through the hassle of figuring out how to fix it, so you don’t have to. And eventually, you’ll get to be the one who’s passing on advice to other people. That’s when you know you arrived.
Do you have any questions? Please share in the comment section below!