DIY Car part 2 - my progress so far

Although I haven't mentioned it since my first post, I have actually been doing a fair amount of work on the Locost, a sports car which I'm building. Although it's still very far from being finished it is now starting to slightly resemble a car, so I thought I would put up a progress update.

Building the Frame

The first major component to be built on the car was the frame. I should say, rather, that it was the first to be started as there are always a few more brackets and things to add to it as the build continues, but the major structure of the frame came together fairly quickly.

Start of frame build

Here is how it all started: four lengths of 1" 16ga rectangular section steel tubing clamped to a build table. Seems very simple, right? It's hard to imagine at this stage that this will eventually be where your butt will sit as you travel down the highway.

Roll Your Own: a DIY... car?

Whenever you start talking to people about General Aviation airplanes, or start reading about them somewhere, the conversation always seems to lead to Homebuilt airplanes (a.k.a. amateur built or kit planes). Homebuilt aircraft have been popular since the early days of aviation and, although they don't appear to be as prominent today because they are dwarfed by the number of commercially produced aircraft in the air, they are still a very significant share of the aircraft market.

Building your own aircraft makes a lot of sense, if you have the capability to do so. Often you are able to get much better performance for a lower price than you would with a factory built certified aircraft, such as your typical offering from Cessna or Piper. Homebuilts have to go through rigorous safety inspections before they are put to the sky, so the safety concerns that many people have about them are often moot.

So, if building airplanes is so popular, who don't people build their own cars? After all, you could reap the same benefits of lower cost, better performance, and a sense of pride that you get from driving around in something you made with your own hands. The answer is: people do. There are in fact many kit cars and scratch built cars both on public roads, and on race tracks around the world. They don't stand out very much, again due to the sheer number of factory build cars on the roads making them a fairly small percentage of the overall figures, but they are there.