For openers

So you want to be a success? Well there are a few general principles that will hold you in good stead for just about anything; work projects, career, home improvements, marriage(?):

• Make a plan and stick to it.
• Do it once, do it right.
• Set yourself daily and monthly objectives and make sure you achieve them.
• Use only top quality materials and services.
• Don’t start a new project until the first one is complete.
• Admit it when you are out of your depth and seek help.
• Don’t get deflected from the main path by tantalising time-wasting diversionary trivia.

The wheel has already been invented.

I firmly believe (with my hand on my heart) that in building the Road Rat not one of the above has ever been allowed to even poke its nose through the garage door, (except of course the fine welding by Alan and Phil, top notch machining by Roy, and Class A fibreglass makings from Alex Mac).

This article is a follow-up to the presentation of the car to the club at the April 2000 meeting and randomly covers a few of the issues I faced in getting it from light-bulb-in-the-air-above-my-head stage through to street legal. Other places where details of the car are to be found are :

• Profile date: 1993(?) (before construction)
• Profile date: 1999 (completed car)
• Spare Parts article, September 1999 issue
• Club Website: you are here!
• Road Rat web page: Go there

Why?

Why build a car anyway? What a dumb question. However, I am very much of the persuasion that if you are going to build a car anyway, then you better make sure that it is not like anything that you could have bought in a shop (or from Trade & Exchange). Because, lets face it, Toyota, Ford, Porsche and their cousies have put a lot of effort in turning out pretty sound products that do most of what you could ask for pretty well. And they don’t really cost all that much. So there is limited satisfaction in investing several thousand hours in making something that you could have bought anyway. There has to be another reason. Why I like building cars is that it gives you a blank canvas (or in my case, more a back of an envelope really) to indulge yourself with any flight of fancy that you might have.

What are we actually talking about here?

The Road Rat is a minimalist space frame car, two seats, no roof, mid engine, built mostly from 60’s and 70’s VW parts. The body is 7ish, with aluminium flat panels on the sides, front cycle guards, fibreglass nose-cone, rear guards and “boot” lid, and a curved textured aluminium rear transom.

Howmush didid coshcha tabildid then?

A very important question. Always comes up early in the roadside chat, just after “What motor have you got in it?”. The answer is - probably about $20 per week. This car took me seven years, and this period included a lot of down time, and a lot of other things going on. There were no big expense items but a lot of stuff was bought and not used. The biggest single expenditure was the four alloy wheels at $200 each. There were a lot of things that cost about $100. But basically it is cheaper to build a car than it is to smoke cigarettes.