LocostUSA.com

all wood construction, brass metals, steampunk looking locost? http://www.davintosh.com/2008/12/07/a-r ... l-on-ebay/ like this but locostish

cool?

Looks nice. No reason you could not do that with a Locost. It also shows proportions for folks that are interested in midship versions.

A good way to be different and beautiful...

This one has been noted before. The plans originally appeared in mechanics Illustrated. Or maybe PM or PS - but I'm fairly sure it was MI. I might actually have a copy (somewhere, amonst my dad's PM & PS collection)

Yep, MI Sept 1956. Just as in Champion's book, only decades earlier. Build it for less than $500 they say. That is 178.5 GBP at the 1956 exchange rate, 30% less than Ron Champion's 250 GBP. I guess we are all following the Hi-cost path, not the low cost route.

Not to mention, it is a highly sought-after BEC design.

The "build log" can be found here:http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/08/16/build-your-own-mahogany-sports-car/

Very cool!! Thanks for the link!

It is cool but besides the wood finish it is ugly.

Yep it's ugly alright. And a bitch to keep the finish looking good.
Let's face it, there were a lot of ugly designs back in the day.

I agree that many of the details of the car pictured don't have visual appeal, but I believe the underlying design could be tweaked just a bit and with the right accessories could be made to look really really beautiful. The basic ingredients for a really interesting car are there; low and wide body, open wheels, mid engine; I think if done right it could be made to look stunning in wood, 'glass or metal. The nose & tail would both need a rework, though. Although you could pull inspiration for a new nose from '50's & '60's era formula cars.

I had the original MI it was in somewhere, drooled over the plans in that for a good while, before deciding what an utterly oddball mix of parts it had in it, and the impossibility of intelligent adaption without practically redesigning the whole thing. Probably why an existing example has high rarity value...

I loved MI and PS and PM for stuff like that... I was gonna ditch my originals when I discovered google books had them online... BUUUT, the search interface is dire, can't confine yourself very easily to searching JUST that title in narrow ranges of years... and browsing is tedious... if you can even manage to hit an issue you heard about by searching the publication date and even the headings of the particular article you want. You find yourself thinking "Hmmmm how long would it take to print all this out and just thumb through it... "

There was a website that had collected up a few older projects, think it was vintage projects dot com or something of the like. Not sure they had any vehicles in there. The guy who did a lot of the 70s ones has his own plans site... trouble is for this neck of the woods, they're all on hard to come by and increasingly expensive VW mechanics.