A five-guy team at Illinois Valley High School in Cave Junction, Oregon, is building a Locost as an autoshop project. The plan was, Kinetic Vehicles (that's me) was providing a soon-to-be-introduced Kinetic 7 kit and a Miata, but a few things prompted a change of direction:
1) "nick47" offered LocostUSA.com readers a pranged-but-running '91 Miata for $200. It has a couple of thousand miles and it would be more expensive to fix than it would be worth once fixed, and it has a salvage title so this wasn't its first dance with danger...but on the other hand it has some nice eBay parts. I think any mechanically sound Miata is worth $500 FOB CJ (or wherever you are going to do your building) but even with the drive and recovery and the electrical mystery, this one was a bargain.
2) It turned out that the current autoshop class includes several skilled welders, ranging from scholastic award winning (we didn't have multischool welding competitions when I was a kid, but they do now), down to merely much better than me.
3) The Grassroots $2007 Challenge has a Locost exhibition class again this year.
4) Coyote Steel in Eugene had a bunch of surplus 1" x 1" .065" square tubing for $.40 a pound--that's about 32 cents a foot.
5) The guys on the project think building a GRM Challenge Car is a cool idea (even though it'll be more work).
6) We got to chatting and Nick <donated> the car for the project and suggested we could raise a few bucks by selling the parts we don't need...the GRM$2007C rules require we value donations at actual value, but that's been established at $200 (as noted, a bargain indeed, but legitimate and verifyable, and bargains do come up now and then) and we're allowed to recoup the donor's value by hawking leftover parts...heck, we can get that out of the nearly-new convertable top...which means...
Well, crunch the numbers and we can project $0 into the donor, $50 or so in the tubing, and $1957 left for the rest of it. Man, who could pass up an opportunity like that? So today's New Improved Plan is to build a GRM Challenger. See
http://grmotorsports.com/challenge/2007rules.html for rules and
http://grmotorsports.com/news/category/2007-challenge/ for other details.
Gosh, I can hardly wait to see what tomorrow's plan is going to be.
Jack
PS--The name (Study Haul) just popped into my head while I was posting this. Got a better name for it? The IVHS colors are red and white, the school teams are called the Cougars, what else can I tell you?
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Locost builder and adventurer, and owner/operator of
http://www.kineticvehicles.com