I have been wanting to do a car project practically my whole life. Many years ago I attempted to restore a 1956 Jaguar XK140, but too many impossible-to-find body panels were shot so I parted the car out. Before I let it go, I toyed with the idea of using the XK mechanicals to build a British kit car, the Kougar, which had received a very favorable review in a car magazine I had read. The Kougar is a very cool car, and you can see it here.
Around the beginning of 2003 I recalled the Kougar, and found via the Web that it is alive and well, though no longer available in the US. I began reading about various kit cars, and was particularly intrigued by Hummer replicas that could be built on the bones of old (or rolled) SUVs and pickup trucks. I also liked Porsche Speedster replicas. Otherwise, the US market is largely dominated by Cobra and Lamborghini replicas, which are a little expensive and, well, common. There's a great variety of kits available in the UK where car-building is a huge hobby, but then I saw that many UK builders were involved with the Locost, the kit car built without a kit.
THE LOCOST
The Locost was developed by Ron Champion, an Englishman who was a contemporary of the late Colin Chapman. Like Chapman, Ron Champion ran with a crowd that amused themselves in the early post-WWII days by building sports cars/hot rods by reclaiming and hopping up plain-jane English sedans like the Austin Seven. These cars were often built on home-made chassis and bodied with aluminum scrounged from abundantly available discarded airplane fuselages. Colin Chapman "made his bones" racing his creations, and the Lotus 7 was his first successful sports car launch aimed at the mass market. You can read all about it...elsewhere.
Ron Champion wrote a book, "Build Your Own Sports Car for as Little as £250", that has been a best-seller for its publisher (Haynes) since it came out, and is now being readied for its third edition. The premise of the book (and if you get into Locosting you will get to know it as "The Book") is that builders can inexpensively weld their own chassis from 1" and 3/4" square tubing, panel it with aluminum, install the running gear from a donor car, and have themselves a passable replica of a Lotus 7. The book is well-illustrated, has a decent set of mechanical drawings and, most importantly, gives the reader a sense of actually being able to build one of these cars. Ron Champion's gift for motivation was polished in his his lifelong career as a shop teacher, and "The Book" has become a teaching tool for his classes, in which high school students build cars!
The book, however, is focused on building Locosts from English Ford Escorts that do not exist in the US. This poses a challenge to US builders, who must adapt the plans to other cars without guidance from the book. The idea is to build a new car from what most people would regard as junk, so US builders are using a variety of RWD cars. See the CMC website for a good discussion about donor vehicles. I had narrowed my choices to the Toyota Celica, Chevy S-10, and Mazda RX-7, which is what I wound up with. See the Donor page for more info.
Without the Internet, there's no way I could take on this project. Compared to my failed XK project that I attempted before personal computers even existed, now I'm fairly bristling with information, sources, and know-how. There are some excellent discussion groups (see Links) where most of the members are extremely friendly and helpful, and some are downright brilliant.automotive designers and historians. If I get into a jam, I know where to go for help.
So what's a Locost like? Well, it's very much like the Lotus 7, in that the car's low weight leads to high horsepower-to-weight ratios no matter what engine is used. Even with a sub-100 HP engine, a Locust will do 0-60 in the neighborhood of 6 seconds. Almost better than that is the car's handling and road-holding, greatly aided by the low weight and low center of gravity. With a good suspension setup and racing tires (recommended for street use because street tires don't warm up due to the car's light weight), a Locost will push up to 1.4 g's on a skidpad. The Locost is a real sports car.
MY PLANS
At this writing, I am in the design phase, having purchased a donor and set some goals for the car's personality:
The subject of design leads me to explain my qualifications for the project. I took a lot of drafting and shop classes in school, and had a summer job working as a junior draftsman and engineering department gofer. I was an engineering major until halfway through college, when I bailed out because I couldn't stand the advanced science and math book-learnin'. I became an accountant, but I've worked many years in industry and have spent a lot of time with engineers, even solving some process and production problems to everyone's amazement. I do all the work on my own cars (except this winter when I had a busted tranny during tax season) and rebuilt the engine of one vehicle, farming out the machining work. I'm fairly mechanical but not a real gear-head.
A Locost's performance is very much dependent on choices the builder makes as he creates his or her car, and that's much of the fun of the building. Following are some preliminary decisions I have made, that will guide my design process.
1. The car will be a street machine, not a racer, so comfort counts.
I'm willing to sacrifice some performance (i.e., size and weight) for some comfort and convenience...but not too much. I'll explain my choices as I go through the build.
I am 6'6" and with a regular frame, so the car is going to have to be a little larger than standard in the passenger area. The original Lotus 7 was built to suit Colin Chapman, who was 5'7", and most drivers over 6' are a little pressed to fit in a Locost, though it is a couple inches wider and 4 inches longer than a Seven.
Actually, I knew that variations from The Book were possible even before I'd read The Book, thanks to Jim McSorley, who has laid out some alternative chassis designs in his web site. After looking at Jims plans for a "+442" chassis (4" wider in the rear but standard in the front, 4" longer", 2" taller), it occurred to me that as long as I'm departing from book, I might as well just make the car to suit me more or less exactly.
At this point, I'm thinking about making the car 4" wider (+10% on all horizontal dimensions, for good proportion), 2" longer (swapping 2" engine space for 4" in the footwell, as I think I can with my donor's short engine). The car will have to be a couple of inches taller to suit my donor engine with stock fuel injection, and I won't mind, either, for the sake of my knees and the car's looks. The height will come from raising chassis side rails 1" and using the current CMC nosecone height, which is a good inch taller than book. Scuttle height will be unchanged, as the Locost scuttle is already pretty tall.
For the altered chassis plans, I have a couple of inexpensive CAD programs I'm trying out, and I'm leaning toward using the DynaCADD I bought on eBay. This was a fully featured contender to AutoCad before the company busted. Just gotta get over that learning curve.
My comfort and convenience wish list also tentatively includes thermal and acoustic insulation, wind deflectors, a top and side screens, electric ceramic heater and demisters and maybe even a cigarette lighter and a radio. These things would cause some austerity-minded purists to lose their lunches, but hey, it's my car.
2. It doesn't have to be a fire-breather.
Because the car will be for the road, I want it to be relatively docile mechanically compared to some of the take-no-prisoners Locosts out there. Lightening the flywheel is always a good performance modification, but I'll just have my stock unit turned down rather than going for a lighter aluminum flywheel, to retain tractability in city driving. I'll open up the intake and exhaust, but will make the exhaust no bigger than maybe 2-1/2", and will hang a good muffler on the back. Something that will be sportily tame and soothing until I nail it. This will be no cafe racer, though. Reports are that a 'book' Locost weighing 1200 lbs. with a stock Mazda 13B engine will do 0-60 in about 4 seconds. My car will weigh maybe a hundred pounds more, but the engine modifications I'm planning should maintain the power/weight ratio, and acceleration like a Viper's.
3. Good handling is not necessarily incompatible with a good ride.
Modern race cars tend to have relatively soft springs compared to the Lotus 7 and many Locosts. More recent practice is to use anti-roll bars to control chassis roll, rather than buckboard springing.
My approach will be to use springs that will just be firm enough to support the car, good adjustable shock absorbers to control jounce, and anti-roll bars to limit roll, if necessary. Having a very low center of gravity, the car may not roll much without them.
Reducing unsprung weight benefits ride and handling, a win-win proposition. My donor RX-7 came with independent rear suspension, the bits from which can be used to construct a de Dion rear axle, which has a low unsprung weight itself (being just a hollow tube), and can facilitate the mounting of inboard rear disc brakes. I'm also considering inboard front and rear coil-over shocks being used by some Locost builders. Lastly, I'll avoid monster tires and wheels, not only because of their weight, but because the car will be wide enough with 7" wheels.
4. Nostalgia can be sweet.
Last but not least, I want some of the flavor of a classic English sports car. Dew on the tonneau in the morning, rocker switches, a starter button for sure, maybe piped seats. I may even buy some Caterham stuff for the right look for the car.
And oh, yes, I've chosen a color scheme. My web page background is Triumph Racing Green, a great color that brings to mind the TR4s and 4As of my youth, and is authentic for some Lotuses. That color will be on the nosecone, scuttle, and fenders. The rest of the bodywork will be polished aluminum. Nice, huh?
on to DIARY
