A Kit Car has always been on my bucket list. It’s just been something I’ve always wanted to do. funny enough when I sold my last ‘fast fun car’ a 96 Ford Mustang which ended up being neither, having a great many mechanical problems and just not generally being manueverable (I was used to Miatas)…Hmmm… an impressively run on sentence so far. Let’s restart, when I sold that POS Mustang I said my next car is going to be something I REALLY want. The SV650 was a bike I saw and immediately loved. For cars it’s much harder. Sure Corvettes are nice, the new Miata’s gorgeous, but I always wanted to build my own car. Funny thing, I had selected the DF Goblin as my kit car of choice. Similar to the Ariel Atom, but with easier to find components and MUCH lower price… I spent the last couple of months watching for a Cobalt to come up. I wanted an SS Supercharged minimum, but then I started pricing things a bit more and the WRX based 818 started to seem a lot more reasonable. Admittedly the justification is: if I’m maybe doing this once in my life, I might as well [insert large amount of money here]. That said my budget has ballooned to about 15-20k depending on how much I can get for the excess donor parts. Here’s the thing… a brand new WRX starts around 26.7k…Mine will be 1000lbs less and probably higher horsepower…and the project has started! Project Bugeye WRX is officially home!
As you can probably see the motor’s removed. That’s what really happened…I looked up craigslist for WRX’s and lo and behold I found a guy that was selling a WRX…head gasket blown and he had a forged internals short block waiting to go in… It’s like half the work is done for me! (sort of…the downside is, having not taken it apart myself, I have little idea how to put it back together). That said he was going for a hybrid build 2.5L motor paired with 2.0L heads and transmission. I made a few calls today to FFR as well as a machine shop that specializes in those heads. This’ll end up expensive, but I’ve already got my first parts to list tomorrow…and we had a garage sale this weekend…made about 400 bucks selling off old projects. Just sold some more craigslist stuff yesterday and today for 380. I’ll list the good condition STI trunk and all the door skins tomorrow. I won’t need them. This project will come together in no time! Now I just need to get the gumption to actually order the kit. It’s been configured and sitting on my laptop for days…It’s just…somewhat frightening to pull the trigger… It’s what I want though…it’s always been the dream… so many tough decisions though…convertible or hardtop? In the mean time enjoy this photo of our Mazda 3 with an extra engine in the back!
And an extra engine sitting outside the garage!
It Rhymes with Hockey 