Hi All,
Been looking at buying another Golf Gti MkII as a trackday car, then thought about a MkI mr2. However having seen the Locost book at Halfrauds and now finding this site I am considering building a Locost as it seems a neat way of ending up with a pretty good car for not much money. I was wondering if any of you who have managed to complete your project would mind telling me how much it eventually cost and what problems you faced?
Thanks for your help.
Chris.

I'm nowhere near done and have already spent over £250. I have a stack of donor parts, some reconditioned, and a near complete chassis. A long way to go yet, but it's good fun.

Hi Chris and welcome to the site,

The cost of your biuld is determined by what you want out of it at the end.

The bare minimum would be around the 800-1000 mark thats doing 99% of it yourself and usting as many donor parts as possible with little or no reconditioning. Then you can go up to 15K + for some of the more exotic bike engined cars and the highly tuned 4, 6, and 8 pot motors.

You put in what you get out really so the choice is yours

I'll start the bidding at "a damn sight more than £250!"

I think Mr. Champion wrote his book quite a long time ago. However, I would not discourage you from doing it. I would recommend a welding course first off if you're not too good at it (like me!). Precision is the name of the game. Read the forum here - it's a wealth of information. Ask questions - do not be embarassed, the members on this forum are good people and happy to help out. Get "the knowledge". Do it.

Dunno about the actual costs myself as I'm building a Robin Hood.

<quick rant>
I would not recommend a Hood by the way - you may as well build it from scratch!
<end rant>

Regards

JonB

Hi Chris,

I started out with 'The Book' and a lot of enthusiasm. I then looked at the cost vs. time equation and decided that although it cost a little more I was better off buying a chassis and starting from there. This was driven by the need to build the car in a manageable time frame (18 months).

I chose the MK Indy and have absolutely no regrets with my choice.All in I expect the car to cost between £3-4k. Although I have been lucky that I have access to all the tools, space and a like minded father. This has gone a long way with things like modifying and making parts. I could not have got as far as I have without this site either.

Hope that helps!

Nick

Try a search for the thread "HHHhhhhow MUCH!". That'll give you an idea.
It all depends on how simple you keep it, how much you do yourself and how long you're prepared to look for or wait for a bargain.

Personally I'll be about £3500 to finish for a book car with everything rebuilt, a couple of shiny bits (seats, shocks etc.) and a few tools.

I think you can virtually double that if you buy all the bits.

I think Colmaccoll is spot on with the range he gives.

Mines cost me £350

That's for a second hand chassis, wishbones, front shox, seatbelts, and a few other small items

Running gear will be taken from stock.. ( i have an array of sierra spares..

I recon I will bring it in in the 1K region, but having lots of parts lying arround from other projects will keep the cost down..

TT

I am hoping to keep to not much more than £1000, but have spent about £400 so far and not even bought my tubing! Have got things like headlights, nose cone, roll bar, shocks etc plus my donor for the amount spent so far, and can knock £80 off that for the bits I just sold from the donor. If you look around there are secondhand bargains to be had. My plan is to upgrade when the car is built but to get it on the road as cheaply as possible - although hopefully it won't look it.

First things first:

Welcome to the madhouse!!!

We have begged, scrounged and borrowed and managed to hit our target price. Though it is a little more than £4000... well, quite a bit more. However, it depends what you wanna do. We wanted a BEC with nice finishing touches and quality parts. Hence, you end up paying for it. It's basically down to what you want to afford against what you want it to look like.

Have a look at our site - we've been advised that most of the info. is good, who are we to judge?

Have a great build, always remember to plan your work and work your plan. Yu won't be dissapointed.

Get into the spirit by visiting one of the various meeting around the country and feel the great welcoming feeling of the Builders....

ATB

I reckon about £4K for mine. That includes a bunch of tools and welding classes.

That'll be enough to build a car that'll destroy 4grands worth of MK2 Golf on a track!

James

So long as you wait for the right part at the right price you can get some cheap second hand items from Ebay or this list. I used as much from the 1 donor as possible and made anything I could.

My 2 big expenses will be the right set of wheels and the best seats I can afford at the time.

well i didnt give estimated costs of mine because its not complete but seeing as others have ignored that bit i shall add my comments

I am looking at a realistic figure of getting my CBR1000 BEC on the road for £2600 with bought bodywork and GRP seats.

I had an advantage because i bought a rolling chassis and seperate engine - this price is assuming the engine is ok and doesnt need any major work.

Im not planning anything fancy with the interior - i learnt that lesson with my Formula 27 - Keep it Simple!

I am trying to keep expense to a minimum and expect to spend around £1200 to £1500, with the most expensive item being the fibre glass body parts.

RPS

The costs soon seem to multiply - and some of the larger costs seem to come from unspected places, for instance I was quite shocked to find out that a pair of decent seats will cost me about £250.....

Other things that bump your budget are items that you really need expensive equipment to do yourself so you end up having to pay for it - like getting a propshaft made up and balanced.

It all soon adds up - I have spent about £2000 so far and expect a minimum of £3500 more to complete

Admittedly I am not going down the cheapest route and I am building a Tiger Avon (only chassis/body from tiger) but still...

I'm going the self build route so that I can spread the cost.

I cannot afford a complete kit package and so have decided to spread the cost of building. When I have any spare cash I'll buy what I need.

With two kids and a wife I want to hide the cost of this project

I also want my son to help when hes a bit older ie. 18. He's 4 at the mo. Shows you my build time scale

Cheers

Mark

Hi,
I'm well past the half way point and have bought all the "shiny bits" that I'm going to need as well as all the major mechanicals. I have spent around £2300 and expect to finish at about the £3000 mark. As with most things, you can trade money for time and time for money so you can vary this figure to some extent. I'd still say that if you want a car which is SVA compliant and half decent looking/performaing then £1500 is about as low as you can realistically go unless you are exceptionally lucky or talented and happen to have your own fully equipped machine shop.

By the way, a good £500 of my costs are for re-usables such as tools and excess quantities of fasteners (bolts, nuts etc) where boxed quantities made more sense.

Cheers,
Craig.

On "The Other Forum" (aka TOL), someone invented the LEU - Locost Equivalent Unit. One LEU is worth £250.

Some people have spent between 1 - 2 LEU's to build a Locost, while others spend 10 - 20 LEU's.

rgds,

David

I can only estimate the cost of mine as I don't dare add it up!
I did some engine work (gas flowing and balancing as well as a rebore) and have twin 45's. Also Cr gearbox and LSD. Nice seats and instruments too.
So I guess I spent about £5K in all. Not bad considering Snoopy valued it at £8.5K for insurance purposes.

Incidentally I bought the Indy because whilst I could have built the Chassis and wishbones etc myself, the cost of buying them compared with the cost of welders, the hassle of getting it all straight, cutting it all etc. etc. seemed like good value to me. the real cost is in the nice shiny bits (bodywork) and reconditioning your parts

Well worth it though

I would definitely recommend the Indy, it all seems to fit together easily and judging by some of the comments from other kit builders on this forum they are not all like that

No matter how carefully you budget for your build the final cost will always exceed your initial expectations

Mick

so far i've spent shitloads on the first one, sold it and made a little proffit

but now started another (yae) and its cost me 90 quid so far to get me a complete chassis made by myself (metal, welding materials and hacksaw blades) :-)

i intend on spending upto about 2000 english sheets on the car and aim to have it finished before next summer (i'm known on here for my speed-building) hehe