BUILD IT RIGHT —
THE PRO TIPS YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO MISS
Imagine being young again and knowing everything you know now. Think of how different you would have handled things, and how much pain and drama you would have saved yourself. Or, when we’re talking about building cars, think about how different you would go about your build and how much money, time, and heartache, you’d have saved doing it the right way the first time around. We see it in almost every issue of NZV8 — a car owner who got the process of building their vehicle a bit mixed up.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. We have some of the best car builders in the world right here in New Zealand, and, lucky for you, they were happy to sit down with us to share some of their tips to building your car the right way.
We gave them all a hypothetical situation where you, the car builder, want to build a project that could grace the cover of this magazine once completed. The example given is typical of many cars featured, being that would need major rust repair, paint — including engine bay and various interior components — and an engine and drivetrain build. It would also require engine bay fabrication — including engine mounts and exhaust fabrication — a complete rewire, seat-belt installation, complete interior retrim, bumper and trim repairs and re-chroming, brake conversion, suspension work, as well as selection and fitment of wheels. When listed like that, it sounds like a lot, but the list is typical of the work involved in many quality street cars, restorations, or magazine feature cars. The good thing is, even if your build is simpler than what we’ve used as an example here, the order of the steps you’ll take will still be the same, just with a few steps missed out.
As anyone who’s built a car will tell you, it always costs more than you think, takes longer than you think, and causes much more stress than you ever imagined — and that’s just on a build that goes well. There are countless stories of builds that have gone wrong and either languished in the back of a workshop for years on end or come out with substandard work having been completed. It always helps to ensure that you’ve done your research on the businesses you intend to involve and make sure that you have a good plan in place for how you will manage the build or have it managed.