Total costs....

This will be updated as I go, to keep track on what I spend on the car.

£97.56. First lot of steel for the chassis, from Camp Steel.
£42.00. Suspension brackets from Ebay - Daveo1211.
£56.45. Bushes and crush tubes from Ebay - shmason2011.
£440. Donor MX5.
£50.44. Steel tube for suspension.

Total as of 04/09/2013. £686.45.

Other costs (not car parts but used to build the car).

£85.00. Argon gas (£55 will be returned deposit at the end of the job).
£137.99. 1 tonne engine crane (hoping to recover at least half of that by selling the crane after I'm done with it).
£13. Welding wire (this won't be the last one!)
£8. Socket for the rear hubs.
£40. Delivery of above mentioned MX5.

New section, sales!!

£50 wing mirrors.
£50 soft top.

First post

Time to get documenting methinks! I've been building my car now for many months, but actual work time maybe only a couple of days. I'd like to blame a busy social life, but it's more to do with parenting duties...

So, this is how it started, way back in February...

First purchase, chassis metal. Purchased from Camp Steel, in the centre of Birmingham. Nick Brown was good enough to cut them to lengths suitable to fit in my car, and also let me have a rummage in the scrap bin for some odds and sods. I saw a lot of plate steel that will work well for later stages of the build, but for now I've just got some 2mm for welding practise. I'll have to see whether he does the scrap on a per kilo basis or whether I could make some similar arrangement.
Prices at this time were;
1" x 1" x 1.6mm ERW Tube x 6.1 M        £10.90 each +VAT
3/4" x 3/4" x 1.6 ERW Tube x 6.1 M        £7.95 each +VAT
I have 6 lengths of 1", 2 of 3/4". They were all cut in half for transport.
First attempts with the hacksaw showed that a) my cutting skills are in need of improvement, and b) it's going to take a while...
10/02/2013. John off Locostbuilders was kind enough to provide me with lots of pieces of plate steel ready cut. £25 later and I have nearly all the pieces I'm going to need, I reckon maybe an A4 piece of 3mm steel will be enough to cover the rest. The diff mounting should be interesting though, I'm hoping to take advantage of a new casing which will use the Ford diff mounting brackets. I don't like the MX5 diff mounted as a whole, it seems to be a bit of a 'bodge' in my opinion.

First segment completed. A while back I had completed a one fifth scale wooden model to see if there were any issues with the plans, turns out it did miss something (more on that later).

Next job, cockpit frame;

So that was February....