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I first come across the Phantom Vortex on an ebay ad then did some research & found Rich was re-building a damaged one on http://www.ricola.co.uk/
& instantly fell in love with the kit car that had super car looks, & have been looking at it for many years, now I feel I'm almost ready to make a dream come true.
I have never built a kit car before, I know many kits bolt on to an MR2 which seems simple enough, but how difficult would it be to build this one for a kit car newbie?
I have a large garage so have the space, & a good friend of mine who has never built a kit car but has worked a fair bit on car & bike mechanics, he has also fitted body kits, one of which he blended into the body using fibreglass so it all looked like once piece, & installed lambo style doors, although not my taste the results on the finishing quality were very good. He can also weld.
Total kit cost is £13,666 plus donor car & parts, respray, retrims and tools, how much would it all really come to for those who have built it?
I guess how difficult it might be depends on what you are willing and able to take on board and how much money you have to throw at a project or how small your budget is. Having a sizable garage helps a great deal as does having a helpful friend.
This could be a straight forward project for you. Your friend might find it a little more like hard work though.
I've never built a 'kit car' but I have built from scratch and converted some vehicles in my time.
My experiences might differ a great deal from the average kit car builder.
Because the kit can be ordered in parts, I think this makes it affordable so you don't have to throw all the money at it in one shot.
I assume you are given build instructions, if these are followed would it really be that hard? But I understand it's not like putting a piece of ikea furniture together.
With a large garage and good mechanically minded mate then you shouldn't have too much to worry about.
The build manual (if it is still the same as mine from a few years ago) is very detailed and the mechanical parts of the kit are of excellent quality with everything fitting together really well. They even detail how to set up the suspension geometry for perfect caster, camber and bump steer - took me about an afternoon to get mine to the point where my bump steer was barely detectable even using a 2m long straight edge clamped onto the hubs!
If you do come across a problem or are just unsure of anything the support from Phantom is first class.
As to overall cost it very much depends on how much you are going to do yourself.
Because the kit is fairly comprehensive there arn't a huge amount of donor parts to source so the biggest unknown is painting and triming. If you can spray and trim yourself I reckon you could probably get on the road for under £17,000. Factor in spraying and triming by others though and you could be up to £20,000+. If you put the effort in though the finished result is fantastic, most people won't believe it is a kit.
Mine ended up at aprox £25,000 but it's not standard by a long way. Extras on mine over the kit included turbo £1500, twin plate rally clutch £600, 6 pot brakes £1,000, SPA dash £750, Omex ECU + mapping £1,200 and non-standard drive shafts £600. The reason for all the extras was because I had recently had a test drive in a Noble M12 and thought it was fantastic but at £55,000 new or £40,000+ second hand at the time just too expensive for me. So when I saw the Phantom I thought I would make my own, there wern't many Nobles about then (still arn't) but the Phantom was rarer again by at least a factor of 10 and much much pretier.
So if you take exclusivity and beauty into accout the overall cost looks like a bargain to me.
Thank you Ken, that is the kind of info I was looking for.
Have you a photo album online of your phantom?
Also what do you think of the kit car in my ebay link; Veleno? I think too big.
Personally I think the car in the ebay link is hideous, it's ugly, the proportions are all wrong, and then its got a poxy little 1.6 zetec engine in it.
If you're going to do it and can afford it then do it properly
The Vortex is a great kit, still rare, still gorgeous, and you can make it whatever you want if you have the skills.
Mine and Kens are probably the most unique ones, having completely different engines from the normal kit, and a lot more power than the normal kit.
Theres some build pics of mine on [url]www.edpreston.co.uk[/url]
I thought I had taken more, probably lurking somewhere in the computer. Just remembered from looking at these photos that I also installed a Quaife lsd as well.
Kens interior is the more basic type, using the earlier interior moldings. The current interior moldings supplied with the kit are the same as in the silver demonstrator on the Vortex website.
That is a car which was being built by one of the partners in the business, quite different to anything else as the plans were for a Northstar V8 to be in it, however it's still not developed anywhere as the day job takes priority.
Many parts of it wouldn't be sensible to productionise as they're just too complex, such as the dash etc...
