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120v welders
- Thread starter stangn99
- Start date
That's awesome. Thanks for that.
Can they be licensed in Ontario? There used to be a home built class but the last discussion I had with someone who had built a car said his was licensed before they shut down some loopholes. A year later and he would have had a man cave ornament.
Somehow legislation to correct one problem resulted in the baby being thrown out with the bath water.
There are some avenues that work. A friend put a jeep body over a tube frame stockcar chassis and registered as a jeep. Another acquaintance builds ridiculous vehicles every few years and gets them registered somehow (motorcycle with sidecar driven from the sidecar, Hand build T-Rex looking thing with Busa power, etc). Maybe you pick up a VIN from a car with a similar motor (corvette?) and register it that way?
Would not be registered as a kit car? I mean hell I don't know enough about it, but am curious.
Would be pretty awesome to build a car like that eventually. But time....money...skill are something that are needed lol.
Maybe? That used to be easy. A long time ago, gov't changed things and made it hard/impossible is my understanding. The other option is you could say it is 15 years old and import it? Homebuilt trailers are still ridiculously easy (walk up, tell them what year and colour, pay your money, no inspection required). Honestly too easy. Requiring an inspection of something you built yourself is not a terrible idea (unnecessary for some people, very necessary for many others). It still surprises me that there are so many requirements for importing vehicles and so few for a trailer you build.
I can't remember what the government was trying to fix. Possibly they were trying to eliminate some untested imports and in doing so slammed the door on anything that hadn't been crash tested etc. Kit cars were the collateral damage IIRC.
There used to be a hot rod class. A hot rod was defined as any vehicle that had a motor not available to the vehicle at the time of manufacture.
You could also just straight up steal a car and register it as a homebuilt.
It was cheaper to license a factory trailer as home built. If a registration was lost you just said it was home built. People had "Home built" trailers with manufacturer's labels still on them.
I "might" have one of those. Maybe not, I can't remember anymore. Honestly most trailers I have had get registered as homebuilt. When you switch it up, just change the colour on the registration and move the plate.
It seems the government doesn't trust us. Feeling is mutual.
Part of the problem is relying on ethics where skill and money is involved. As mentioned above welding up some tube is easy, leading some unskilled entrepreneurs to get in over their skill level. Add to the problem that people don't tend to build 28 HP model T Fords but instead 1000 HP low flying airplanes.
A friend had a HP 350 CI V-8 put into his S-10 pickup and it cost him close to $20,000. There were shops that would have done it for less than a quarter the price but the work was crap.
Part of the problem is relying on ethics where skill and money is involved. As mentioned above welding up some tube is easy, leading some unskilled entrepreneurs to get in over their skill level. Add to the problem that people don't tend to build 28 HP model T Fords but instead 1000 HP low flying airplanes.
A friend had a HP 350 CI V-8 put into his S-10 pickup and it cost him close to $20,000. There were shops that would have done it for less than a quarter the price but the work was crap.
I "might" have sold mine.
I'm guessing that the industry isn't big enough here for the manufacturers to get things moving. The market would be split between kit cars and home built with a ton of legislation to sort out and every case unique.
Why couldn't they model something after the EAA. A home built airplane is built to known standards and inspected along the way.
Why couldn't they model something after the EAA. A home built airplane is built to known standards and inspected along the way.
Probably not worth it. Even a homebuilt plane is tens of thousands or more. A lot of homebuilt cars are a high hp collection of garbage built for very little money.
I'm not sure I agree on the target market. The guy I was talking to had $15,000 in the paint job. An off frame restoration can be six figures.
I don't think it would be a good idea to cater to the guy that wants to build a V-8 powered home made Lada. It would be interesting to see what would happen to the modified cars if they had to meet annual safety checks as is done in many jurisdictions.
Back to the welding, we don't want anyone to get a donor V-8 pickup, a thousand dollars of steel and put together a custom car using a cheap 120 volt welder as a first weld effort. There are a few YouTube videos where some cool looking vehicles get the once-over by serious builders and correcting the faults is expensive.
The homebuilt car would be subject to a lot of regulations. Weight and balance, centre of gravity, front / rear braking balance for starters. One would have to choose between a modifiable professionally built chassis or paying front end engineering costs.
All critical welds would have to be done by a certified welder or tested to meet the criteria.
The owner could do the body, paint, upholstery and wiring but the big hurdle is crash resistance and safety (Air bags). I'm not sure what CAD options are available for those areas.
Building a custom anything is rarely cheap. You can build a boat hull for a few thousand dollars but then choke when you find the motor is $25,000 plus. The old line about a woman being like a sailboat, the rigging costs more than the hull. In sailing, the wind is free but the sails aren't.
A custom home is more expensive than a development build and it's only custom to you.
In the flying world the home builder compares to a new Cessna 172 or Piper equivalent at well over a half million.
How much does it cost to have a custom bike built? Likely more than it will sell for after.
If you want cheap transportation buy a Chevy.
We're talking an expensive hobby. If you want to go on a budget then you don't build, you customize or modify.
I know people that actually make (or made) money flipping muscle cars and hot rods. Key is flipping, buying something that needs an easy (for them) fix then sell it. Even mild modification, one buddy made good money in the late 80s buying (sometimes importing) clean granny slant six two door mopars, new K member, wrecker V8 and 727... add rally rims, nice ROI when sold--good luck finding anything clean enough of that age today.
Once you are down the road of too much modification (or worse yet modifications to your taste and not the market's) you are done from an investment perspective.
Once you are down the road of too much modification (or worse yet modifications to your taste and not the market's) you are done from an investment perspective.
My grandma had one. An insurance salesman stopped by the farm and while he was there tried to pick up my teenage mom by bragging about his car with a 283 V8. My grandma was not impressed by him and gave him "That's nice dear but my car has a 425, so she doesn't care about your little motor.". Obviously he didn't get a sale or the girl that day.
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Guess I’ve got a new project again.....wiring up a 220V circuit in the garage for the welder to mess around with. Thanks GTAM! Work never stops!
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