The Plan

Nick and I have been talking about and planning the build for about the last 6 months. Starting in the Spring when we went to a kit car show, to have a look over the types of car available and to get an idea of the price etc. The Zero seemed to be one of the cheapest kit cars around, and also one of the best looking, so its not a big surprise that after some more investigation we eventually settled on building a Zero.

The next thing to plan was the donor car for the Zero. The kit is based upon a Sierra, so that is almost a given as the donor car, however I was not keen on the idea of the old Sierra engine. We looked at many different options from newer ford zetec engines, to bike engines, to larger engines. We have decided on a fairly small (1.8 - 2L) turbo charged engine, as this should fit in the chassis without too many mods, be significantly more powerful than a sierra engine and not be crazy loud / high revs like a bike engine. We have not made the final decision on which car to get this engine from yet, the two front runners are a Nissan 200sx and a Saab 900. I'll go into more detail on this decision in another post soon.

I've set myself a target budget of around £5,000 and hopefully we won't go too much over that. I think it would be tough to make the car for less than that without cutting quite a few corners. I'll let you know how we get on keeping to that budget!

So now we have come to the point where the actual build starts. The basic plan is to get hold of the Sierra donor car and take the transmission etc that we need from it out, then get rid of the rest of the car. Then we will take the engine out of the engine donor car and get rid of the rest of that car. Finally we will get the Zero plus kit (comes with more than just the basic kit parts, so less of the extras to worry about) and put it together with the donor parts we have. Ideally you would like to take the parts off the cars and put them straight into the kit car, but unfortunately space contraints mean that having more than 1 car in pieces at once is not really a possibility.