UC_Portolio_Book

59 The Beautiful Byers SR - 100 Returns—With a Modern Twist This stunning midcentury fiberglass sport special is back, and the first new example gets Corvette bones and a high - revving ZR - 1 heart. As published in Autoweek—By Graham Kozak: April 30, 2019 Spend enough time working on cars and, sooner or later, you ’ ll start to wonder: How difficult could it be to build one of these things from the ground up -- to design and construct a machine that ’ s really, truly mine? Pretty darn difficult, it turns out. Even assuming you have a fairly good grasp of chassis design and suspension geometry and tuning, and you can build a reliable engine from the crankshaft on up, and you ’ re a decent fabricator and body man to boot, there ’ s the matter of design: Conjuring up a form that works in three life - size dimensions is tougher than it looks. You ’ ll soon find that a blank sheet of paper is an intimidating starting point. Enter the kit car, which (in theory) puts much of the hard work of design to the pros, allowing you -- the ambitious DIYer -- to bask in the pride of having built your very own car without all the headaches. Fewer headaches, at least. The kit car industry flourished in the post - WWII years, as the proliferation of fiberglass made it easy for inventive, entrepreneurial types to create backyard carrozzerias on shoestring budgets and then sell their products in the backs of magazines, shipping parts and pieces to optimistic homebuilders. Runs were limited, on the order of a handful to perhaps a few dozen bodies.