My older brothers bet I would never finish it, but I might as well have been glued to our playroom table because I didn’t get up for three days that summer until the entire model was finished and gleaming. And I had just as much fun organizing my workspace, tools, glue, and paint as I did building the model. It was my first man-cave, the first little place in my life that my sister didn’t want to mess with. The whole experience of car creation just seemed to be so essentially satisfying. I was hooked.

Thirty years later, I’m still at it. Only this time the cars are real, and I’ve learned to share the love with thousands of fans on the internet as together we design the cars that we’re going to build together.

Sangho Kim's drawings of the Rally Fighter concept.

We recently began manufacturing our first car, the Rally Fighter. Designed by one of our 20,000-plus community members, Sangho Kim, it’s a premium, authentic, off-road vehicle that’s also on-road legal. Building a Rally Fighter at our micro-factory is the ultimate kit experience, priced at $74,900.

Open Design
Here’s how it works. Local-motors.com hosts the open collaboration space Local Forge, where people can post their ideas on anything automotive. Most of what’s there is free exploration, but the discussions always come back to the essential question: “What would it look like if I were to make it real?” This is not a fantasy picture site, but a place where engineers, designers, and enthusiasts collaborate on stuff that the big automakers wouldn’t dare to. You can dream anything you want here, but to see it come alive, you must also justify your ideas to your peers and accept guidance from our engineering team.

Kim working on the orthographic drawing.

This open source ethos promotes understanding and sharing by all stakeholders, which eases manufacturing and service later. The result is that our build process accommodates all comers, from 13-year-old Iowa Boy Scouts to 85-year-old businessmen from Kazakhstan.

Our cars are literally open source. The build wiki is accessible and modifiable by anyone. Each build is broken down into day-by-day instruction sets, each with a text listing and photos of all the required parts and tools, and YouTube videos taking you through the entire build step. We build our cars here, but there is no part of a Local Motors car’s assembly that someone can’t study and replicate elsewhere.

Scale mockup.

In the next stage, the community discussed initial concepts of how to fit the necessary components inside the Rally Fighter. For this, we made orthographic packaging drawings, where the original concept is flattened into 2D planes from the side, top, and front and then the major systems (wheels, engine, transmission, driveshaft, axles, seats, steering, etc.) are placed in their proper orientation.

The result: the Rally Fighter would have a lightweight space frame, composite aerodynamic panels, 20-inch shock absorbers, and a mid-mounted engine with rear-wheel drive.

This exercise is effectively ground truth for the engineers focused on function, but any changes to the 2D orthographic views to accommodate gear can also alter the 3D appearance of the car in unexpected ways. To realign the space requirements with the original vision, we snap the orthographic lines back out into a 3D surface, add highlights, gravity effects, and texturing, then render the revised design. With the Rally Fighter, the community’s gut reaction to the renderings was still powerful and positive. We had the makings of a potential car.

The next step was open development to get the Rally Fighter ready for micro-factory production. This is a grand effort, because with each car built, we have to train our “build force” (our customers) anew, so we’ve got to make the process as clear and supportive as possible.

Customers at work.

We use scanners and 3D printers for fluid, rapid prototyping, and fabrication equipment like water jet cutters for rapid manufacturing. We limited the fixed machinery and put everything else on wheels so we can move it around. If you think a rolling crosscut saw is a bad idea, think again.

Our ten build bays are stacked together on the build floor so that customers can eyeball each other in a friendly game of “I can build to standard better than you can.” Competition is an amazing motivator. If it works in Dearborn, it should work here.

Body panels in construction.

Finally, since we demand ten-hour days or more in this car-building boot camp, we include a kitchen and refreshment area managed by a local Arizona Culinary graduate who comes prepared to keep the troops well fed. A happy belly is a productive mind.

That’s how we roll here, and if you breathe automotive and style, I invite you to visit local-motors.com and engage in real-time auto evolution: design, buy, build, and love the car of your dreams.

-Jay Rogers

Glen Warner and his father came to Local Motors from New Jersey to build their own RallyFighter sports car. Making two separate trips to build over a 3-day weekend, they put together a RallyFighter in six days and then had it shipped back home. A farrier by day, Glen, 32, talked to MAKE’s Dale Dougherty about the experience of building car from a kit.

Had you or your father ever done this kind of thing?

No, we’d never built a car from the ground up. I know my dad had some experience working on cars. I myself had never worked on anything to do with a car. It was a whole new experience for me.

So what made you want to do it?

First of all, the RallyFighter car itself is super cool. Once I saw it, I knew that it was the car for me. I always wanted to have the opportunity to build a car. I didn’t know if maybe later in life I’d have that chance. But then I found Local Motors and saw they had all the tools and everything set in place to do it very easily.

So walk me through it a bit. What was day one like?

On day one, you come to the factory, and they have your chassis and the frame sitting there with the engine and transmission sitting next to it. You meet your build trainer. Over the next couple of days, you just start working on the car. The trainer showed us which part needed to go on first. I think it was the gas tank we did first. He showed us where it needed to go, and then we just did it ourselves.

Before I went through the experience, I wasn’t sure how hands-on it was going to be. I was a little worried that I’d be sitting around watching somebody else put stuff on a car. It turns out that you get to do everything yourself, and the Local Motors people are just there to help if you’re having trouble.

Was it pretty clear what to do?

There’s a wiki guide up on the Internet. We’d just watch a tutorial video for each step. The workspace is laid out so well. The tools are sitting right where you need them. And you’re told that when you finish one task, you put all of your tools back and then we know exactly where the tools are again. Then the builder trainer would pull out the tools that we need for the next operation. Then he’d get the little parts out that we needed. I was really impressed with how everything was organized.

What was your dad’s reaction to the first day?

Oh, he enjoyed it too. It’s really fun. The first couple days there—it’s amazing how far you get along on a car. You really see it coming to life.

How far did you get in that first weekend?

At the end of the first weekend, we had most of the components on the car. The outer shell wasn’t up on the car yet. But the engine, the transmission, the shocks were in there. We had all the linkages. The first weekend is really fun. I’d say the second weekend is a lot more tedious, because you don’t necessarily see the progress like you do the first weekend there.  There’s a lot of small, important stuff you need to do, like putting the plugs in, but it doesn’t have the big impact of the first weekend.

What did you learn as a result of building this car?

I learned how everything works together. When the car needs work, I’ll be able to go back and fix it myself for the most part. It’s really nice knowing where everything is because you put everything on it. You know what you need to do. And if you need to, you can drop in a whole engine and transmission.

This car is not a mystery to you.

Yeah, that’s true.  Unlike most cars, where you’re closed in, everything is closed off in plastic, and you have no clue what’s behind it. But then you know exactly what’s there. You know how to rebuild the shocks if they need to be rebuilt. It’s really cool.

So give me an idea of what you did on the last day.

We charged up the air conditioning unit. Then we ran the car. The builder trainer actually drove it around just a few minutes to make sure everything was okay. We let it run for a little while to burn off some of the extra fumes. So on the last day we had a running car that we were able to drive around.

Did you ship the car to New Jersey?

Yeah, I had to ship the RallyFighter home.

This is a car for fun, right? It’s an off-road vehicle.

While it’s an off-road vehicle, I can also use it for my work. It might come in handy for that. I should be able to pull a trailer with it. I shoe horses for a living.

Are you and your dad proud of the car that you built?

Yes. It’s something I know I wanted to do, and it’s nice that I was able to do it, and do it with my dad.

-Dale Dougherty

Greasecar sells complete conversion kits for diesel Volkswagen, Volvo, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Peugeot cars, and Ford, GM, Dodge, and Isuzu vans and trucks. I could not be more pleased with the results of converting my 2004 Jetta TDI Wagon to run on WVO. The kit supplies all necessary components, which upon installation revealed high quality and excellent fit and features. Written instructions and a professional installation CD made the project a complete success for this weekend mechanic.

The neat part about the kit is that it doesn’t compromise the car’s original diesel system. You start the car on diesel and, once up to temperature, you transition to WVO either manually or automatically. Prior to shutdown, a simple button on the onboard controller initiates back-flushing of the WVO lines with diesel fuel so they won’t get clogged with WVO when the car cools.

Once installed, the operation is incredibly simple. The true reward is driving a few hundred miles down the interstate and not seeing your fuel gauge move … wow!

I got the FreeRadical Classic extension kit with cargo deck and giant panniers, and added the WideLoader cargo shelves and KickBack kickstand. Xtracycle favors a mountain bike platform, not road, because the wheels are stronger. I bought a 2002 Cannondale MT2000 mountain tandem with a stong, American-made aluminum frame, and hydraulic disc brakes and quality tires for safety.

If you have any background in bikes, the kit is easy. Components are good quality; a “snap deck hook” failed on me, but I’m a heavy-duty user. The documentation is good, and if something wasn’t mentioned, a quick YouTube search had it figured out — the Xtracycle community is rad, and totally open source.

The kit bolts to the bike in three strong and strategic places: the dropouts and rear triangle near the bottom bracket. Moving the rear wheel back 15 inches doesn’t affect the handling on such an already-long bicycle. From my local bike shop I got a 10-foot hydraulic cable, a tandem rear derailleur cable, and another chain. I completed my cargo-bus-cycle with a Rock the Bike Mothership sound system. Now I ride around with my friends listening to music like we used to do in a car!

The ad brought back kid-time memories for me, as I had dreamed of one day owning a Whizzer, the classic motorized bicycle. It was the only vehicle you could purchase new during World War II. Now I could make one!

The kit arrived from China in three weeks. I opened the box to find that every nut, bolt, washer, and other sundry parts were not packed in tidy little plastic bags but were loose and had obviously rolled around in the box during its journey to me. I had no idea if parts were missing, as there was no assembly manual either.

I went online and found an assembly manual PDF and an assembly video at Gas Bike (gasbike.net). (They also sell a variety of bike motor kits.) Then I picked up a cheap used mountain bike.

Now for the coup de grace — the engine and control mounting! Actually, the process went quite well. The kit uses a chain-driven sprocket that clamps to the rear wheel’s spokes. I found I was missing a part and readily located a replacement at a scooter shop.

Since the now-motorized bike has no starter, I had to get on, aim it downhill, let out the clutch, and hope it started. It did! A nice pop-pop-pop noise like a baby Harley came from the muffler. I turned it uphill and was amazed at the torque that came from that tiny engine.