sl-c body quality questions

[Roark_John]

My question is... if you give someone $22k for a product.. you should expect that product to fall in line with what the seller is stating it will be. Claiming the "other" car is a 250-300hr build is simply false advertising.
Quoted from F5R FAQs:
How long does it take to build the car?
We have only built (and rebuilt!) two prototypes to date. Therefore, a lot of designing was done concurrently with the build which lengthened the build time considerably. We are spending huge amounts of our time developing/building the car, so you don’t have to! We estimate it will take the average builder about 250-300 hours (estimated) to complete the project.


So many inexperienced builders end up spending that $22k and say "Oh chyte, what have I gotten myself into?" Next thing you know you're spending 2k in hours just to get the vehicle to look good and have far exceeded your budget. Or it ends up in the "classifieds" section where the owner is selling at an extreme loss. At some point the consumer should demand a better product that falls in line with what is being advertised. Just my $.02...

Good thing you said this on GT40s.com and not the other site...that's the sort of blasphemous talk that the F5R cadre can't tolerate

I had exactly the same sentiments and said as much. It was not appreciated. Especially when I raved about Fran's fit & finish. That was the tipping point I believe.

Never make the mistake of comparing the two vehicles or mentioning the ACTUAL cost of building them comparably...they will crucify you faster than the Saducees & Pharisees did to Jesus after Pontias Pilate kicked him out of his court.

All I can say is that I'm a HUGE fan of Fran's business model & products...F5R not so much.

 

[Howard Jones]

I'll try and get this back on track a bit. I find the comments on the FF car to be interesting but I confess I have seen one pretty good looking FFC although I don't know the particulars.

I'll tell what I do Know. I have a GTD and a SLC. I did ALL of the body work on my GTD and I would estimate (very close) that I had at least 8 months of work into it. That's a no shit couple of hours a day, 5 days a week and most of the day on many weekends. I would call it 500-550 hours to get it to the point where I could take it and get it painted without paying for any body prep, just put the paint on thank you.

In defence of the old girl I understand that the older makes used a fairly common parent splash off of a real car way back in the day. The original race cars were RACECARS and the body fit was well.....functional and not very symmetrical. As the early body molds were used and used over and over the cars that came from them were quite bad as far as fit lines and door fit go. Mine required a lot of added fiberglass and many many hours of "fuck what the hell did I get myself into". The doors took me MONTHS!!! It came out real nice in the end but I made it a point to really look at the SLC before I bought one with the body fit and finish at near the top of my priority list.

So how is the SLC.......... I would say that having one in my garage for a year now and thinking about the body and door installation, as I did some really personal changes to the chassis to suite a track only build, I can tell you that it will be about 10% of the time and a LOT less difficult. I don't see any fiberglass modifications and very minor surface prep for paint. I think I can put the body together in a couple of weeks without too much trouble. The doors look like about 90 percent easier than my old 40. Just not much to do other than follow the plan. Once they are aligned they look like they will gap real nice.

The rest of the body is so close that I could just mount it on the henge's and body clips and leave it alone. I may just do that, and wait until I have some time on the chassis setup and engine sorting before I paint it. I'll call it an easy pace 60-80 hours. If I took a week off work and hit it all day I could pretty much finish it I think. I just don't like to work that way. The help and advice I have gotten in the form of pictures and door install information from Fran and other SLC builders will really save me a lot of trial and error. Looks pretty straight forward.

So thats what I know from first hand experience.

 

[J. Salmon]

We had to do some body work on ours. My dad had a little ... incident

We don't talk about it.

It was spot on out of the box, no paint, just unfinished gel coat.