Design your own or manufactured buggy?

popeyethewelder.com/facebook questions

 

2012

  • Eduardo Lopez –Designing and building your own buggy or buying a recognized brand buggy?
  • I started with a copy of a Flexifoil buggy, then a copy of the Dragster Libre. NOw I use a Hard Core Libre with front suspencion, it really make a diference to use a recognized brand. It is much more expensive but at the end of the day you see better results.
  • Ken Shaw – I think it depends entirely on your comfort level in your engineering and fabricating skills.  There is nothing more righteous than working gear you’ve designed and built. The problem lies in the iterations one must endure to get to that final piece that is light, strong and sound enough to risk life and limb to it’s mercies.
  • Thierry Delacour – I initially wanted to go for a home made buggy. However, I found that the expense is not so much lower compared to buying a recognized brand one.
    Just look at the price of wheels, bearings, seat, raw material, etc. If you want some high end stuff, this becomes quite costly.
    I did the quoting exercise and estimated a cost around 600 to 700 Euros with a lot of work and no guarantee that it will be functional in the end.
    Finally, I have just ordered a Libre Supertruck II for 1000 Euros.
    In my opinion, DIY is mostly interesting if you want some specific equipment that you cannot find on the market or if you have a way to get cheap piece parts/raw material.
    For example, I may be interested in building a kite bike, no real choice here.
  • Ken Shaw – You’re on the right track, to a degree.  It’s all about exploring possibilities and experiencing the personal fulfillment that comes from “Making” because it’s seldom Cheap and it usually ain’t easy. If it was easy, everybody would build their own gear.Then again, some of us are just wired differently. We can’t help but take the toaster apart, analyze it and put it back together in such a way as to ignite a slice of bread into full blaze and launch it across the room with terminal ballistics properties sufficient to shatter a window. MUHahahaha !!!
  • Blame it on ADD, OCD, DNA, whatever you like.  It’s just doing what we love to do and ya really gotta love it to do it right.
  • Thierry Delacour – We are on the same page, it fully depends on people.
    What I forgot to mention is I am a beginner, so I prefer to ride now with a proven buggy 🙂
    Then after getting some riding experience and hopefully not too many crashes, I will probably explore some tuning possibilities.
  • Ian Nudge Pearse – we made our own, looking at what worked and what didnt on a buggy and added our own flavour and came out with the PKC bug, which we have had nothing but compliments in its ride since we made them. There is one thing that I would alter, but would require a section milled out, but dont really get out as much as I would like to warrant the cost!
  • Ken Shaw – There ya go playing with the toaster again Nudge…  Just make sure you unplug it first, we want all of you guys back on this side of the pond for NABX again soon.  Oh, and bring the toaster, please. That was a very nice piece.
  • Carlos Fandango – There is a world of difference between designing and building your own buggy, or just copying one, if you for instance are just copying a buggy, as long as you have basic common sense and as Ken mentions a natural flare for using tools and developing and manipulating pipe work, then copying a proven buggy is a piece of cake. For a fabricator there is nothing in a kite buggy to raise an eyebrow.
  • I have great admiration to all home brew buggies, especially from people who are not natural fabricators, but people who are using basic materials they have to hand.
  • Why would anyone bother making a buggy when they can buy a cheap second hand buggy almost anywhere these days, well there is the great sense of achievement in actually making a functional piece of equipment that you can actually have a lot of fun with, and if that buggy has been made from materials around the home then chances are it has been made for next to nothing, lets face it you can make a kite buggy as simple or as intricate as you like, like Ken Shaws 4 wheel master piece at NABX 2011.
  • Designing something different on the other hand adds another touch of achievement if you can pull it off, there is nothing quite like having a fully functional buggy that works as well as any other buggy but looks totally different from the norm, the Hungarian buggy makers for instance have designed their buggies to suite their terrain,  a normal buggy would not last them 2 minutes, Sand Yeti is another example in the Dubai desert along with Giorgio and his fully composite buggy, perfect for the dunes.
  • I would guess most people who make a strong functional buggy, do not even think about the cost against a production buggy, they are more interested in having something original, and as long as its strong and well built, a one off or short run set of buggies will hold their value much longer than any production buggy.
  • Personally, I started making a buggy because I could not afford a decent buggy, and I had access to materials at the time at work, so it was the cheap option for me, so I incorporated everything I liked in other buggies in the one, the 06 Fandango Buggy…..the trouble is, and most people will say this, it will never be just one buggy, you will always want to improve and build a better one, mark my words, there will be buggy number two and three and four…….