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Hello all,
TL;DR- I plan to purchase a Dayonta kit in ~2025
I’m not particularly new to the forums, but I figured I’d say hello. I wanted to post my journey on how I came to decide on a FF build. As a serial lurker, I tend to enjoy more detailed posts on build threads. So sorry if it ends up being a novel in length.
I’m a born and raised Floridian from Orlando. With Daytona International Speedway in my backyard, I was attending racing events from a pretty young age. I was there when number 3 hit the wall in turn 4. I've attended many Rolex 24s and 12 Hours of Sebring events. So my love of performance cars and racing is deep rooted in who I am. That being said, being an engineer is something I wanted to do since I started high school. At 6’1” in 10th grade with no karting/drivng experience, being a professional racing driver was kind of out of the question. So to specifically be an engineer involved with automotive applications was the next best thing I could think of. As far as cars go for me, I’ve always loved a mint classic car. I found I had a particular interest in a 67 Camaro, they just look so mean and pretty. I understand Lambos and other supercars turn heads, but a perfect classic rumbling by turns heads for all the right reasons in my opinion.
In 2007 I started at UCF in Orlando for a Mechanical Engineering degree. From late high school to early college, I still went to many local races, including the ones mentioned above. I also became a fan of Formula 1 and ended up attending multiple Canadian Grand Prixs in Montreal. After my sophomore year, I found a club on campus called SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers). This is a club that designs, manufactures and races vehicles from scratch every year. Its essentially 2 teams at UCF: The Baja and Formula teams. The Baja team builds a small off-road vehicle with a 2-stroke engine with 5hp, while the Formula team builds an open wheel, full suspension vehicle with up to 610cc 4-stroke engines (610cc was the rules when I left, it may have changed). As soon as I found out about them, I jumped in and fell in love with designing and manufacturing in general, but especially with high performance components. Unfortunately, when it came to choosing between doing homework/studying and building a racecar, I almost always chose the racecar. I ended up failing out of UCF in 2012. I did end up utilizing the skills I learned (manual lathe, manual and CNC mill, general fabrication) to enter into the manufacturing industry as a machinist.
During the next few years, I gained industry knowledge and with my partial engineering education, ended up moving more toward design and machine programming than fabrication and machining. In 2014 I got married, and after another year of just working, I found that the engineers that I was working with were not intellectually out of my wheel house. In fact, most of them didn’t seem to understand the basics of manufacturing required to design the parts they were designing, leaning on me and the company I was working for’s knowledge to make the best design changes to the parts for their applications. So I figured, why not me? In 2015 I decided to go back to school to get my Bachelors in Engineering. Seeing that I was working full time, I went to a smaller, cheaper school than UCF. The school I went to also offered all online classes, which took a little getting used to, but was what I needed. Taking 1-2 classes a semester makes a 4 year degree take significantly longer. About a year or so back into school, I started to think about my dream of owning a high performance machine of some sort, and the thought of a blacked out 67 Camaro with chrome trim really appealed to me. So I started looking into the specs, and I was a bit disappointed with what I was seeing. It made sense, the vehicle was pretty old, and I know there is such a thing as resto-mods, but I was just thinking, why isn’t there something that has a modern hardware with a classic body on top? And that is where I found Factory Five. Of the kits offered, living in Florida, the coupe was the obvious choice for functionality and in my opinion, the sheer classic beauty of it. I know a Cobra could be utilized year round down there, but with the heat and rain, something with a roof made more sense to me, seeing as performance wise, they are incredibly similar.
In 2017, my wife and I bought a house with the plans to fill it with children while we were still relatively young enough to enjoy playing with them. In 2018, I welcomed my son into the world. Leading up to his birth, the thought of building a car was just an idea, an unspecified goal with no time table. But as I started to research FF, I couldn’t stop thinking about how amazing it would be to build this car with him once he was a bit older. So I started to formulate some concrete goals. The first was to finish my degree. As we all know, money is a pretty big obstacle in having and building one of these. Luckily I was already on that, not making the mistake of my previous attempt at college with a 3.3 GPA. I also created an account on the forum to lurk and learn (Yankee407). Yankee is my last name, and 407 is the area code in Orlando. As you can see since I never really posted on that account, I decided to update it to my current location, as it is unlikely that will change in the near future. Even if I do move, I won’t be changing the user name again. Before you ask, no I am not a Yankees fan.
In 2020 the pandemic hit, and with spending more one on one time with my wife instead of with the extended family with a new kid, I decided to propose a plan to purchase a kit. She was 100% onboard as long as some financial goals were hit first. I made a plan to purchase a kit in 5 years. The beginning of 2021 started with me enrolling in my final semester. Needless to say, I was quite excited to be done with school and was looking forward to the reward of a potential job that was more satisfying and higher paying. I was currently working at a marine component manufacturer designing parts and programming machines to cut said parts. Not a bad job, but with the debt incurred from buying a house and having a kid, not enough to reach my 5 year goal of purchasing a kit. Leading up to graduation, I started sending my resume out. My wife and I both agreed that we did not want to raise our son long term in Florida. As a native, its a wild place with little to no culture outside of the Mouse and the beach. This was an opportunity to move out of state and enjoy something called “seasons” as well as raise our son somewhere with not as poor public schools as Florida’s legendary bottom of the barrel status in that regard. I graduated in May, and spent the next few months applying and interviewing to jobs that weren't the right fit. Then something happened that I thought was no longer possible for me.
There was a job opening at Roush in Detroit, and I ticked all of the qualifications. I had given up on my dream of working in the automotive field and just accepted that general manufacturing is what I would be able to get. I nailed the interview and was offered a position with a great leap in pay, and an interesting project schedule within the department. I accepted, and we started turning the gears towards selling the house and moving to Livonia, a nice city in the suburbs of Detroit where Roush is located.
This is where things became very binary. I started working at Roush and immediately got along well with the team. I was basically fulfilling the role and then some. Work life was great. For whatever reason, my wife seemed excited to move, but when reality hit after we moved that her friends and family were no longer a 20 minute car ride away, home life went downhill fast. We did buy a nice house (with a garage of course), and really enjoyed the area, but my marriage hit a wall pretty hard and quickly. Nothing made it better, and it just continued to get worse. Unfortunately, in November of last year, we ended up filing for divorce.
As of right now, this is definitely a setback, but with my newly acquired freetime, I’ve started to read the forums again regularly. Edwardb's (relatively local now!) two build threads are legendary and were quite enjoyable to go through. It has rekindled the desire to get one of these kits and actually start taking the steps toward getting one instead of endless planning, or the last year of putting those plans on hold. Knowing more of the current lead times, parts required and (a pretty nifty) relationship with Roush, things are starting to align for this to be attainable in the near future..
Anyway, I still plan to purchase a kit, but with a new financial situation and knowledge of up to an 8 month lead time on the kit, even longer on some specific parts, that may actually be moved up. I’ll continue to lurk, mostly on the type 65 coupe build threads to learn from other’s processes. I’ll obviously post when I start to order my kit with a build thread.
Hello all. I hope to become an regular poster on this forum soon. And for those local to Michigan, to see you at Woodward and the London car shows.
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Originally Posted by edwardb
