My son, Jack, and I have been collecting some Formula Vee pieces for a couple of years and Jack has started work on making two cars out of the pieces. He's been out of college for a few years and has one of his FSAE buddies. Theo, helping along. My other son, Chris, will probably get involved too when college and FSAE isn't keeping him too busy. I'm mainly providing the shop space in the back room of Eclectic Motorworks, paying for stuff, and will be doing the painting when the cars are ready.
We started with a $500 find on FB Marketplace maybe 2 years ago. It was a chassis, a body, and pretty much all of the Zink bits but none of the VW bits except for a new front beam. I've been into air cooled VWs for a long time, so we figured we could get the VW pieces from our community. We quickly started mocking this car up with a used transaxle and crankcase.
Like a lot of VW people, I'm on theSamba quite a bit and I found this roller on an original Zink trailer in Kalamazoo, MI one weekend. That's about an hour from me, and the price was absolutely right. It also had nearly enough spares to finish the original car. The only problem was that it was sold. I messaged the guy with my cell number and e-mail just in case. And sure enough, a month or two later, he e-mailed and said the deal had fallen through.
We didn't trust the tires or bearings on the Zink trailer, but it turns out the whole thing would fit inside my enclosed trailer so we took it home that way.
We're pretty sure this isn't Rich Lamb's car (anyone know him?), just the body as the previous owner just built it up from swap meet parts over the years. But it's cool. This picture is from maybe a year ago when we put it on the shop floor for what we call "stare time." We like to stare at a car and think through the build for a little while before we start work.
It's been maybe another year, but Jack and Theo have started working in earnest on getting one car fully built up before we blow it apart for paint. The plan is to prep one for vintage racing (Jack et al) and the other for display (mine).
We don't know a lot about FVs, but there is a guy in Grand Rapids who is one of the national gurus. He's been to the shop and looked the cars over and feels like we've got a good kit of parts. He'll be a great guide for us, but we'll take any advice any of you can offer as this progresses. There really isn't a lot of useful stuff on the internet about Zink FVs, so we thought we'd put this build thread up to help anyone else going down this path. So far, we've mainly just grabbed as many pictures as we can from for sale ads. There's one decent messageboard, but not a lot of pictures.
Anyway, stay tuned and please share anything that may be helpful!
