Project Binkey #27 is out!

As the title suggests. If anybody needs me, I'm watching a couple of blokes making brackets.

I have not replied to this thread yet because I'm still racking my brain trying to think of the AC/DC song that the shifter cable montage reminds me of.

It's RIGHT. THERE.  Slowing the video down to 75% speed seems to make it sound more right.  It's kind of like Hell's Bells times Have a Drink On Me.

Of course, there's a good reason for that

They seem dangerously close to actually finishing!

Honestly, I can't wait for their engine teardown.

I wanna see just how pretty they make it.

I lost interest. I built two cars from scratch, and it was accomplished by not losing sight of the goal. We apparently have different goals.

Their goal seems to be about maximizing Youtube ad revenue by inventing new story arcs. (Lately I've been using the old TV series, "Lost", as an lesson in how endless story arcs hurts the product.) It seems like the car's turned into a project where they're don't actually want to finish. I get it, it's about money, and I guess I thought it was about a car. Maybe I'd enjoy it more had I not built anything.

I think you're wrong there. They're building a complete car. HVAC, automatic wipers, nice clean wiring, etc. They're also heavily constrained by packaging which makes for some clever and/or complex solutions. It's fairly clear that this was the plan from the start, in every episode you see indications that the most recent work was expected years ago - in the most recent one, they added recovery points to all four corners, and they'd left access to weld them in place way back when.

This most recent episode is one of the last before teardown for paint. If they were looking purely to monetize, the release schedule would be a lot more frequent and consistent.

In reply to kb58 :

The way they are going about it, it looks like they had all this stuff planned in advance, except for some of the details like the flip front's mechanism and other things that you can't fully plan for until you have the reality of the free space available sitting in front of you.

I mean, they did start the very first episode with the fully-concieved, engineered, and built chassis jig/lift/rotisserie/surface plate/dolly thing.  That alone would have been worth a two or three episode Howie Did It series.

The way I see it, having been involved in similar work, it's progressing exactly as normal.  The fun and major bits take 10% of the time, it's all the details that suck up all the time.  And money.  What is impressive to me is that zero corners are being cut.  Do it right, do it once.  That takes time.

In the homebuilt experimental aircraft world, the word is: the part you practice, the part you screw up, and the part that goes on the airplane.  This project is completely reasonable. 

In reply to kb58 :

you are severely over-estimating how much ad revenue a show like theirs can actually generate. I have enough close associations with some YouTubers to know that amount is miniscule for the number of videos they produce. 

While I have the upmost respect for the cars you've built, they are by your own admission, track cars.  The fit and finish required for such cacrs is far less than for a pure street car.  What they are doing is more along the lines of NOHOME's Molvo build, turned up to 11. 

While I have not built a car from scratch, I have done enough restoration and car modification work to know how time consuming that last 10% is.  And because my plans for my own 1800ES includes a lot of the intricate details Nick and Richard are so focused on, every episode serves to remind me of the task I have ahead of me.  And I'm not even planning to swap out the drivetrain. 

In reply to Ian F :

Agreed - Jeff from "homebuilt by Jeff" gave a breakdown on how much he's getting in YouTube revenue. Granted, Bad Obsession Motorsports is a much bigger channel that also has merch and a Patreon, but I don't think the guys are giving up their day jobs.

Also - they've put out 27 videos plus a couple of Howie Did It episodes over a 6 year period. That's not get rich quick territory :)

I cannot help but include brackets among my potential fixes for nearly any project. 

Bruce

I heard about Project Binky in passing a couple months ago.  At first I thought “oh that sounds neat” … until I started actually watching it about 2 weeks ago

…well, I’ve been up to date for about a week now, and have been waiting for this to come out.

Also, the only things I bought during the holiday sales were metalworking tools.  I may be marginally obsessed at this point.  I’m strongly considering finally cutting up my perfectly good autocross car to install the GT4 driveline that’s been hanging out under my work bench for several years…

In reply to BoxheadTim :

I was going to say, isn't the shop Binky is in their actual day job? So regular customer cars come in for work (based on Binky, it really could be ANYTHING) and there is minimum 40 hours on the day to day BEFORE they even look at Binky, and as it had been stated, if they were on the YouTube income bandwagon, they would not be doing that great due to the irregular schedule of them posting videos

If you think all this waiting has been hard, just wait until it is in the paint shop for 4 to 6 months!

They are building their own bespoke car, to their own spec with a standard of workmanship defined by them and them alone. They certainly get to set their own timeline as well.

I don't feel like they owe me more content. I feel lucky I get to follow along and just enjoy it when it is available.

I think the videos are a good indication of how much work "should" go into these sorts of builds, but rarely ever do. You start a project with some grand scheme, underestimate the timeline to completion, underestimate the amount of work required, underestimate the amount of re-dos required, etc. I'm actually getting to the point where I don't look forward to their videos for the same reason I suck at finishing my own projects. I'm bored and want to start another crazy project. The good news is they started the Escargo project much like any of us would have done before finishing Binky. Classic.

Also forgot to mention the amount of effort it takes to film, edit, and release the footage in an interesting format for us freeloaders to enjoy or mostly complain about. Maybe it's not Herculean, but a lot of effort none the less.

In reply to captainawesome :

Some YouTubers have estimated that every minute of video you see represents about an hour of work, although I'm sure it varies a lot based on the intricacies of the editing and voice-over content and music and... 

In reply to captainawesome :

I like that they called attention to that very ADD in this episode.

Enlisted the help of one of my aunts, who is a big AC/DC fan.  She said "definitely Bon Scott era, I can hear the lyrics in my mind, let me get back to you."  She just got back to me.