It took 17 years, but [Ken Imhoff] finally got the car of his dreams. This isn’t a, ‘go down to the dealership’ situation. No, [Ken] built a Lamborghini Countach by himself in his basement.
The build process started off by fabricating a wooden frame to which hand-crafted aluminum panels were attached. The frame of the car was welded out of tubular steel, and slowly, over the course of 17 years, a custom Lamborghini Countach took shape.
When the car was complete, there was one problem left to solve – how do you get a car out of a basement? Rent a backhoe and knock out a wall, of course. Replacing a few cinder blocks in a properly reinforced wall is a lot easier than cutting a Lambo chassis in half, it seems.
It’s an amazing piece of artistry that is a testament to [Ken]’s skill in metalworking, welding, and pretty much any other skill we can think of.
Would be interesting to know the financial costs involved. Parts, materials, what he considers his labor costs and compare that to purchasing an authentic one. Then of course cost of digging it out of his basement could be comparable to a delivery cost. Over all very cool project!
That was the first thing I looked for when I went to his site, didn’t see any costing on it.
There is an 89 countach on eBay for just shy of 140k. I doubt his cost that much, especially if he didn’t use authentic lambo parts. But even if he did spend close to that it was spread out over 17 years.
This is an exceptional build, but the concept of building a lambo in the basement/garage is actually more common than you might think. Most of the ones you see are fiberglass kit cars on a fiero chassis though. I actually just finished the basic chassis structure on an Ariel atom type clone. I’m 23, so if it takes me 17 years it should be right on time for my midlife crisis!
I’m not that much into cars, but this is very impressive.
Never underestimate what you can do driven by an intense desire to have something nice.
In high school I wanted a high end ESP Explorer guitar, but the specific model was way out of my means. Digging around in the wayback archives of ESP’s website I found link to a leaked diagram of all the measurements for the body of a model that was similar to the one I wanted but never made it to production. Took me a month to turn a block of the best Mahogony you can buy for a guitar into a playable guitar that looks, sounds, and feels every bit as good as the guitars that popular guitar legends play on. It cost around $200 after mixing up some wood glue from the insane amount of sawdust and selling that off in the parking lot of a Home Depot (with the manager’s permission of course).