Students in Year 10 are in the driving seat of an exciting after school project which involves building kit cars from scratch.
Overseen by workshop technician Ben Scanlan, who was himself a pupil at the UTC in 2015, and Paul Lane, a helpful dad of a Year 10 pupil, the children are having a great time tinkering with the car to get it road-worthy.
There are three Tiger Avon kit cars at the school, one which came fully built, one which is almost built, and one which is being worked on currently.
Although instructions are provided, Ben says they are quite ‘basic’ so it’s a good thing there is a completed model to copy!
“It’s slow, small progress, but we are getting there. It takes around two years to build, but of course we’ve had Covid and exams slowing us down.
“The manual, if you can call it that, isn’t that useful, so we’re using the finished car to copy. We do things like lift the carpet to see how the wiring works and we don’t always get it right – if we make a mistake, we’ll just pull it apart and try again.”
Once completed the aim is to sell the cars and use the money to buy either more kits or invest in another pre-production car for students to tinker with, such as the two Civic models which were donated by #Honda.
And even though most of the tinkerers will still be too young to drive a finished kit car, Ben says they are benefitting from the social side of building something together that will actually work, and it is supporting them in their #STEM curriculum, particularly engineering.
- The club is currently open to Year 10 students, but will consider opening it up to other years if there is enough interest.