I think what everyone is saying is to either buy a built car and go from there or go into this expecting to spend more than you'd like To farm out and duplicate my build "from scratch", you'd be looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of $20k. If you have some of the expensive parts already (like I did) or can do some of the work (which I'm going to do), then that figure will be lower.

Take a look at the classifieds and buy something there for pennies on the dollar. That's what I did for my first car... then I reached a point where I wanted the car 100% the way I wanted it AND I wanted something that had never been built. The result is what you see in this thread...