Your Ride Your Style

For today's lesson we will be looking at orginality in the tuning scene. You have just picked up your next project. For most of us we have allready researched every part we want to put on our car. Everything from motor, body, chasis and interior has been througlhy gone over. For alot of us though we don't have the funds to build our draem car. So what do we do? This leads you with three main options buy used parts, save until you can afford the patrs you want or buy cheaper versions "knock offs". If you go with the used part route you have to be careful. You never know what condition the parts are in. Research is your best friend here. Make sure you check on the seller's ratings. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Remeber it is buyer beware. Your next option is to save and wait to get the parts you want. With this though it might take you months or even years to save up for. What can happen is newer parts come out that you want or the parts you want become discontinued. But if you do save up and are paitent you will get the results you want. That brings us the last option buying knock offs. This can be easiest option but also carries the biggest risk. As they say you get what you pay for. The quality of the product may not be the greatest and has a lot of risk to put on your car. However you go about it you start to build the ride the way you want. Build it in your image.
After the process of building your ride you now want to show everyone the end results of all your hard work. You either begin buy posting pics of your ride on car forums or you take it to car shows and meets. You wait to see what people will say about your ride. For the most part you hear positive feed back. You will get a lot of good jobs or looking goods. But then you finally hear it or see it posted online. Someone ridicules your ride. They say it isn't JDM enough or make fun of the color, wheels or what you have done to the engine. They will nitpick every little detail to death. They will claim they are an expert and they know what it takes to build a proper ride. That if you don't listen to them your ride will always be made fun of. Mostly this will just be one indvidual. Sometimes though you will get a group of people telling you this. This will begin a mob mentality and you will be critized for everything. You begin to question why you even built the car in the first place. But then again who are you building the car for anyway? We are all guiltiy of it, we want to please the masses. We want to be praised for what we build. Remeber though this is YOUR car. You build the car the way you want. Don't just listen to everyone and how they say to build one. If you look at the most popular trends out there, they were started cause someone wanted to be diffrent. Someone dares to be diffrent. They know they will catch a lot of heat for doing it but they don't care. Then next thing you know someone will try it out. Then more people will try it. Next thing you know you have a trend. The JDM look started this way. As did wire tucks, low offset wheels, two tone engine bays and the "racecar" show look. If you really think about it that is how the whole import tuning scene started. The key to all of this is orginality. People dared to be diffrent. They did what others though was wrong. Anyone can look at a catalog and buy every part from a company. But then every car would look like a "catalog car". You would just take say a Honda and order every part from Mugen's or Spoon's catalog. Then though every Honda would look the same excpet for a diffrent color. What fun would that be? A world where every 240 is built to be a drift car, every Lexus a VIP car, every EVO a track car or every Honda a JDM, wire tucked, low off set clone. Not the world i wanna live in. To keep this from happening it is as simple as just being yourself. Do what you want and don't listen to the haters. The haters only talk cause they don't know how to be original. In the end everything comes down to you. Make the car the expression of what you want. When it is all said and done you can be proud knowing it is all yours. All the hard work will be worth it in the end.