[GlynMeek]

Mike...there are LOTS of us on this forum who have built our own Cobras. As a complete neophyte wrt building a car, I was able to build a Lonestar in 15 months. I did EVERYTHING myself except paint it (although I did ALL the prep work for that (200 hours)). Go check out some of my gallery pics to see my efforts. If your friend ahs worked a lot on commercial vehicles, that will be invaluable and more than a lot of us had when we started.

In my humble opinion, given time and interest and a modicum of technical expertise and comfort with tools, then it is indeed a good, reliable, INTERESTING, FUN and AMAZING experience to build your own Cobra.

Now, wrt which producer, you have opened up the perennial can of worms on this forum, and mine will only be one of many responses. Opinions are just like a$$holes, and everyone will have them. There are LOTS of existing threads about this very subject, but you will find that most of us have an inbuilt bias towards whichever one WE built! My recommendation is to a) make a list of what you are looking for in a Cobra i.e. comfort, speed, accuracy to the originals, price, location etc. and go from there when you examine manufacturers literature b) read as many of the other threads on this subject as you can using the 'search' capability on 'which kit' or something similar, and c) go visit (if you can) your top 2 or 3 choices.

Good luck and welcome to the madness!

Glyn