Is this suppose to be a trick question? The easy answer is that the #1 car among millionaires isn't a car at all. It's the Ford F-150 pickup.
If I had a good deal more liquidity I'd buy a Kirkham.
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michael
A man that is young in years, may be old in hours, if he have lost no time. But that happeneth rarely. Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second. For there is a youth in thoughts, as well as in ages... Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
I have a lot of photos from this week, but the guys put me to work on this baby so we could make the deadline! Actually, we are working on another secret project and that kind of has me tied up so the posting has been down. I will make up for it shortly!
Here you can see how we line up a body to mount onto the chassis. Most people don't realize how difficult this actually is. I tell people it is actually easier to take a flat sheet of aluminum and turn it into a body than it is to actually mount the body. Here is why. It is extremely time consuming to get everything lined up. It is almost impossible to hold everything square in 3 dimensional space. Here are a few of our tricks
First, you notice 3 holding devises that we are using.
Vise grips:
Vise grips are really great to hold things down. BUT they slip, crush things, won't hold things that are not flat and square very well, and are generally a pain in the butt. Here we are using them to hold the end of the body in relation to the end of the tube.
Clecos:
As the late Carroll Smith said, Clecos are like peanuts...you can never get enough of them. (I would change the word peanuts for burritos (or a few other things I can think of) but you get the point). Clecos (the copper colored thingy) are temporary fasteners that are spring loaded. The fit directly in the hole where an 1/8 inch rivet goes. They are amazingly strong and will hold way more than you initially think they will. Of course, familiarity breeds contempt and pretty soon you are using them for things like overhead cranes--with predictably unpleasant results. So, I would recommend you just stick to using them to hold bodies together. One word of warning here...clecos are made from spring steel. If you weld around them, you will suck the temper out of the spring and your part will come flying apart--particularly nasty if you happen to have a pool of molten metal close at hand "Oh, that can't happen.", you might say...but you are talking to the voice of a rather warming experience.
Safety Wire:
This stuff is amazing. The side of the car is extraordinarily difficult to line up with the door and then hold it in place exactly where you want it. We do this by literally wiring the body to the chassis. We then twist the wire to lengthen or shorten it until we have the perfect fit.
The most impressive part on that car is the rear wheelhouse, I'd love to see that being machined.
Too bad we didn't film that. The only way we could make that part is with a full 4 axis machine. That means all 4 axis of the machine are moving at once--X, Y, Z, and A. A is the rotary axis so the part is spinning while the machine is moving up, down, left and right, in and out. We had to move in all 4 axis to spin the part around the tool to get into the tight spots. We then had to "unwind" the part to get the tool back out.
I will look for some more pics of it being made for you.
The block we started with weighed 225 pounds. Each finished wheel house weighs about 2-3 pounds. (I'd have to check and see if I ever wrote it down). Here you can see Sandwich sawing the billet log in 1/2. The chunk of aluminum is pretty big--but it was the only way to turn the corner on the chassis to feed the rear suspension loads to the front of the car and finish off the tub.
Here one of the 1/2's of the block has been mounted into the mill. We welded extensions on to the block to get it far enough away from the rotary axis so the spindle didn't crash. We then cut the welded on areas off (along with any heat affected zone).
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"Oh, that can't happen.", you might say...but you are talking to the voice of a rather warming experience. 
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