Creating high-end race cars and parts for a living is a dream for many of us, but how do you turn that dream into a reality? We don’t have all the answers, but we can pick the brains of the people who’ve pulled it off, like this week’s guest, Joe Scarbo.
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Use SCARBO50 to get $50 off HPA 3D Modelling course: https://hpcdmy.co/CADb
Joe Scarbo of Scarbo Performance and Scarbo Vintage began his love affair with all things motorised like many of us — young and elbow-deep in a deconstructed radio control car trying to fix and improve it. This episode first covers Joe’s early days as he gained an appreciation for all things automotive through his love of both RC cars and go-karting. After a few too many crashes in the kart, Joe steered his passions towards the engineering side of the game, and began building his first car completely from scratch.
With little experience and zero computer power, Joe designed and built a four-seater 350 SBC-powered off-road sand car that’s still hitting the dunes to this day, despite it being finished before Joe was even out of his teens.
While he was still studying mechanical engineering at university, Joe found himself employed as a fabricator and machinist at a high-end race shop. From there, his career began to snowball as his design skills became more and more in demand. We dig into the design side of Joe’s career in this conversation, discussing the creation of strong and light wheels, chassis’, and everything in between.
After that, Joe talks us through different fabrication and manufacturing processes, discussing some of the pros and cons around CNC, water and laser cutting, notching, materials, and more. This chat also goes into the business side of the equation as we attempt to answer age-old questions like: how do you accurately quote your work? And when is it better to just outsource certain jobs?
The star of this episode, though, is undoubtedly Joe’s current passion project, the SV1 Rover. This monster off-roader is a marvel of engineering, and a machine that Joe has labelled the world’s first “hyper truck”. Whether he’s right or wrong about that we’ll leave up to the listener, but either way, the details we get into on this 30-inch travel go-anywhere-at-very-high-speeds beast is well worth a listen. Find out how it was designed, what powers it, what it’s capable of, and much more in this episode of Tuned In.
Check out Method Race Wheels here: https://www.methodracewheels.com
Follow Scarbo Performance here:
IG: scarboperformance
FB: Scarbo Performance Corp
WWW: scarboperformance.com
Don’t forget, you can use SCARBO50 to get $50 off HPA 3D Modelling course: https://hpcdmy.co/CADb
Time Stamps:
3:30 How did you get interested in cars?
8:32 What did you become passionate about through your mechanical engineering degree?
14:27 Designing a car at 19, how did you figure out how strong to make all the components?
18:20 What happened after your degree?
25:31 Design work for Method Wheels
31:35 How do you balance weight, strength vs looks when designing wheels?
36:27 Starting your own company
52:18 Overview of Scarbo Performance
1:08:48 SV Rover — what was the initial concept?
1:18:13 How much did RC cars influence your design?
1:46:43 Engine configuration in the SV Rover and an EV option?
1:50:01 Did the SV Rover work out of the box or were there teething issues?
1:57:28 Where is the SV Rover at? Are you going to be offering this to customers?
1:58:59 Final three questions
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