OK, here's something else to chew on.
It seems that I may be buying a farm soon.
Niner wants a house. She wants to move out of our apartment, and get a real
house. I want a big-ass garage - actually, I want a proper race car shop -
and I've worked in a shop that was a converted barn before, and that works
well. So we're going out looking for hobby farms that are close to Windsor
(of which there are plenty) that have decent houses with modern facilities
and a big-ass concrete-floored barns.
However, these farms tend to come with large slices of land attached. I'm
not about to take up farming (although I may sub-let land to Real Farmers)
so I may well find myself with a large tract of land 30min outside of
Detroit sometime in the next few months.
Hmmmm.....
A 4wd chassis dyno costs $60,000 US. That's $100K CAN. That's a whole lotta
coin. So stuffing a dyno into my dream shop isn't a likely near-term
possibility.
But a back-of-the-napkin calculation says that a 200'X200' pad, at a depth
of 4", works out to roughly 40 cubic yards of concrete. At roughly 10 cubic
yards of concrete per truckload, and roughly $100 per truckload, then that
pad costs $4000. Still not chump change, but a 200 sqft pad is a decent
sized skidpad....
OK, so 1/8 mile is 880 ft. Let's call it 800 to make the math easier.
That's 16 "squares" at $4000 each, for a total of $64,000. Still cheaper
than the Dynojet - but now there's 16 acres of concrete down. I'm thinking
that's large enough to run a pretty decent sized autocross course on....
and it's WAY cheaper than I thought. And I bet paving with asphalt is even
cheaper per square foot.
All of a sudden, the idea of building a dedicated autocross facility
doesn't seem quite so far-fetched. I had always figured an initial price in
the millions, not the tens of thousands. Can building a facility *really*
be cheaper than buying a Dynojet?
This is all back-of-the-napkin stuff. An exercise in entertainment. Playing
a little "what-if" with some numbers. I certainly am not realistically
expecting to build my own autocross site anytime soon.
But still...
Anybody know:
1) How big (lengthXwidth, in feet) the competition surfaces are at
a) Harrisburg
b) Petersburg
c) Topeka, South Course
2) A rough price per square foot for asphalt paving
3) If 4" of concrete is thick enough. If not, how much thicker? How much
more $ per square foot does rebar etc cost?
4) Any other important details that have been overlooked? Assume that
unskilled/semi-skilled labour is available for free for really basic tasks,
like building forms, laying and tying rebar, digging drainage ditches, etc.
Any civil engineers in the house?
DG
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