LT Auto Club is working on a metal, eight foot long Lamborghini that will be constructed out of steel pieces fabricated from a CAD (computer aided design) file. G.E. Mathis, a precision metal fabrication company, donated over $4000 worth of labor and material to assist the club in constructing the model car. When finished, the club hopes to fit the go-cart with a 35-horsepower, turbo-charged engine.

“It’s going to be like a bullet-proof tank Lamborghini go-cart,” auto club advisor Jordan Engelhardt said.

Made from 20 gauge steel, the body alone will weigh about 220 pounds.

The club was only about two weeks into the construction of the vehicle in early October, but is making good progress. They hope to finish the project by the end of the school year.

“What interests me is taking a model of a car and making it into a smaller scale, and especially getting the time and hands on experience to do it,” Daniel Bear ’17 said. “Later in life, if I’m going to work on an actual body of a car, this is good practice.”

Bear is an active participant of the model Lamborghini project and a former student of multiple auto motive-geared courses at LT. On top of that, Bear also contributed to the inspiration for the project. The idea came from a mask that he made out of paper, which he later converted to metal.

“I thought (the mask) was really cool, so I looked up cars,” Engelhardt said.

Engelhardt found that the same process can be completed in building a model car, in which a paper model can be re-created on a larger scale using metal panels.

Auto Club hopes to debut the car at Chicago’s “World of Wheels” in March. Club members will display their progress, even if it is not yet in its finished state. When finished, the car will act as an advertisement piece, Engelhardt said. They plan to drive it in the homecoming parade and solicit the help of local businesses when the time comes to paint the car.