Yahoo Autos A Corvette Engineer Founded This Compendium of Vehicular Knowledge
Engineering consultant Steve Balisteri and his brother Nick set out to create a compendium of automotive knowledge. A repository of nearly every vehicle project out there, for nearly every vehicle: homebuilt 240SX drift missiles, Dodge Challenger burnout machines, 1,000-horsepower Supra dyno queens.
How to build a stick-shift Lexus SC300 into a drift car. How to install HIDs on a Chrysler Town & Country. How to make a shift knob out of wood. What the torque specs are on a Toyota Tacoma.
You get the idea.
The ambitious project took the brothers Balisteri the better part of five years. The build projects are culled from an entire Internet's worth of forum threads, which Steve personally trawled himself, picking and choosing threads for accuracy and informativeness. (A rating system is coming soon, he said.) "Up to this point all the threads donated were from people we sought out and asked personally after seeing what they wrote," said Steve Balisteri. "This is obviously a labor and time intensive process mostly done by my brother and I."
The site grew organically. People began sending the brothers links to their own projects, and the two began dutifully categorizing them. A failed Kickstarter campaign in 2014 stymied them, but two years later, the site saw a thorough redesign.
The result, at DIYAuto.com, is a slick collection of vehicular projects, organized by make and model, supported by so much information: technical specs, data tables, wiring diagrams, owner's manuals, model timelines, even vintage MotorWeek reviews. For an engineer like Steve-who once worked at Chevrolet developing the transaxle for the Corvette Stingray-so much information, so neatly categorized, is exactly what he's used to.
"My first project car was a 1969 MG Midget I bought for $1,200 and brought back from the dead," he said. "When I started working on the site about five years ago I decided it would be hypocritical to drive a new reliable car so I've mostly owned older, more interesting, higher mileage cars. Now I daily drive a 1999 BMW 5-Series wagon that just passed 222,222 miles a few weeks ago."
There's a few projects for that, too.
