Anyone know of any good auto schools in NC? Teaching stuff like the usual body ,and engine. But i would also like something that gets into chassis fab, metal fab ,performance engine and so on. Also......I know for sure that hot rodding is something i want to turn into a profession. I know I will never learn even half of what i need to know in school but i would like to get the basics. Do you guys think school is worth it? I know alot of the basics now I mean ive been into this for awhile I just don't know all the secrets and such ,especially with body work. With there not being many people i could learn from around here I figured school was the way to go. What do you guys recomend.
Central Carolina Community College in Sanford has an Automotive Restoration Curriculum that's pretty cool. And cheap in comparison to the other places... http://www.cccc.edu/curriculum/majors/automotiverestoration/
This could be fun: Hedgecock Racing Academy 1520 Horneytown Road High Point, NC 27265 http://www.hedgecockracing.com/ Dave http://www.roadsters.com/
They don't have the best reputation for what they teach or how they treat their students, as well as it being expensive. Some are calling it a sweatshop, using the students for labor they are paying to do. And it's $1k a week. Just the word around the area.
People getting into NASCAR need to be aware that there are people out there that for various reasons will use people up. Paying for the privilege is something else. Thanks for pointing that out. Until now, there was a link to their site under "Technical training" on http://www.roadsters.com/software/ but I'm deleting it now. Dave http://www.roadsters.com/
I haven't posted in a while, but I've got to respond to this. The Hedgecock Racing Acadamey is good deal. Is it perfect? No. Can you please all of the people all of the time? No. My buddy Billy Valitzski is the head instructer at HRA and he takes great interest in all of his students. He goes out of his way to spend extra time with people that need help in a particullar area or have a special interest; such as spending more time wheeling metal or more time bending tubing etc. etc. Once they used a student's drag project as a subject for a class segment on sheetmetal work, and my friend Billy stayed late many nights to help the kid get car finished so he could bring it back home to Louisiana! There was also the time when a student who had a physical handicap took the course and Valitzski went to great lengths to modify hand shears and other hand tools so the kid could do the sheetmetal work! The school is based on a "real world" experience. You have to sometimes bust your ass to get a project done, but if you can't handle it on a school level what hope do you have in the working world? The students learn to deal with what comes in the door on a Monday morning, they also learn how to deal with the deadlines and the unpredictable nature of the business, while also getting to build a NASCAR late model from the ground up. The school has placed around 50 percent of their students with NASCAR teams as fabricators. That's a good record! The better the student the better gig he may get, it's just that simple. So is there someone out there that isn't happy with their experience at HRA? I'm sure there is. Not everybody that attends a school has what it takes to succeed in the motorsports industry.
Thanks for the replys guys. It just seems like all this stuff is based around Nascar stuff anyway. I'm more interested in sheet metal fab and stuff like that. Something kind of like Wyotech but I havent heard very good stuff about them either. I swear I saw a commercial about a school kind of like that in NC and I was hoping someone here would know of the place.
If you're thinking about Wyotech, I say go there. It does have some faults (they're way too bureaucratic), but I learned a ton there. It's like any other school, the people that tried to learn did well and the one's who didn't care wasted their money.
The Jalopy Journal
