Garage Invader GT body

The molds for this model (GT4) Invader were destroyed years before the end of production of the Invader GT5A, and GT5B models. It is a sleeker looking model with the raked windshield, but it was hard to fit anyone over 6 feet tall even with drop buckets for seats, and it’s roof was very weak compared to the newer GT5 models. I visited the factory to pick up a couple kits back in 1978! Spent a lot of time with Bruce Weeks talking about the kits history.

A company called Sun Ray has the molds but you have to have a big order to get him to make it if it’s not in stock hope this helps

Len, you are wrong; like Jon said Bruce Weeks, Oakland, Ca. I have an Gt1 (for sale inccidently), and have talked to Bruce personally.

Kaylor did produce it for awhile, but Bruce Weeks was the originall manufactuer.

Doug

Hello all,
Anyone on this site is my hero. I just bought a Invader GT that was in rough shape. I have not been able to find out what style this kit was until now. I was lost in trying to keep it somewhat original. But if anyone would like to flood me with information i would greatly appreciate it allot. Please e-mail me at z_zealous@yahoo.com thank you all who posted info on the Invader GT.
Zach
http://www.getunplugged.biz

I use to own an Invader GT5 in Houston, Texas. I also had 2 Kelmark cars, both with the same paint job. The red black gold paint job. The car for daily driving had a porshe engine in the back, I dont remember the number, it was hot rodded to 2500 cc dual carbs, it was show place winning car, it won car show awards. The second Kelmark had the same exact paint job, its frame was built by Mid Engineering, it has a Chevy 350 engine in the middle of the car ( mounting the air intake was extremely difficult, with out putting a extra scoop on the back, so what I did was get a propane carb mount converter and it was just over a inch or so tall then went sideways and that cleared the turtle trunk hood in the middle, to a more open space in the engine compartment for air to get inside the engine. On the Kelmark driving at night was sometimes scary, why? Because the headlights were so low the light did not reflect back to me as I was driving it, to solve that problem I used 55 watts motor cycle headlights and they worked perfectly, I had to get a larger Alternator cause it would just about kill the alternator when everything was on. The daily Kelmark had the ICE brand ac system, it was a pain also one of its mounting brackets points went to the exhaust, and it was ALWAYS tearing up the bolts to the muffler, making the holes that held the mufler on bigger and bigger, so it was constantly being upgraded to larger and larger bolts over time. All 3 cars, were scary to drive on wet roads because when you hit the brakes to stop, they were so light they just skidded and slid forward on wet pavement. I learned to adjust for that, just keep plenty of distance between you and the person in front of you. Also when driving the cars, if someone was driving next to you checking it out, I had to make extra sure to watch the road and their car, because as they were rubber necking to look the car over, they stopped looking where they were going and would sometimes drift all over the road, causing a hazard to me and others on the road, you got use to it.
I was young, had lots of money and got the cars, dont have them any more. Guys use to want to race, I was young and foolish, sorry I can race you right now, ( in the 4 cylinder porche engine car) I am on a errand, if you want we can race later, maybe at..such an such. I would go home swap cars, they had the EXACT IDENTICAL PAINT JOB. I would get the Chevy 350 Mid Engine V8 out and drive that one to the race) ‘Hey you car sounds different than it did before, well I tweaked it up just a little before leaving, you want to race or talk?. The Chevy 350 midengine had a corvair rear end. I could not pop the clutch with out blowing it up. I had to be doing AT LEAST 30 MPH before I could put my foot into it, other wise it would blow up the rear end, so I ALWAYS let the other guy get the take off first, then once up to 30 mph, floored it and because it was so light a car, the Horse power to weight was tremendous so it took off. I won alot of races to say the least. One guy I knew, had a Sebring Kit Car with a 454 Oldmobile Torendo engine front end assembly built into his car, he HAD to have ‘wheelie’s bars’ installed on his car because if he floored it, the entire front end of the car would raise up and all he could see was the sky. His was a a quick and fast car and drank gas worse than my Chevy 350 did. We never raced, even tho we joked about it, there is no substitue for cubic inches. I never installed the Turbo Charger I bought for the Chevy 350 engine, I still have it, nice and clean still in the box. Just never got around to it. Times got bad, money got tight and the insurance was killing me. No one wanted to insure the cars, unlike what you would hear the companys say, oh just insure it as a VW and you will get cheap insurance, in their dreams. Once the insurance company saw it was a fiberglass body, the insurance got so high they didnt want issuse insurance for it. I had to apply to the State insurance car pool, where insurance companies are FORCED to take your car and insure it, each year it was a hassle. I had the Invader GT5 with a custom spedometer. A buddy of mine, had several kit cars, the Bradley GT, the Ford GT40 and Manta Montage, and it was big, it was a BIG kit car,with a V8 in it. It was the same kind used on that tv show in Hard Castle and Mc Cormmick, anyway we were testing it one day and I told him he needed a better speedometer, every one had the VDO 160 speedometer, one day on a test run on a back street, where else? ha ha. We were stopped by some guys who saw us ‘test the acceleration’ They pulled up to us jumped out of the car and ran over to us, one guy looks inside at the speedometer and says, hey the speedometer says 160 mph. My buddy looked at me and could not belive it, that it what they looked at. So when I had my Invader GT built, I contacted it was either VDO or Volkwagon and I told them I was building a kit car and I wanted a speedometer that would read ZERO to 250 MILES PER HOUR. They wrote me back, said we can take one out of a FOX model car change some gear inside of it, to calibrate it and do it for $65.00, so I sent them the money and got the 0 to 250 MPH speedometer, and it looked SUPER COOL. I would take it to the car shows and guys would go nuts over it, I mean they went nuts over just the speedometer because it said 250 MILES PER HOUR ON IT…and again, every one asked. “Where do you go to drive it 250 Miles Per Hour’ and I would always answer, Oh any side street!
And they loved it!!! Because EVERYONE knew you did ALL your hot rod driving on any side streetS, ha ha. Now for real life, the car would barely do 85 mph, its just the way it was geared,
it was NOT geared up for high mileage, it was a tricked out transmission for speed, well not high speed. It was designed to be QUICK, so it got up to speed quickly. There is long distance speed, on the high end for long drives and that takes awhile to get up, or their is quick, this was designed to be quick, really quick. In real life that 0 – 250 mph, with the vibrations from the road, you could not read it, from zero to 30 mph, where in real life actually did your driving around, you didnt dare drive fast cause the police always wanted to pull it over and do a inspection. Anyway I had built a Heathkit digital speedometer kit that had a gas mileage gauge built into it. It had a orange digital readout, long before cars had such a thing as a digital speedometer. So I had to use that because like I said normal road vibrations would bounce that need all over the place, once you got past 30 to 35 mph, then you could KINDA use it, but I always stuck with the Heathkit Digital Speedometer, because it was accurate, the other one the needle would just bounce around alot. I even had Koni spring over shocks installed, way too much for the Invader GT5 and Kelmark Body, so we cut out a few windings on the springs to adjust the ride height. Someone asked the question about the seat, if a owner was tall, you had to cut out the floor pan and weld in a box to drop the seat a few inches, I never liked that idea, cause I thought if I hit a really big bump, it would hit the bottom of my seat, I never did that to my cars, any of them. The mid-engine V8, I bought it from a guy who had gotten the frame from Kelmarks Mid-Engineering section before they split off from Kelmark and he had a normal volks wagon Beetle body on it. It just had the phrase on it “I do have a V8′. There was a commerical for years that always said the catch phrase, I could of had a V8, so he just played off of that. V8 tasted well not to good then and it still doesnt taste that good. So we pulled the VW Beetle body off of it and installed the Kelmark body. A VW Beetle with a V8 really drew the crowds, it was noisy and the engine was right there, right next to you. The car never needed a heater ever in winter. I had a sun roof installed so both of the Kelmarks would match up looking the same. The first Kelmark I got, it was at a friends place for repairs, some one knew about it and broke in and stole the car. They were found by the police headed towards the Texas – Mexico boarder and the State Police stopped them, because the guys driving it..well..they just didnt look like the kind of guys who could afford much less own a car that looked that good. It had a custom paint job for the car show circuit, anyway the car had vanished, the police arrested the people driving the car. A local wrecker picked it up and of course wanted IT for himself, so he let it set in his lot to rack up some daily cash for his lot space. Some how the insurace company found the car, put it up for sale at some car auction where they do that kind of stuff. My buddy found out about it and some how I got the winning bid on the car. The guys who stole car, blew the transmission up, I mean just wiped it out, the brakes were a mess. There was car show that weekend, and I just took delivery of the car a few days before, so we washed and cleaned the car up, polished the car, wheels, upholstry, everything. So NOW it looked great but it bad a blown transmission, but only WE knew that, ha ha. So we put it on a trailer, hauled it to the car show, people stopped what they were doing and just walked towards it, because it looked SO GOOD. You know like when a EXTREMLY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN walks into the room, all of a suden, everyone stops and looks at her, well it was just like that, ha ha, Kinda Spooky at the time, for sure. So we just rolled it down off of the trailer we hauled to the car show on, let it just sit there for several days at the car show, won some trophy for it, cause it looked so good. And no one ever knew it would not run, to put a car in a car show you have to tape up the gas tank, disconnect the battery cables, so there was no change of it ever having to PROVE that it actually ran, ha ha.
I had alot fun with those cars.
Then I went and did some work for the government and the cars were all stored at my fathers place, while I was gone. I got back, and he sold them out from under me. Yeah I got mad at my father for sure, who wouldnt, I loved him and well years later that is water under the bridge, I just happen to come across this website by chance and thought I would tell a little bit about what it was like to actually own a Invader GT and both the regular Kelmark and the Mid-Engine Kelmark. One last story, one time I pulled into a gas station, sat afternoon filling the tank. This guy in this old rusted out beat up pickup truck with his girl who is missing some teeth is in the front seat. He walks over to me and says, I bet you got alot of girls with that car and I am a nice guy, I didnt want to make him feel bad, so I responded with “I bet you got a lot better gas mileage in your truck, than I do’ and he said yeah he did and he was so happy that he had something that I didnt have. So I made the guy feel good about what he had, I didnt make him feel bad about what he didnt have, and I know that meant alot to him.
One time I got pulled over by a police man who wanted to go for a ride, I asked him how fast do you want to go, he said as fast as it will go. I tell him okay, as long as I am not gonna get a ticket for it, So we go for a ride and then he tells me to open it up, he also tells me his buddy is down the road with a speed trap and he wants to blast right thru it as fast as we can. Now days that would sound like entrapment, to anyone, back then, well it was just two guys having fun going as fast as they could on the ground, ha ha. So I go blasting past the speed trap and he is thinking oh boy I got myself a GOOD ONE, I was leaving him behind and he was not catching up, it was a dead end road I knew, I lived on that dead end road, it was my test track, ha ha.
So he is comming after me red lights and siren, so I pull over and we let me get behind me and he is holler get out of the car, I just sit there and the policeman who was riding with me, he got out and talked to them and we all had the biggest laugh. For someone who is gonna fuss about this, well it was a long straight road out in the country and hardly anyone lived out there and it was safe to drive fast, as long as there was not a speed trap set up. I found out they knew about my cars and they wanted to catch me speeding, well they did, I didnt get a ticket, I gave the other guy a fast ride and from then on. I held it down when comming home and when they saw me, they would flash their lights and I would wave and slow down, we became friends. Other cops came by for a ride, they KNEW about the cars.
I miss them, I can tell you this and this is something to SERIOUSLY consider if your OLDER now, like me, ha ha..Riding in a kit car is a HARD RIDE, it aint soft like a Lincon Caddy.
Now I prefer a SOFTER RIDE, no one ever made, that I knew of, made a kit car ride like a soft ride. It would break eggs if you were not careful. The insurance aint cheap, its as bad as Corvette insurance if not worse, now probably in 2009. VW’s had no air bags, only a piece of metal that if the car was in wreck, the steering colum would crush about 6 inches, maybe a few more, then if it was a bad wreck, it would just keep on comming right at your chest like a spear.
Years later I was driving Mazda Miata sportscar home from work late one night, a guy changes lanes hits my car causing a wreck (not my fault even tho I went to the hospital and in months of therapy) it crunches it all up and the air bag saved my life. My wife had a wreck not her fault and the air bags saved her life. So as much fun as kits cars are, and THEY ARE FUN…it aint as safe and it aint worth dying over.
Now would I want another one, yeah probaby..when I retire, maybe another Kelmark, because it was the best of all the kit cars that actually made a car drivable back and forth to work. I knew guys who had Sebrings, Laser 917 and The Box and several other kit cars..some how you just seemed to find these people when you have one, someone talks to you, my friend has such and such a car and I woudl take their name and number an go visit them, We ALL had the same problems with the kit cars. The Invader GT5 to me had the safest if it was gonna roll, because of the photo of the VW Beetle sitting on top of it, that photo use to be in the Invader GT5 Brochure.
Bradley GT’s always had a problem with the head light covers working properly. I would like to have another Kelmark or Invader and make it an electric car. Its light weight and the horsepower to weight would be terrific, again. I would not want to die in it tho. I am suppose to be older and wiser now, I dont drive like I used to any more, not by a long shot. I suppose older and wiser now. If your young and still young at heart, then go for it..just pray before every trip. I did meet a Nasa scientist on Nasa Road One one time and he drove a white/silver Kelmark, he just happen to pull up next to me, I flagged him over and we talked about the cars and problems and how to solve them. Mainly swap out the headlights for 55 watt motor cycle headlights and then you could see the road at night, when you drove. I had these cars back in the 1970’s and now its 2009, so yeah it was awhile back for sure. And that factory bumper on the Invader GT5, it was FOR LOOKS ONLY, I think it was a dune buggy bumper, if you just barely bumped it, it would bend.

If your going to drive a kit car, LEAVE PLENTY OF SPACE BETWEEN YOU AND THE OTHER GUY, cause since the car is light, it will slide, the tires wont sick and I had Pirellei P7 tires, the very best (at that time) and they slid, so allow yourself LOTS of room to stop, also remember some people cant see you in the Invader GT5, why?..because you are so low to the ground. You pull up next to someone in a normal car and they are LOOKING DOWN at you. So Be Safe!

Invader GT5 & 2 Kelmarks owner

I have a conplet GT1 ,it has not been driven sence 1972 .it has doors on it. What would is car be worth? Or should I restore it or get rid of it?