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Several weeks ago my family and I vacationed in Myrtle Beach South Carolina. While there we visited the shopping and entertainment complex called Broadway at the Beach where you can visit Ripley’s Aquarium, do some miniature golfing, eat at the Kiss Café and shop for all sorts of eclectic souvenirs.

One of the main reasons for our visit to Broadway at the Beach was to visit a business called Ridemakerz that my wife had heard about and that seemed intriguing. Ridemakerz appeared to use the Build-A-Bear business model for kids and adults to build custom model cars and trucks.

Upon entering the business we were greeted with young enthusiastic staff wearing pit crew attire. We were first guided to the body shop where we selected vehicle car bodies of many different makes, models, colors and paint schemes. After some agonizing over what car to build my son chose an intense metallic green 2008 Dodge Viper body, I selected a 2010 flat black Dodge Challenger body with orange racing stripes.

Then we moved on to the chassis selection where you can choose a sports car chassis or monster truck chassis with or without remote control. My son went for the sports car remote control chassis and I selected the free-wheeling sports car chassis. From there we selected tires, my son went for wide tires all in black rubber, while I chose the wide black rubber with some orange treads to match my racing stripes. Then on to the wheels, the wheel selection was impressive, there must have been over 50 different wheels to chose from in all sorts of finishes from flat black to chrome. I was even more impressed to find a line of wheels designed by Chip Foose.  I chose some sexy 10 spoke wheels in black chrome while my son went with some appropriate chrome wheels for his Viper.

Now that we had the basics we could now shop for the accessories which included ground effect lights, headers, oversized blowers and more. We decided to keep it simple and only added the ground effect lights, reddish orange for the Challenger and Green for the Viper. Our guide then took us to the pit where we were timed assembling our rides. We raced each other for the best pit time and I was pleased I did not lose to my 10 year old or I would have never heard the end of it.

Upon completion of our rides we got to play around with them, my Challenger has awesome headlights, tail lights, and ground effect lights that blink and flash in coordinated patterns. One press of the button hidden on the hoods air intake and you experience the light show complimented with sounds including racing, hard breaking and more.

After playing around with our rides for a while, we registered them on-line and were given vanity plates, a title and cool cardboard garages to carry them in. While the visit was not necessarily inexpensive the experience was phenomenal. I can’t wait to go back and build another amazing vehicle. I keep my Challenger on my desk in my office and press the button several times throughout the day as I love seeing the lights and hearing the sounds of my MoPar fantasy car.

If you are in Myrtle Beach or visiting Disney Land in California, you should stop in and check this company out. I guarantee you will have a blast and come out with a ride that is unique.