Just take your pc, or laptop, and give it a nice warm soapy bath. Let the water soak into every crack, and seal. When your done, throw it into a camp fire and let it warm up.
Or...just...look at the Wiki. Take your time with creating a good mod. It'll be worth it. Start with configs maybe. Now for me, that's a nope. I'm not gonna try making a vehicle.
And there's no harm in using a vanilla vehicle as a reference vehicle. You can also reuse some of it's scripts and jbeams, just make sure to modify everything so that your mod isn't simply a mesh slap. Yes you could use a 200bx as a base, just modify the jbeam to fit your mesh so it collides properly. Make nice new textures, specular, normal and diffuse. Make nice renders, maybe change up the engine jbeam a bit, slightly different suspension values to fit your vehicle better. Just whatever you chose to do, DON'T SLAP your mesh onto the 200bx. It'll look like shit, handle like shit and collied like shit.