Progress means: A new floor!

Wow, it has been over a month since our last post, this will be changing soon since the progress is moving and the focus has shifted to 100% BAJA! In the last month the team has been busy, not only with the car but with a bunch of other things as well. Pikes Peak International Hill Climb was at the end of June which some of us participate in. With teams to help and videos to make the final video is rendering… RIGHT NOW! But it did mean that for a day or so our Bug had a visitor!

Don’t worry, we have still been working away on the bug. Planning has commenced and our team has been doing a lot of things to research and prepare as well. Right now we have things split up between our team members with some focusing on the build preparation, some focusing on planning and logistics, marketing, and well, it is all split up. With each of these things in capable hands we know that we’re moving forward and in the near future we will really start making progress!

So what has happened since we talked to you last? We have been spending late nights at the shop. Right now we are there once a week and our plan so far was to take care of any repairs the body need. The body was in good shape, but it is a 40+ year old car so there are some issues. What kind of issues? Well, it has had some impacts, at least 3 that we can figure. so each of those areas has a bit of bondo… Ok, a bit may be a smidge liberal. This thing had 1/4-1/2″ of bondo coating the panels. I bet we took 40 lbs off the car in just bondo! After stripping all the bondo off we had perforated panels. One day when this car was being repaired someone thought it would be a good idea to drill holes and coat the car with bondo. The holes, well they are just so the bondo could actually hold on in the thickness that they were expecting to lay up… If only there were a time machine that we could go back and say “NO!!” to that body guy.

With all the body work going on, we had already split the body from the pan. The pan doesn’t have a whole lot going for it either. It has a hole the size of a basketball under the drivers seat and a few more holes through the rest of the pan as well. so it had to go. We ordered a new pan and chopped up the chassis.

After a bunch of cutting and a bunch of welding our car had a new floor in there. Yeah, it makes it look so much better already! Of course there may have been a few hiccups along the way. Measure once, cut twice? cut once, weld in a new piece later? Yah, we made a few errors, but they are all fixed up and ready to go.

With the floor installed we had our friend and it sounds like maybe a sponsor as well Grant from Built by Bones. Grant is going to do a bit of research, some planning and work with us on our pans then he will be building a cage for the bug. We are pretty excited to have the same cage builder building our cage as several of the Pikes peak cars and many a rally and road race car.

The build continues and we will have more photos soon. John G is working on our suspension planning, Matt W is working on our general VW restoration and tech planning, Matt F is working on our business planning, Josh is working on general organization, marketing etc and we have Susan and Jeremiah working on Logistics. Expect some video in the near future. We are working on some really cool stuff in that department too!