Hey there King Kong

Recently I stopped on in to Rock Barbers and gave an update as they trimmed up my hair. You know what I realized? Well, I should probably tell everyone on our website too! Since we’ve been having a bit of trouble with our website security recently It has been a higher priority to fix the site than to update it. Now, it’s fixed and we’re updating!

Well, last time we left off we were starting to get our King Kong installed. It is a bit of a process to be honest and we just really wanted to do it once and do it right. So we, or should I say… Matt Wilson dug in. He really took command of this, the research and the fab work. Everyone has a part in this build but Matt has been our most knowledgable VW guy…

Before we knew it the king kong was ready for install. Aligning it so it is perfect is a bit of a challenge. I mean. there are frame horns in the way and this thing needs to be completely parallel to the torsion bars that it holds. We took our time, lined it all up and finally put a tack on, then a bit more measuring and another tack, and a bit more measuring and another tack and so on and so forth. Eventually tacks gave way to full welds and the King Kong is in!

Just in case you weren’t aware, we just want to make sure that everyone knew who “did it”

We have been doing a bit of test fitting of the trans and other components to just verify everything before we do all the final welding, gusseting and boxing it in but I think we are ready! One step closer to sitting this thing down on its own weight again.

As a side note, we were given a blue Super Beetle recently and we have been pulling out all the parts we could use. Finally that thing headed out to the junk yard and freed up a bunch of shop space too…

Don’t worry, we took all those wheels as soon as it was loaded up on the flatbed… No waste!

We have been making progress on body work too. It seems silly to fix all the body work on this thing when it will just get beat up anyhow but we are on a mission to replace any and all rust we can take care of. It is better to deal with it now than when it is all caged and together. We’ve been focusing on any fasteners we need but anything that is rusty is getting replaced right now and we are fortunate that the blue car had some opposites rusted out than our race car so we could cut panels out of one and weld them into the other.

So whats next? Well, so far we have squared off a lot of our cuts in the frame horn to prepare for all the boxing and gusseting that will take place. We have also ordered the Urethane bushings for the trans mount so we can do a final test fit of the trans before we box everything in and we are continuing to chase the rust around the car. Once the rear is finished up we will be moving on to assembly of our front beam with the nectar labs parts, then assembling the rear of the car as well. Hopefully this thing will be on the ground in a matter of weeks!

Thanks for following along, we’ll have a bunch more for you very soon, including an intro video that our friends at CondorCam just finished up!