Monday, September 1, 2008

Cutting brakes, CB and minor carnage

Doing stuff like this:
Leads to this:

And this:
Here are more shots of the 4x4 play area and me climbing the steps. I don't think I actually lost my bumper here, I think I lost it on a worse obstacle, or loosened itand then it came off while driving on one of the trails, I wasn't able to find it.





I'm getting very lazy with the blog business, so let me know if you want details on the cutting brakes made from bolt cutter handles, otherwise I'll let the pics speak for themselves.

Finally I installed a CB that my brother in law gave me. His father had it on his boat or in the vehicle they towed the boat with. Its looks like its from the right era for this old car.

Yeh I went thru this too.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Well on Saturday Aug 16th I went to Hollister Hill Off Road park for the first time and the bug did well. But I forgot to bring a mem card for the cam so no pics!

Monday, August 4, 2008

Its been a while since I made an update. Since the last post I scored a used rear bumper for $5 delivered, and yesterday picked up some 235/75/15 tires for $80 bucks. Can I budget or what?
Enjoy the pics!
At some point I might post more details on the front fender cutting.


Sunday, April 13, 2008

Patching the front

In the last post the front had a chunk cut off, today I removed the trimmed piece, trimed it some more and reinstalled it. More than anything this is needed to restore the trunk floor. Here you see the piece sitting in front of the car before the trimming.



Here the piece has been trimmed more.



Here we have a trial fit.



Originally I planned to trim it super close and then weld it on, then thinking the idea is to bash this thing off-road, so I'll just bolt it on. Plus I might not like the results and go with a reg baja bug kit anyway, so bolts it is for now!

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Seats and front end cut

Today I mounted some skanky Toyota seats a friend gave me, why put skanky seats in my bug? Well the bug seats were pretty skanky too, but they don't really recline, so its an upgrade to reclining skanky seats and who cares once they are covered. Reclining seats make the drive-inn more fun anyway :)

So we start with this seat:

I have to cut the sliding mechanism off so I can mount the seat to the stock VW stuff, as you'll see:

Here we are after the tracks got the angle grinder treatment

Now its time to destroy the original seat to get to the needed part, I only want just the very bottom which I will then weld onto the Toyota seat


I won't go into details on how I ripped it apart, its pretty self explanatory. This is what I'm left with from the original seat.
Here it is positioned and partially welded in place, you get the idea on how it will mount, just like stock. It turns out they are a few inches higher which gets in the way of the steering wheel, I had planned on a body lift anyway so its ok. If after that I don't like them then it will be time for other seats, its like Lego, don't like what you made, pull it apart and put it back together again differently.

Now on to the front end cut. If you read the link to the one day baja build you'll have an idea of how the front can be cut instead of buying a baja kit. I decided to go with this approach as an experiment, again if I don't like it I can just redo it. A real baja kit would require to remove even more of the car so that always remains an easy option. My version is a bit more radical than the one day baja guy, I really want to get the nose out of the way. Here we see the nose marked off with tape to get the initial cut line.



Here is is after the cut, I still have a working trunk, but the spare can no longer go in the stock location. I also will reshape the piece I cut off and weld it back in so that I have a trunk floor again. Right now its open to the world except for some duct tape to keep the the cats out. So thats next weekends project. I'll clean up the edges then at that time. I'll also reshape the front the rear fenders once I have my tire package mounted.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Baja Build Day 2

Today the rear gets cut off, to make my lines I laid tape, then misted white paint on and used that line as a guide.





To make the cuts I used a cheap angle grinder with cutting dics and a cheap 'sawz-all' type saw, both sourced from Harbor Freight. The very bottom required the sawz-all and the bug had to be jacked up to gain the necessary clearance to angle the saw properly.

I cut most of the way on one side but left a little uncut to support the part while I cut the other side, I wanted to avoid distorting anything and keep the piece I removed in sell-able shape.
Here we are cut all the way thru on the driver's side.

And here we are all cut, with the part ready for the final tug off. Its not very heavy, I pulled it off and carried it easily.



And now its all gone


The final pic shows a bar I mounted temporarily for the taillights and license plate. Its ugly and temporary and only there until I get the cage assembly for the motor, so not much point going into how I set it up. I also removed the two little tailpipes, I didnt know they provided so much of the muffling, the thing is much louder now. Between the freer flowing exhaust and the weight that was removed the car feels a good bit quicker, but maybe thats just psychological. Next up will be work to the front end.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Baja Build Day One

My Low Budget Baja Bug Build
This page will be a log of the progress made with my first baja build attempt and will hopefully also have some value to those of you researching ways to build your own baja. I have used two VW forums and one individual's site for most of my research:
thesamba.com
How to build a Baja bug in one day
azbaja.com

Just about everything I will do here I got from those sites, I'm just putting my own twist on it. I take no responsibility if following anything I say here causes injury or any other type of harm.

Before we proceed, yes I know my yard looks messy, I'm a car guy, I can't be mowing and raking n shit.

One common technique to create rear Baja fenders is to use stock steel FRONT fenders that have been trimmed, since they are wider that the rears. Front bug fenders will bolt on to the rear of the bug with hardly any tweaking at all, I may mount some untrimed ones oneday with the headlights mounted just to freak out other drivers and make them think they are about to have a head-on collision j/k. Awhile back I found someone selling a bunch of body parts dirtcheap so I stocked up and already had an extra set of front fenders. I bolted the two together to make it easier to measure where I want to cut and keep things symetrical. As you can see below one fender is slightly bashed in.



To fix this I decided to first cut of the headlight bucket and lower metal, it could be fixed without removing those pieces, but they will be cut off anyway and this will give me roomto easily get in with body working tools. Here it is after a little hammer and dolly work.



So now the majority of the bodywork is done on that fender, enough for today's purposes anyway. It will get the final smoothing when we get close to paint time. I'm using a lot of masking tape aong with a measuring tape to make my marks and try to keep things even, the first major cut is below.



Next pic you can see the marking I made to round off the corner. To make the mark I used the roll of masking tape as a guide, just hold it against the fender and go. Later I decided I wanted to take more off and needed a bigger circle, so I used the old headlight chrome trim ring.



Here is a shot of the first fender mounted. I'm not going thru all the mounting step, hopefully if you are attemting a project like this you can figure that part out.



Here you can compare just how much wider this formerly front fender is than the regular rear.



And here we have both mounted



It looks wierd since stock tires are on and no other body mods have been done yet



This shot will give you an idea of just how much larger of a tire I wil be able to stick back here now, its way more room than I expected. I also need to pressure wash that mofo.


Stay tuned for more changes, most of that rear end will be cut off!