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!