Beach Buggy

Another new project from Calgary Italian and classics.

To turn a 1969 VW Beetle, that’s almost too far gone to restore, into an original design Meyers Manx VW based Beach Buggy.

Next is to remove the body from the floor and inspect the chassis and floor. The floor is in good condition but we will be cutting it straight across the middle to shorten it by about 15 inches to be able to fit the Buggy body. So whilst still using the good old floor we will also weld new floor pans over the old ones to strengthen the whole floor.

We continue to make the fibreglass body. The mold gets at least two coats of wax so that the gelcoat doesn’t stick to it, making it easier to release the new body, then we give it two coats of gelcoat, after letting the gelcoat dry we lay three layers of thick fibreglass and resin, leaving the layers to harden before doing the next one.
We will only be putting three layers on to start with so that the fibreglass still flexes making it easier to free it from the mold.

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Next is to extract the body from the mould, we had to bond handles to the body using the last layer of fibre glass to be able to pull the body out. The body is in white gel coat and will require some work to prepare it for painting.

The power plant will be a supercharged 2000cc engine out of a transporter, converted from injection to carburettor. The following pictures show the start of the rebuild. This is the block with new pistons and liners, with compression ratio of 9.5 to 1.