FINALLY FOUND ONE

After the sheer disappointment of yet another baja slipping through my fingers, I promptly decided I needed to take a break from baja's. This lasted for a mere two days, and before I knew it I was back on craigslist looking for more. I waited six months before finding a new one. This new baja was a 1972, and held the price tag of a $1500. I went with my girlfriend Emily to look at this one, and she knew right when I saw that I'd want it. I was first drawn to stance of the car, It had big tires, and a cool curve to it. Plus the price was pretty nice. It was running, well sort of, the engine ran, but while driving over 20 MPH, the front end would shake violently. I knew it was a huge project, and I was trying to get away from projects, but the potential was there. It has a bolt in roll cage, and enough wiring to wire 6 VW's, but like always, I had to have it. Since I'm away at school, I have not really done anything to it, but here it is how it sits....

THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT BUG: ROUND 2

Well after the failure of the 1962 baja, it was back to the drawing board. I was pretty disappointed that we got beat buying it, but I knew there were more out there. Now I really wanted to be able to just go out to the desert and tear up the place. I wanted a project with low to no work. It had to be at least 90% complete. I decided to narrow my search engine to just race-dezert.com's classifieds, knowing that all the cars on there were race legal. I found one immediately. It was a blue 5-1600 race car that the owner was trying to sell fast. There was only one problem, it was $8500. While $8500 may not seem like a lot of money to most, it was the top of our budget, and we were not comfortable spending all of our money on the car, and have no money left over if something was to go wrong with the car. We decided against buying it, but I was sill watching it everyday to see if the price would change. Well, the price didn't change. On a thursday afternoon I decided I would call Buck, and see if we could figure out some way to get it. He said the only way he would feel comfortable with it was if we could get it for $6000. That was $2500 less than the asking price, so I figured we were SOL. I said screw it, and texted the owner right after talking to Buck. I told him that we really liked his car, but all we could spend was $6000, he text me back right away saying that he'd take 6k if we could pick it up by saturday. I was so excited. We only had two days to pick it up(which was a seven hour round trip). On friday Buck and I were running around getting everything set to get the car. At 7AM on saturday morning we left our house for parker, towing a U-haul trailer, excited to bring our new baby home. We finally got to the owner's shop, and were excited as could be. The 5-1600 was beautiful, it was everything I had hoped it would be. It was finally the perfect car. The owner turned the car on, and the engine purred, it was a great sound. Finally he said the words that I had been waiting to hear since I got there, "wanna drive it?" I jumped in the drivers seat with Buck next to me. I turned it on and then tried to shift it into reverse....nothing. I tried again.... and again nothing happened. The owner jumped into the car and tried to put it into any gear, nothing. From that moment I could see it on Buck's face, it was a deal breaker. He knew that I was moving out to college the next weekend, and he didn't want the car to just sit. Walking away from that 5-1600 was a horrible feeling, but we both knew it was for the best....

THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT BUG

After we sold the class 11 mistake, I immediately started looking for a new baja, this time we decided to look for less of a project. I spent months on craigslist before I found any potential Baja 1000 race cars to be. The first potential baja I found was a 1962 for $4500. It was ugly, but it looked pretty beefed up and off-road ready. It had a full roll cage, but we knew that it would need to be replaced to meet SCORE specs(SCORE requires a DOM or chromoly roll cage, this was made of mild steel). I went with my dad to go check it out, and if I thought it had potential I would report back to Buck. Well it had potential, so the next weekend Buck and I went to check it out, and possibly buy. We drove it around and really liked it. We left saying we would think about it, knowing that we were going to purchase it. Unfortunately for us, he called about an hour after we left and he had already sold it. A baja that had been off and on craigslist for almost 5 months sold the day we were going to buy it, it must be a sign...

THE FIRST VOLKSWAGEN(CLASS 11 MISTAKE) PT. 2

Now that we finally had the super beetle running our next project was paint and interior. Anyone who has ever painted a car knows that its not just going to the store and picking out a color, then going home and painting. Some cars take hundreds of hours of prep before you can even think about a color. The super beetle was no exception. we spent months prepping the car for paint, and we chose sublime green as our color. Luckily for us, our Dad had painted a few cars before, so he was a major help in letting us know what needed to be done. We stripped the car all the way down to bare metal, tearing through the previous five or six paint jobs the car had gotten without any prep! Once we had the entire car stripped we set up our garage as a paint booth. Buck did the painting, he was more interested in it than me, and it turned out pretty good!After the painting was done, I decided it was my turn to work on the interior. I recovered the seats, put in new carpet, and my Dad put in a new headliner(a real pain in the ass). We also put new rubber, and lights all the way around the car. The last thing we did was put in new rubber around the glass, this was by far the hardest part of the whole car. We could not get the glass in the car if our lives depended on it! After hours of attempting to get the rubber on the glass, we figured out that we were putting it on backwards! We finally got the glass on, and only managed to break the front windshield! Once it was finished all we wanted to do was get rid of it. We sold it two weeks later, and took the loss $$$$!

THE FIRST VOLKSWAGEN(CLASS 11 MISTAKE)

The first VW Buck and I bought was a $900 1974 project. The engine came with the car....In a box, and the body was in rough condition, but to us it was a perfect class 11 start....that was until we brought it home and looked up the VIN. Yup, it was a super beetle. I knew that I couldn't use a super beetle for a class 11, because everywhere I read said, stay clear of super beetles. Apparently the super beetle had a MacPherson strut(looks like a coil over shock), and was not durable enough for off-road use. So, we were back to the drawing board, we didn't know if we should cut our losses and sell it for less than we bought it for, or use it as a learning process. We decided to build it into a street driver. Instead of rebuilding the engine, we found a turn key one on craigslist for $650. Now we had a bug that could drive, and now we knew we were onto the hard stuff.

                                                                                 Just Got Home

                                                                                "Box" Engine

                                                                                B1K Bound!

                                                                           New Engine!

                                                                                 It Drives!