Father & Son Build - Removing the Body

The car has been drive-able since April, but it hasn't had rear shocks, the battery can't sit on the passenger side since there is a huge hole in it, and there is simply a bunch of work to do that is much easier to manage with the body off, so Sam and Nathan spend a few hours separating what VW original put together over 50 years ago! They lift the Beetle body free of the chassis and slide it onto a rolling dolly. Then the two discuss some future plans for the project including putting air conditioning in the Bug and widening the front end.

Video Transcript

Well, there we are, Bug on that chassis. Over here, Nathan, it's off finally. Your body's off.

Hi guys, I'm Sam and I'm Nate, and we're going to try to pull the body off this Bug. I'm nursing a hurt shoulder from a little spill on my mountain bike. I went for a whip to the right, and the landing went down to the left. I went down to the left, almost hit a tree, and decided to dive off, popping my shoulder out of place. So it's going to be interesting to see if a 13-year-old and an injured 47-year-old—together we're 60, so if you divide that in half, you get two 30-year-olds, not really—can lift this Bug body up and off. But we have to use our heads more than our muscles, and we'll figure this thing out.

It's warm in here, if you can't tell. We're sweating, and it's 105° in here, so a lot of this is going to be just kind of time lapse. Sorry, I've got a big swamp cooler that's going to be blowing through here, trying to keep us cool. It makes a lot of noise and isn't exactly the best for audio quality. We'll turn that off, bring you guys in for any of the big stuff that we encounter along the way. But with that, Nathan's already pulled the seats out, obviously, and now it's time to start pulling this thing apart and see if we can get the body separated from the chassis so we can get to work on all the look on the chassis. Let's see how it goes.

Alright, Nathan, what have you got done so far? I've pretty much unbolted everything from here back on the body. Now we just need—what bolts are those? What, you have the two bolts under there? Yeah, four bolts under there, and then 18, yeah, per side—two there, two there, nine here, nine there, two there, and then two there, two there. Although we had to put that one back in to get the car moved from over there to over here. Two over there, one there, one on the other side. You want to get that ground out? We've got to pull the fuel tank out. Oh, Nathan, you want to shut off the water on the swamp cooler? Yeah, and then we can turn on the swamp cooler and really get to work on this.

We got the fuel tank out, got to pull that bolt, that bolt, that bolt, that bolt. I disconnected the wiring from our master cylinder, hold those wires back up, disconnected all of our turn signal wiring, so these guys can hang out with the bumper. Body's clear there, and then—there.

Alright, with that, the body is completely unbolted from the chassis. You may have caught that I went in there, and I kind of just punched in and got it broken loose. I guess I'll try it one more time. I'll try it; I'm not strong enough to—yeah, well, stay on the cardboard. It's free. Oh, I got to disconnect this wire to the starter. There we go. Yeah, so now we can—we have to pull the shifter out. Oh yeah, that might be helpful. Well, I mean, could we just un—take out the shifter, Nathan? Oh, like yeah, anyway, like I was saying, the whole body is disconnected from the chassis. Now I've got to figure out a way for Nathan and I to get this off so we can roll the chassis out. Might hold a lot of 2x4s and sawhorses and whatnot.

That doesn't sound so good. You don't sound so good.

Apparently, that 2x4 is not very strong. It's a lot of weak, so we lost that one. So all I'm doing—I guess I should bring this—bring you guys over here. Yeah, which I've seen that on YouTube, like somebody just took the body off the bug and they just drove around—yeah, it can be done, just not that easy because the steering column's hanging up.

So I'm just—it's so hot that I had to put the phone in the refrigerator to cool it down. I've got it in front of the swamp cooler now. Audio is going to be junk, but at least you guys will be able to watch me and Nathan try and get this body off over the chassis.

You guys probably can't see it on this side, but Nathan forgot a bolt on that side. So here I am trying to lift the body up, and it keeps on getting stuck at that front right corner. I'm like, what the heck? So I'm underneath, as I'm trying to jack up that front right corner of the body, and the floor pan comes up with it. That's probably because there's a bolt still in place. We'll get that taken care of, and we'll keep on keeping on.

Okay, the Bug looks a lot bigger without the body. I mean, it's a big chassis. It goes from there all the way to here. Hey, shush. Yeah, no, I definitely should not stand on this. That wasn't exactly easy, but it was doable. I had to think about it, and obviously, this spot over here where Nathan unbolted it—Nathan forgot to undo a bolt right here. You can see how the floor pan creased when I was jacking up the body, going, why isn't this thing coming loose? Well, because it's still bolted in place. Yeah, you forgot a bolt, Nathan. Yeah, well, because the chassis over there—see how it bent in? I had to unbend it, and then to get the other ones out, and then I just completely missed that one. Yeah, there we go.

Honestly, I should have taken some measurements for my subframe from here and out and around and to the height of here, but I guess when I have more assistance, maybe we can throw the body on and off and whatnot when we actually have the steel. But in the meantime, your floor pan repair, Nathan, it's got to go bye-bye along with the entire floor pan. Yeah, so that's okay. I don't know how easily I can flip this thing on its side to make life easy to cut. We'll see how that goes. Also, I want to relocate these calipers and see if I can't possibly make these parking brake cables work to actually give us a parking brake-equipped rear brake system. I think that would be pretty nice.

What's that? Parking brakes. It's a ball up here. That's the heater control knob from right there, so you can slap that back on, although we're going to get rid of those because we don't need no stinking heater control levers. I'm pretty beat from that, so I'm going to take a break, and we'll be back.

Nathan, where's your body? Over here. And it's right there. Actually, that's your body, the body God gave you, buddy. But the most important thing right now is, where's your chassis? All the way over there. There we are. Alright, so we've got everything pulled off—well, obviously, the body's pulled off, but now we can gain access to everything in there, clean up that front beam. We're probably going to completely pull out that front beam, put in some adjusters, weld it up, make it nice and strong for off-roading. I want to go with a wider beam, but Nathan doesn't want to go with a wider beam. I mean, it depends on when we're actually done with the entire chassis and seeing how far out the wheels stick. I mean, we can see right there. Yeah, I know it will just end up rubbing up against the body. I'm not entirely sure how bad it is.

Regardless, Nathan, you've got some holes in your pans. Yeah, that's going to be the next big deal. And you have a hole in your shorts from engine battle. No, that wasn't from the battle, that was from the engine. But yeah, I've got a hole in my shorts. Holy shorts. Hole in the pans and hole in the shorts.

Next big step will be cutting out the floor pans, getting this entire chassis cleaned up, getting this beam cleaned up, steering box. I mean, I just want this entire chassis just as clean as can be and painted and ready to reassemble, so to speak. A couple of oddball things I'm going to do is I'm going to probably run some air conditioning compressor lines through the chassis because I do plan on putting air conditioning in this. We live in Phoenix, Arizona, kind of a necessity. Yeah, I don't have any particular kits in mind. In fact, I see some universal kits online, probably going to end up using one of those and making my own brackets, and we'll see how it goes. We need to cut out these floors, put in new floor pans, get this thing detailed. Another big thing is we need to get a rear subframe made to be able to put some rear shocks in this thing. Yeah, otherwise we're going to go…

Along those lines with the suspension, I want to put in a wider beam. Ideally, I want to widen this stock ball joint beam. A lot of off-roaders are going, "Why bother with the ball joint beam?" Well, we've already proven that we've got like 7 inches of plus travel out of these trailing arms. The ball joints both point the same direction. It's a plenty strong front end. Is it as capable as a link pin front end? No, but it's still plenty good for most general off-roading. We're not racing. We can still go out and have fun. It's plenty capable, but I want to get the front and rear track the same width. But, man, it's really, really warm. It's currently 107° outside. 207° inside. 207° inside. Well, let's see. The chassis is 102°, 102.3° sitting here in the garage. The ground, 102°. Yeah, the concrete is 102°, so it's a warm garage.

We're going to call it a day. I think it's pretty successful. We struggled a bit trying to figure out exactly what to do, trying to pull the body off the chassis by ourselves, but in the end, we managed it pretty well. On that note, until the next video. Life’s full of good people. If you can't find one, be one. Later, guys.