Video Transcript

Hi guys, I'm Sam. And I'm Nathan. Welcome to our garage, where Nathan's already been sanding.

We're back at it again. The chassis is out here, and body's in there. Nathan's cutting a template—I hope that fits. We don't want the entire thing to fit through there; we just want just this edge to show. We want it flush on that edge, so I think we need to remake that. But anyway, we're going to be drilling that hole in our fiberglass so that we can mount our filler underneath on our body, so that we can fill up our fuel tank.

How do we use a compass to draw on that thing? Because I want to make certain that we have a good size hole before we go cutting holes in fiberglass. That's a kind of circle. That's a kind of circle? Well, you kind of need to work on your circles. Yeah, so let's work on that and show you what we come up with.

Hey, nice, that's good. Okay, back to the body.

Now we can mark our body to go and cut in there. So it's kind of smaller? You don't say. Well, we certainly can't make a hole bigger when we have the body in the way, can we? All right, so somewhere in that general vicinity is where we're going to be. All right, now we can get this hood off again. Hood, get out of here.

So we need to just knock that old fuel filler out of the way. Yep. So are we just going to weld in another piece there? We'll probably have to weld in a patch panel here.

I've never done patch panels this way, but there's a guy I watch occasionally on YouTube—kind of like you guys are doing now—that is really, really good at metal fabrication. He actually will just make a panel, weld it in place, and then cut out the piece underneath as he's going. So I'm going to give that a try and see how it works.

All right, so now that I've got this thing kind of laid out in place, and this is a piece of German steel—this was originally one of the front fenders. It's got a little bubble in it and a bow, but it's going to be under the fiberglass anyway, not a big deal.

Now what I'm going to do is come in with my angle grinder and cut in this bottom edge at an angle, and as I do, I can come back and then weld up that gap. Let's give this a whirl and see how she goes.

Maybe that tack right there might be a little bit too hard, out of place. We shall see. Nice. Smells nice.

All good, getting there.

There, the last edge here, and then we have a patch panel made, and our fuel door will be missing.

That fuel door is a little more stuck than I'd like, but I'm sure I'll get it.

Fuel door out, patch panel in.

Nate. Yeah? You want a fuel door? Um, no. All right, good, 'cause you ain't got one. You mean to go over that?

Oh yeah. Also, can we keep that black? Keep what black? The... you. Yeah. Okay, good.

Now I can just go through and weld up all that gap—one perfectly cut patch panel.

Oh wow, perfect, huh? So, like, come the '67, huh? That just looks horrible. Let me get my flap wheel and clean this stuff up a little bit so I can see where I'm at.

Is it perfect? No. Will it do? Absolutely.

If this was a full-bodied sedan where we would see this quarter panel, that would not do. But this is an off-road car where this is going to be covered with fiberglass. I'll probably give it a very thin coat of filler when we actually do the bodywork. This is going to get painted body color, even though it's going to get covered up, but we don't want it to look like that. And we can do better. So we will. But I'm not concerned with this thing being perfectly body-arrow straight. That's why I wasn't too concerned with warping and whatnot. We'll beat it out with a hammer.

Show you guys that side—just a quick touch-up with a grinder and smooth enough, especially for a Baja Bug.

All right, let me see if I can find Nathan, and we'll get back to work.

I got the whole front end bolted on just to get that marked so we can pull it off again. But while we have it there, I might as well drill the hole.

You know what? We can actually leave it on until we put the thing. Thing? For the most part. Perfect. All right, fits? Yep. Open it.

All right, um, little—I wonder if my jigsaw has a metal blade or not? Oh yeah, that's—that's honestly what I was thinking about.

Yeah, that blade is— Yeah, that way it's not—get the body out, get the front end off. Get the front end? Yeah, taking the body off is not going to do anything. Lost that bottom...

Ah, there's a crack in my windshield. There's a couple of cracks in the windshields. There's a crack in your butt, Nathan.

Perfect. Let's get the blade back again. Now, it's going to work. Probably not, but... yeah.

Awesome.

All right, how we looking now? Not quite there, but closer. And it's literally just right on that edge.

Boom. Nathan, how's that? It works. It's in.

Oh wow. Yeah.

Nathan, put the front end on. That was my front end. Yeah. That's going to like it. Yeah, look at that. Huh, I like that. What do you think?

Yeah, that looks pretty good. Now we just got to paint it. I mean, that shows you how far this goes out. Yeah, I'm going to try and bang it out a little bit, but at the end of the day, I ain't mad at that.

Flush mount, or I believe the proper term is "French tin," but we ain't French. We're American. This is America.

Try and get the inner fender well to pop out that way just a touch, right there. Cuz we got a pretty decent gap there, but whatever.

All right, now that we have this in place, we need to work on being able to connect this to our fuel tank. Now, I already have gone through and flushed out our fuel tank, because we did actually have fuel in it at one point. It's been flushed out and aired out. Now, I've got to go get a filler that I can weld into it that we can connect to this.

I think that should be leak-free, but I'll go fill it up with water and we'll find out.

All right, for the most part, it's pretty good. Now, where we got a little bit of a seep right there. And that would be about it. So I'm going to grind that down and then come in and reweld that. This is where I first started with the welding, and I didn't like how little penetration I was getting, so I cranked up the voltage a little bit after that. Take care of that real quick.

Yep, just right at that bottom edge. Let's hit that real quick with the welder.

No water drips nowhere. Is it the prettiest thing? No. But it's effective. I'll just touch it up with the grinder, make it a little prettier. But other than that, it's not leaking. That's the most important part.

I've welded up virtually all of our body molding holes. Actually, I can't say virtually—all the body molding holes, all the holes in our rear luggage tray from when we broke off the engine brace or the engine firewall piece. That's all welded up. You can't see underneath here, but I got that welded up. I got some of the holes in this fender well welded up. And obviously, of course, the big thing, we have our fuel filler in here. Now the body is not sitting in place, so that's not going to be perfectly flush, but we now have a fuel filler here. I need to get a hose and extension down to our gas tank there, but I want to get the majority of this front end cut back to the point where I can put a bulkhead on the front for our fuel tank and cut away all the rest. Other than that, Nathan, you need to do a lot of sanding when you're not making 3D prints of your parts.

So Nathan's been working on getting more engine block-off plates made and ready to ship out for some customers that have ordered them. He actually took his money from his first few orders and bought a second printer so that he can have two printers going to double his production. So it was very smart on his part to get those things rocking and rolling. He's been working on that today while I've been working on this.

Started playing when I got home tonight and did that. I haven't really been filming because I just picked up the grinder and the sawzall and started working. I do that sometimes when I'm bored. But I've got our front end bobbed, and the important part is, when I get this piece of metal cut here, we will be able to have essentially a full trunk.

I also rolled up this edge of our hood seal piece to give us a straight lip, and I'll continue that straight lip across the top of this piece of metal here and across this piece of metal here. Then I'll actually be able to put a piece of a snap-on trim right here, perhaps with a seal across the top edge.

Anything we put in the trunk is going to be in waterproof containers or, you know, it's going to be weatherproof stuff, but anything we can do to keep more dust and debris and stuff out of the front, the better.

Yeah, we're just going to keep on playing with this, and we'll show you what we got at the end.

Kind of what we got started off here. Yeah, just sitting there in that box edge. We'll do the same thing on this side over here. It'll come in on the inside. Just got that piece shaped in. We can just come in and do some spot welds on the inside edges, and that will be relatively sealed up. Maybe use some seam sealer.

What do you think about that? Yeah, looks a little better. Better than those big old dangly pieces hanging out the front. Yeah. Does it look like it's a crazy flat-nosed pug? No. All right.

Well, I got to do what I did to that side to that side, and I'm just going to cut the bottom straight across here to the other side, up and over, and so this will just be a basically a front flat face on the front of this car. And of course, hopefully, we can still just barely get into the top edge right there to get our bolts in, but I think we should be good to go.

Yeah, but we're still going to have the front end on, so you're not even going to see any of this anyway. Yeah, exactly.

All right, the moment of truth. Yes, you can get the gas tank tab down in place with the help of a magnet and a long extension. It's just held in place with a couple of vise grips and some clamps at the bottom. But there we go. It works.

Then we’ll weld in the side of those to support our front beam supports, which hold up the fuel tank or the front edge of the fuel tank. Weld those across both sides. I'll just use some forehead saver 1000s across the bottom of that. That is just going to be an open edge. I'm not too concerned about it—it's at the bottom. And what you're going to do?

With that, in about two hours, I've turned the front of this Baja Bug into a flat-nose Baja Bug. You like it? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be under the front anyway. You're not going to see any of this, of course. Yeah, you're not going to see any of this, but—

Guess let's pull that bracket out real quick. Easily. Of course, so easily that even a magnet can do it. Maybe.

Boom. There we go. All right, pull the tank out. Here we go.

Yeah, so it's just a folded edge here, a folded edge here, and a folded edge there. Then this panel comes in this way and then rolls flat that way. I'll weld up that seam, weld up that seam, trade it out. We'll weld a piece across that, and we'll take the sealant and seal it up.

And perfect. Then we've got one-piece front-end Baja trunk. I mean, it's not like we're even going to really put much of anything in it. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of just, you know, tools and whatnots that will be nice to have, but you're not going to need to get to them every day.

Yeah. Yeah, jack, tools, etc., that can sit up here. Yeah, just 'cause it's so freaking hard to get it on and off. Maybe a spare tire?

Is this important for the car? That is the most important piece of this car ever. This piece—you can't run, we can't run or drive. We might as well just scrap the car and trash it if we lose that. Yeah.

All right, on that note, we're going to wrap it up for the night. I'm going to go take a shower and go have some homemade chili. Later.

I am by no means an expert in any of this. It's only our, what, second time doing this? Yeah, started back there, being right there. Yeah, on this car. So I'm learning as I go.

Hey look, we're fixing that spot right there and back there too.

Hey look, two thingy things. It looks like if you, um, hit somebody with that, it would hurt a lot.

Wow, look at that. Oh, there's a hole in my car. A hole? There's a hole in my car now. Apparently, I put too much heat in that one. Yeah, well, I can weld that up. Yeah, with the other welder. Not the—not the welder, not the—that guy. The Chicago Electric welding dent repair instead welder.

Nice. And see, that might not be very fun. Well, at least there's not much of a dent left. We got most of it. Just pull this one—

Wow, just need one more right there. Yep, and then we should have it. Wow, better than she was. My car is looking more undented. Well, better than it was. Could be better. Yeah, but guess what? That's what filler’s made for. Yeah. Yeah, and at least now we have a nice even gap there, and we don't have a big crease right there. Thin coat of skimmer right there and lots and lots of sanding. Yeah.

First, we're going to make a new intake manifold for Nathan's bike project and this new fancy VZ-something. PZ20. PZ20 carburetor. Yeah. Okay, we're putting that on a little 49cc two-stroke bicycle that you got off the side of the road.

Yeah, I mean, I got the bicycle, the engine, everything off of Amazon. Sadly, my favorite motorcycle engine kit brand stopped making them, and now they're doing electric stuff.

Stupid electric. And how can we go bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing? DZ20.

All right guys, a new day. Saturday the 15th, I think so. Yeah and it's bodywork and sanding time. We're going to spend the next couple of days, next couple of nights as time allows, getting this thing all ready for bodywork. Minimal bodywork, obviously. We did get that popped out. Going to get a thin coat of filler on this guy here and this guy here—all our body molding holes. And for the most part, it's going to be very minimal on the bodywork, but just enough to make it decent, but not perfect.

So today, the mission is mud. Yeah, mud being body filler. Just going to go through, do our couple spots of Bondo filler. We're going to call it Bondo—we're actually using Upol lightweight gold, some good body filler. So we'll just do our couple spots here, here, here, here. We're just going to feel out our panels. Anything that sticks out by hand, we're going to go ahead and mark and do some filler on. And it's just going to be a quick job. We're not going for mirror-perfect reflections in this paint. Being a light color like orange, it's going to hide a lot of stuff anyway, so we should be good. But yeah, that's what we're going to do today.

Show you some of the stuff we picked up yesterday. So, filler: Upol lightweight gold. Lightweight filler, easy to sand, non-sagging, pinhole resistant, direct to metal. So we're going to do some of that. For primer, we're using 50-states legal acrylic lacquer primer in gray. We're going to mix that one-to-one with some lacquer thinner. Economy lacquer thinner. For our bare metal spots, once we're done with bodywork, before laying down our primer, we're going to use some self-etching primer. For all of our fender wells, trunk, and rear firewall, we're going to do black paintable undercoating. This stuff's really good—I used this on my Super Beetle. For work on our front end, we're going to go with some Evercoat Kitty Hair long-strand fiberglass. That will help fill in all of our holes and do some repairs on our front end.

We've got respirators. Any last-minute stuff after primer, we've got some glazing putty, grease and wax remover, and tack cloths. And of course, more acetone. This is some of the stuff. All totaled, how much, Nathan? Around $500, but that's including our respirators, 'cause I didn’t have any proper respirators when we're shooting paint.

So we spent more on all this stuff here than we did on our paint. And we went on a shopping spree. But that actually kind of just goes to show—for any paint job, it's not the paint that makes the car look good It's all the prep work before the paint.

As I was explaining to Nathan yesterday, you can take the best paint in the world and paint it over shoddy bodywork, and that paint’s going to look like garbage. But along the same lines, you can take some junky paint—not necessarily junky paint, well, it's just not the best paint in the world—but if you paint that over good bodywork, it’s going to look pretty good. So that's kind of the route we're going for. Again, we're not going for mirror-straight panels here, but we're going to do a pretty decent job, I hope.

Yeah. So we're going to get to work on that.

All right, nothing fancy. Just some grease and wax remover. Old clean rag—clean-ish enough, anyway. This is all pre-bodywork stuff anyway. Just wiping down the car from top to bottom, get all that dust from sanding off of the car before we lay down some filler.

I haven't wet the back yet. Now Nathan’s going to finish drying it off while I mix up some mud.

Woo, stuff. Now you can smell that stuff from a mile away. I am by no means a bodywork professional, but I can work it. My blue Super Beetle—if you guys aren't familiar with our channel or haven’t been watching for a long time—I did all the bodywork on that car myself, and that car was arrow-straight and on a cover magazine. So I figured if it was decent enough for them, I figure I can kind of fake it till I make it when it comes to bodywork.

All right, that should be good for now. We had a couple small spots inside this door jamb I wasn’t really happy with, and I’m not looking to get perfection in the first coat.

All right Nathan, your first foray into bodywork. Yeah.

Now that our Bondo is, for the most part, tacked up, let's clean off the edges. Now on these, you don't want to just pick an edge and go. You want to take the whole panel in full and just let the sandpaper do the work.

So just? No, no, you don’t go in lines. You go with the curve. So if you go like this, you’re going to end up with a groove right there. Yeah. So you just want to go—if you're going to do anything, go like that, and just let the sandpaper do the work.

That’s mainly why I did that quarter, so you can do that. Also, you can mount some of the edges right here. You got that—those thick edges that— No.

And you guys, so you can see what 40-grit looks like. It’s pretty rough. It's got some heavy, heavy grit. 40-grit is very, very tough. But yeah, we're just trying to just give a general shape to this, and most of this will probably end up on the ground, and that’s fine.

So we’re revealing that low spot right there. Everything else is just getting knocked down. This is going to be a huge low spot right there as well, but—pretty big. Just good enough for now.

All right, get the air blower nozzle and kind of blow out some of that stuff.

Anyway, you guys see how it goes. We're going to keep doing this for most of the day until we get all this feathered out with probably 220. Once we get everything at 220, then we'll hit the whole car with 220, and then it'll be time for the first couple of coats of primer.

And then the car will be one color, and that's when you want to sell a car—ready for paint! Just kidding, we're going to keep going.

The majority of our bodywork is all done. We're each going to attack a side with self-etching primer, get all the bare metal. And with that, we're going to roll the car into our paint booth—which is just our side yard—and we're going to start shooting some primer on this thing.

Yeah, like legit primer. Legit primer. And then it's all going to be gray, and not gray, instead of blue and white and metal and—yeah. So we're going to head to that.

And just like that, we're shooting primer. This will tell us where all of our highs and all of our lows are. It'll fill in scratches, and it'll reveal scratches. But this is a good starting point, getting the car all one color. Nice.

We're going to keep on doing this for a while. Be back later.

That is my first time using lacquer-based primer. I have always used water-based primer, and I've always had good luck with it. This doesn’t build quite as thickly as that waterborne primer, so we've got a lot of coats on here. We're going to go through, and we're going to block this out—or at least sand it down with blocks, probably 320. That will reveal any other imperfections and scratches and everything else. And from there, we'll touch up some more primer, and then she’s ready for paint.

So, Nathan, what do you think? I think it looks awesome. Like, it's finally all mostly one color. One-color bug, that’s pretty, pretty cool. Yeah.

So with that, I'm Sam. And I'm Nathan. And thanks for watching.

Life’s full of good people. If you can't find one, be one. Later, guys.

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