Video Transcript

There we go. Hold on. That is so weird-looking. It's massive. Like, what the heck? It's monster-normous. It's such a Baja. It's like, insane.

Hi guys, I'm Sam and I'm Nate and today we're working with CAD or cardboard-aided design. Stay tuned to see what we come up with. We've got a big hole in the bottom of our dash now, Nathan, don't we? We have AC. We have an air conditioning evaporator up underneath the dash now. The reason why I cut this up here is because otherwise, this would have all been sitting underneath the dash down there, which is not good. There's our piece. I got the front of our trunk all welded in. That's all nice and solid now. I'm shaking the whole car. Now we have a flat-nose Baja Bug trunk with air conditioning. How's it look from the inside?

Nathan's getting the battery booster. Anyway, we're going to build a box inside the trunk to seal this off so that this is still on the inside and not up in the trunk, grabbing air from our trunk and blowing it into the car. Alright, now we have power. Oooh, it's a lot of air too. You can feel it from back here easily. Now we've got an air conditioning evaporator. We'll just have to hook up all the lines, of course. The lines will go from here down to here on the tunnel. That's on one. It can get pretty slow and it's still pushing decent air. Very cool. Literally.

Still need to cut these guys out for our gauges and I'll work on the roof rack that Kyle gave us. Nathan is all jazzed about that roof rack. We're going to keep on working and next is cardboard-aided design to build a template for some sheet metal that will cover this guy here. Cardboard-aided design.

Not horrible. Not horrible at all. I thought it was supposed to be horrible. Well, you know, sometimes you don't get what's wrong. Alright, I'm going to keep on working on that. Nathan, You keep on working on that. You get the idea on how I turned cardboard into steel. Not necessarily. Well, I turned the cardboard template into a steel air conditioning box. I'll probably run some foam tape or foam sealant on this or maybe I'll run a snap-on piece of trim right there with a bead around there that will seal our air conditioning unit into our cab.

You approve? Yeah. Nice. It's kind of cool having AC in a bug. It will be. And in a Baja Bug. In a Baja Bug.

So I'm going to call it a night. Realistically, I'm probably going to go weld that piece up and then I'm going to get some dinner. I haven't eaten since 7:00 this morning and it's now 6:35 at night. Nathan, you going to keep working on the rack? Make sure you take a shower before bed. On that note, we will catch you guys later.

And we're going to get back to work on our body, getting all the undercoating and everything else done up front and in the back so that we can get this body onto the chassis. Or should I work on getting the cage and seats off? No, we still have to paint the backside and everything else. Plus, you still could have been stripping the fenders instead of installing the door latch in the door.

Gray or we just keep it underneath black. Black underneath. I need to get another coat. I need to grab some cardboard right there. We got to still paint that and then the back and back. Where? Oh, I got that side mostly. Let's get up here now. We're spraying the trunk in gray because why not add a little bit of contrast? It'll make things easier to see if you're not looking against the black background. You can't see me because I'm camouflage. Anyway, we're going to keep on doing what we're doing. Wrapping it up before dinner. Got the backhand side all sprayed and undercoated. Everything here is ready to go. Everything at the front is ready to go. Let me show you what the front looks like. How's the front look? Good. What do you think? I think it looks like the front of the car. That's what our trunk looks like. Now we've got a nice high contrast trunk.

It is about the moment of truth for that body to go on that chassis. Are you almost done with the engine? Alright, let me give you a hand. That there engine's out. We need to put a panda body seal in place and put some sealant over these guys for the roll cage to sit on that, which we have. Shifter's out. Everything else is good there. Panda body seal right now is our big one for that. We have two options: early style panda body seal or what we're going to go with from the home depot is some of that weather strip seal. It's actually like camper shell sealant, but this is actually pretty close to what Volkswagen did originally. You can actually still see some remnants of it all around here. They had a little bit more adhesively stuff, but this will do the trick. It's the right size, inch and a quarter, and we can basically just run this all along the thing all the way around.

We're going to get working on that because our body is just sitting up there precariously, giving us a little bit of time during a very windy day on just 2x4s that are sketchy. We've got our body sitting up there precariously. It's worked so far. We're going to trust it works again. We'll be back when we're ready to roll this thing in. Nathan, are we ready? No. Why not? I don't know. I mean, I'm not mentally ready. Physically, yeah. The chassis is ready. We've got our panda body seal in here. We've got our pads in place up here for our cage. We've got our 17 mm shock pads in there on the beam at the body. We have our 10 mm shock isolation pads in there. See our nice undercoating job.

It is going to be a complete shock to me seeing the whole car like put together, mostly restored.

Underneath, we've got plates by Nate bolted on both sides to cap off the rear heater ducts because we don't need those. So, body's ready to go, pan ready to go. We're going to try and put them together.

Roll the car forward there. Right where it is. That step one. Nathan, you've got a flip-open Baja Bug. Easy access to transmission and clutch adjustment and AC.

I'm probably going to have to pull it back right here and then let it reset. Well, I don't know if it's big old tires. OSHA approved? Not at all. Oh my gosh. That's freaking massive.

Alright, body's not quite in set. Yeah, I can see that. What the heck. Weird. Alright, that's pretty darn close. See those holes? I can see those holes. Sigh of relief. Body is back on the chassis. Sit here with it like complete and orange.

There we go. Hold on. That is so weird-looking. It's massive. Like, what the heck? It's monster-normous. It's such a big Baja Bug. It's like insane. It's so wide. That is a monster Bug, dude. Like, what's the point of freaking fenders when it's like this? Baja Bug. That's the point of fenders. The point of fenders is Baja Bug.

Got orange body on in the way. Alright, bolt her back up, buddy. Your Baja, you bolt it. Nathan's going to keep on bolting this up. I'm going to relax. This is his car.

Got some new panda body bolts to put in place. Nathan's starting with those two frame head bolts up front. They lined up. That's the hard part about putting a body on. We're going to get all the panda body bolts in place and then we'll be back to get them all tightened down.

Apparently, what you want to do when it doesn't go in because it's super gooey is just use the ratchet. Alright, so we've got all the bolts in all the way down the sides. I need to come back and back mask this and spray underneath here, and obviously, I missed that in orange. So we're going to try to find some Kubota orange rattle cans and do some touchup here and here. But again, Baja Bug, it's fine.

Alright, now that I got that one finished and that one and those two and everything underneath, now we're going to try to get the cage lined up on those back plates. I think I'm going to still run some more of that camper shell seal underneath the base plates.

Don’t scratch my door. There you go, just like that. Underneath and start bolting everything down. Two frame head bolts on the front and then swap it up for the 13, which should be down there, and hit them all up. Well, that's good and that guy there.

Alright, it's been a long day. We got a lot done today. Like, the car is like an assembledish kind of. We got seats in. Nathan's working on a steering wheel. I'm so tired my eyes are watering. Yeah, he doesn't like the steering wheel, but I do, so I'm going to clean it up so maybe he will. I've got our main wiring harness cut open just to make certain that none of our wires were charred all the way through. Everything's good. This is just melted plastic that's stuck to it. We're going to wrap this guy and rerun him. The second spot as well. Nothing inside was even touched, so we're good there.

So tomorrow is Friday. Yeah, today is Thursday, February 27th. So I think the video that comes out tomorrow, we said that hopefully by the time that video tomorrow comes out, this car will be painted. This car is now painted. It's now on its chassis, as you guys have seen in this video. Tomorrow, Friday the 28th, we are going to bring home a bunch of parts and hopefully get it. We're going to start assembling as much as we can, starting in order of importance. Things like windshields, doors. I do have pop-out windows. Just all of the bare necessities, so to speak, of getting this thing sealed and comfortable to drive in.

All this is in preparation for the Edge Finders Bug Bloom coming up. I think that's the 23rd or the 24th. I'll have a flyer right here. And then the next weekend is our return to the first show we brought the car to, even though it's a month early. The next weekend will be the Desert Dubs fourth annual car show. I want to say that's on the following weekend, the 29th. That's this show right here.

For any of you guys worrying about me cleaning this wheel with a wire brush, it's aluminum. It's aluminum. It's been a good day, but I'm tired. Nathan's going to keep on working on that, and we'll see you guys tomorrow.

It's Friday. Nathan's working on putting a new steering wheel adapter on his old steering wheel. I've got some old hardware to clean up to put on the mounts for our front beam and the rear shock tower mounts. We've got a pile of parts outside scrapers, window regulators, door seals, window trim, window seals, mirrors, door latches and catches, and lions and tigers and bears, oh my. I say it would be pretty cool to have this thing running and driving this weekend. We'll see how it goes.

All sorts of stuff to make sure that we can drive this car in inclement weather, seeing as the Bug Bloom show last year we actually got rained on. So having the interior sealed off would be kind of nice. Anyway, we're going to do some work, and we'll bring you guys in for anything interesting.

Just so I can get a bolt in there along with the factory-style washers and spacers. Using an X-Acto knife just to trim that out a little bit. And now, with luck, be able to thread that bolt in.

Here's a pro tip. Super glue. Trim the door handle seals as needed, depending on whether or not you have original handles or aftermarket handles. The door handle seals, they will fit some and most of the original door handles, but most of the aftermarket door handles they don't fit that well. So get them test fit, trim them as needed, and once you actually get it to snap on in place all the way around, get some super glue and put some glue on that, and then snap that one in place. That one's already glued in. I'm going to get the backlight done now. Just like that. Let that set up, and then when you're done, we got the hood seal in all the way around.

I've got the aftermarket Mexican-style Beetle hood seal in place there, which doesn't cover across the back, so we still have a stock seal there. We got some mirrors on. We got the antenna on. Nathan's working on getting all the door latches in. We've got this door handle in now. These seals are all in place, trimmed, and glued. We're going to keep on keeping on with the assembly.

Still at it after dinner. Nathan's putting in a gas tank-to-body seal. We're still working on getting all the door mechanisms and check rods and handles and everything else. We had to pull that door handle off because the door latch mechanism wasn't unlocking with the key or barely with the pull. So we've got that out and being cleaned. Nathan's got an deffective gas tank-to-body seal. It's way too long.

Alright, I'm off to the store to get a steel extension for that, and I shall return.

It is March 1st, Saturday. Nathan's feeling under the weather. There's a little stomach bug that's been going around for the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, I haven't had to deal with it yet. Hopefully, I stay out in the garage and stay safe.

Got our fuel tank in with our little stock mounts still fit down there. Kind of a tight squeeze, but we're good. We got the stock mounts in the back. Eventually, I will get our fuel door in and our elbow and our steel line and all that set up, but right now my major concern is all the window regulators, vent wing assemblies, windows, felt channels, scrapers, etc.

I'm not going to go into too much detail on this. My 1971 Super Beetle has a fantastic video on everything from putting the door on to regulators to scrapers, etc. Full order of operation. If you want to see how everything on the door goes together, watch that video. I'll show one trick in this video that I hope works and I'll show why I do that when the time comes. But in the meantime, I'm going to get this door assembled and that door assembled. I'll bring you in for that vent wing stuff that I play with.

Looks like Nathan's back. How you feeling, buddy? Up all morning. Yeah, lucky he's seeing the toilet. Mostly, except for the first time I woke up at 5:30 feeling nauseous.

Thing's looking sweet. Not too bad. Sweet.

Did you figure out the gas tank? I think so. Might be the thing you put it back together. He's like, whoa, time me to do something. Looking nicer and nicer. Alright, well, I guess Nathan just had a little bit of food poisoning, hopefully. So he is here was watching me install scrapers. Unfortunately, I got this one preemptively, and then I got sidetracked.

Alright, outside scraper, drop it in, down and then up. And then you got to make sure that every single one of these clips is in place. Alright, dude, you got better eyes on me. Is that clip in place or not? Um, what clip? This one right here. Yeah, that metal clip. There's a rectangular groove here. Hold on. Yeah. Okay, take a flat screwdriver and stick your arm up underneath the bottom and push those clips in place. There we go. Wow, look at all this chrome. My favorite, even though it's probably not metal, is it? It's actually aluminum. It is metal. Just like that.

Bring you guys close up so we've got our scraper in place now. Alright, and on this guy here, I like to bend that tab around the front, and that will hold that in place. Stock mirror. I just drilled a hole in the stock location. When you're looking inside, you can actually see that location for that mirror is in place. And then I just used a 16x1.5 mm nut, threaded it onto there while that was in place, and now we've got a mirror, a passenger side mirror.

Felt channel clips, you just go like that and then down. Yeah, show that little hook on the end like that. Push it in that hole, and then I'll use a flathead on the top of it to tap it in just like that. And you can see it's in place. Yeah, because you got that big horseshoe right there. That's our felt channel clip. And then for this guy right here, I will push him up usually. Can you see the horseshoe enough? No? Yeah, you see the horseshoe? Yeah. Anyways, there you go, you got two more across the top there. You know the deal now.

Well, Nathan's working on that. I'm going to show you guys the quarrel I have with these aftermarket vent wing assemblies. These are aftermarket vent wing assemblies, and overall they look nice. Those are aftermarket? They not the original ones? My problem is, Nathan, hold that open. See this gap right here? As soon as you open it and then try to go back and close it, it now has a big gap there. You actually have to go through and force it back into place. I can't adjust this. I can't adjust that.

But what I can do is drill out that rivet and space that rivet out a little bit. That should give me an opportunity to actually open and close these things smoothly without having to force them. So I'm going to give that a try. So while I work on that, Nathan's going to work on the left side scraper.

That didn't take hardly anything to get that to pop out, and now I'm going to re-rivet it back in a place where it's more happy. I'll just use a couple of washers or spacers in between here and here, and then a pop rivet and pop rivet it back in place.

Alright, while I continue to work on those, Nathan is going to start to put in his pop-out windows. Going to pull off these three screws. That metal plate is going to go... it's going to stay in the position there, but it installs on the back side. So what I'll normally do is I'll put in one once it's in place so you can hold the plate and get it lined up, and then I'll roll it in place and get the next two.

What did I just say? You said that we're going to put the one in place, and then once it's in, then we're going to put the other two. Okay, well, there's no "we" about it. This is all you, buddy, because I'm working on stuff. So you got to figure this out.

At the back, we're already pre-drilled back here for our latch. I just didn't bring home these screws, so we'll have to use something temporarily on those. It's all the details, all the small details. I just temporarily used a small nut right there as a spacer, and you know what? At the end of the day, that's an eye lock nut. That thing's all in place. The head isn't sticking out too far in our felt channel. I'm just going to rock it with that bolt and I'm going to go stick this in place.

I think the German seals are better than the aftermarket rubber seals, but we'll see how they do. Most importantly is the window operates. This guy in. Skipping a few gaps, dropped the window in place, got that bolted in, got the felt channel in again. If you want a better explanation, go to my 1971 Super Beetle door assembly.

Before you ever hook up a window regulator, make certain that your glass moves smoothly by hand. If you can't move this smoothly by hand, your window regulator does not have a chance. Make sure this operates smoothly before you ever put your inside scraper in place or hook up your window regulator. Now I'm going to put my inside scraper in and then I'll operate this one more time and then we’ll give it a try.

I had to finish that pop-out window up for Nathan. His stomach started bothering him again, started getting queasy, so he headed back inside. I finished that up. We've got that almost done. However, the aftermarket regulator gave out. Put in the original German regulator. It gave out. Problem being is I think I used some very old but new felt channels—the long ones right there and back there. They weren't the best. I think that's what caused two window regulators to strip out despite the glass actually seeming to slide up relatively well by hand.

That door's going to stop for a moment, and I'll get to work on that door and then this pop-out window. A little while later, I got this door completely assembled. Inside scraper, outside scraper, vent wing assembled with my riveted modification. Everything closes, no interference here. Again, just drill out that rivet, put in about 3/32 worth of washers or spacer or nut or something rather flathead bolt, bolt that together.

These aftermarket vent wing assemblies do come with a felt channel. It seems to be working. The vent wing seal—not a big fan of. They seem to be made smaller than the originals, so they're a little bit loose here. Probably makes them easier for them to install. The German ones are definitely more difficult to install, but they seal a lot better. We'll see how these do long term.

New used felt channels—they're new but they've been sitting around. This one actually seems to work alright. This window regulator, aftermarket window regulator, not German, and it works quite well. This door is done, other than a vapor barrier, armrest, and door panels. We're working on a custom cup holder for right here. I'm going to go put that other pop-out window assembly in, maybe do the rear window glass, maybe the windshield glass—I don't know. Catch you when I'm done with all that.

Alright, with that, I'm going to call it a night. Windshield is in. I wrapped up the night by testing our wiper switch and turn signal switch and ignition switch. They should all be working. Ignition switch is the most important that works, best as I can tell. That stuff should be good to go. This door is complete. That door needs a new window regulator and felt channel. I did swap out the ignition lock tumblers so our ignition and door handles have the same key. Obviously, we've got pop-out windows in, rear window seal in. We've got mirrors on, antenna, we've got all the hood seal and everything else good there. I've got the fuel filler in and extended down to our fuel tank, so we can put fuel in this thing outside the car as opposed to having to fill it up here.

Tomorrow, God willing, I'm going to run the main wiring harness up through the roof and do some temporary wiring at the back—probably enough to actually start this thing and maybe take it for a spin around the neighborhood. I do need to bleed the brakes still. We haven't gone through and bled the brakes after going through and redoing the entire chassis. I will mount the air conditioning box. Other than that, I'd say it's been a pretty good day—just all the chrome and the aluminum trim and all that stuff really brightens up the car and draws your attention away from the, eh, not-so-great paint job. Hopefully, Nathan will be back feeling better tomorrow and we'll see you guys then.

Good morning, it is March 2nd. We're back to work. Nathan's feeling better, hopefully today. Yeah. We're going to throw our air conditioning evaporator fan unit in place. Nathan wants it wired up at least so we can blow air with a fresh air motor on there. So yeah, we're going to do that and then we'll probably work on the main wiring harness and get this thing one step closer to turning the key to start the engine.

Nathan's got some more fans coming for his 3D printer. We're still printing like crazy on block-offs. Trying to catch up with orders. We've got four on order right now that we still have to catch up to.

We've got air conditioning all set in place, all sealed up inside from outside. We've got the power wire running down to that so I can wire that into our fuse box. Speaking of fuse box and wiring, I think our next step is to run our main wiring loom up and over the top of the car. I've got to add a couple of wires—oil pressure, oil temperature, and tachometer—and maybe just a spare.

We've got our main wiring harness with five extra wires run along with it, tied to a chase wire. We can't run through the roof, unfortunately, because Volkswagen blocked everything '71 and later with foam. So we're going to go through the old route on the chassis. Nate, we gonna hop inside and pull this through? Pulling... pulling... pulling... Keep that harness pulling. Let me know when it gets to the inside. Alright, keep going... right about there.

Oh man, I forgot to undo our tail light wires because we're only going to have tail light wires on this side to a plug here. That's to our engine. That's to our tail light. And that's all we need.

At the engine, all of our wiring is run. Alternator warning light, coils got power, carbs got power, choke and distributor are hooked up. The only thing I haven't hooked up, obviously, what we're going to need to do is the starter, that'll be underneath the rear seat and at the transmission. Obviously, tail lights, I've got everything rerun and reloomed. I redid some of the wiring here. I pulled all of our tail lights because these are all just going to go into one wiring connector. I'll have that wiring connector here.

Nathan, what are you doing? Putting fuel line back on after I siphoned some out of the dune buggy. Nice. Now we can at least test out our fuel filler. Alright, you test out our fuel filler. I've got all of our wiring that can be hooked up hooked up. Is it the cleanest thing in the world? No, but I don't have any crimp-on terminal ends currently, so it's as clean as it's going to get for now, and it will suffice.

Moment of truth. Might want to turn it upside down and then lift it up—oh, straight up and down. Never mind. Alright, I'm going to go teach my son how to use a gas dump can and I will be back.

Now it's time to figure out whether or not the battery has charge. Well, that answers that question—turns out it doesn't. Alright, attempt number two with a booster box in place. Alright, hold on, let me prime the carburetor. Attempt number three, dump some fuel down the carburetor and see what she does now.

Hey, look at that. We're getting some fuel back there too. Alright, keep cranking. That's all she needed. I'm all like, how come I can't give it throttle? Maybe because I forgot about that one. Why don't you go grab the one off the dune buggy, should be 8 mm. This engine hasn't started in what almost an entire year? She started right up. Well, obviously, because Nathan built the top end on it. Yeah, go grab that. The dune buggy starts up pretty well too, and I built that entire thing. Yep, and twisted my ankle. Careful.

We had to wait for some batteries to charge. While we were waiting, we put on the front end, bled the brakes, torqued the lug nuts, put some cotter pins in the axles, tightened the front bumper. Nathan organized some hardware. We're still cleaning up.

But anyway, in the meantime, in between time, Nathan, you want to do the honors? Alright. It stops, brakes work. She's going. It almost sounds like it has a turbo, huh? Because of that fan. That’s the transmission? Oh.

Nathan, how do you like your Bug? It's pretty cool. Pretty cool, he says. I mean, it's just kind of weird being able to go around the block in it again, seeing as it's been years just sitting in parts, working on it, painting the chassis—that was a big step. I think this is a bigger one because now you can actually drive it as opposed to just sit and look at the pile of parts that looks all nice and pretty.

And with that, I'm Sam and I'm Nate. Thanks for watching, and life's full of good people. If you can't find one, be one. Later, guys.

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