Pick a Bugeye, any red Bugeye.
Above is an amazing assemblage of cool things. In the foreground (with gold wheels), you’ll see Mr Krabs, a Bugeye that was once pronounced dead and buried as a coffee table in a beach house in Texas. The car was brought back to life by our customer in Houston, and now we have restored the body for him and repainted it in the proper cherry red. This dark red matches the original red you’d see in a showroom in 1960.
Behind Crabby on the lift is Mr Powell’s red Bugeye. This one is getting all new floor pans before it moves to New Jersey. This car is painted a more traditional red, which is not technically correct, but very popular.
And then in the corner is the topic of this post, “The Illusionist.” This car, also bright red, is the first car we have built with its very own butt protector. Notice the steel structure supporting the back deck above. This is all about the people we anticipate will sit on the back deck of this shiny restored car, while smiling for photos and dangling their legs in the cockpit.
Why, you might ask? Illusionist is heading for a happy retired life in the common space of a 300 unit rental condo building in Harrison New Jersey. Soon, we will be lifting the car into the building with a Lull (a giant fork lift, if you are unfamiliar). There, she will be permanently parked in a speakeasy/meeting room that renters can reserve for meetings and parties, made all the more merrier because of the smiling red Bugeye in the room.
We anticipate people losing control as they clamor all over this display, and thus we have reinforced the back deck to proactively prevent the inevitable butt-print on the Bugeye back deck. We’ve also painted the car in super durable bright red Imron, which will help protect the car from the selfie-stick assault that awaits.
Now that the car is painted, our fun begins, we because we get to stylize the car and get creative. The nose will be permanently secured since the engine and transmission have been removed. To create the illusion, we will modify the front springs to level the car. You can see how high the front of the car is sitting in the profile photo above. We’ll fix that.
We’ll also switch to wire wheels and wide white walls, to make the car sing. We’ll use the bolt-on wire wheel conversion kit on the market for disk wheel cars… we have a few in stock that we have removed from cars that have shown up in our shop because they are UNSAFE and have arrived here in the past with hubs about to fall-off the car. The original wire wheel hub is secured differently and works… these bolt-on kits are truly scary, but they are perfect for this application, where the car will never roll again!
In the coming weeks, we will be fitting-out the interior, and will post more pictures here. In case you missed the “before” pictures of this vehicle, you can click here to read more.
