The industry standard for complete rotisserie restorations includes painting the entire tub body color. 90% of the restored Bugeyes that you see have an underside color that matches the top-side color. This is how we generally prepare our Concours gold level cars, and, per the national concours judging standards, we’ve never had any point deductions for a color-matched underside.
There is, however, a group of people that believe that Bugeye bottoms should always be brown.
Every online beauty that’s marketed as “perfect” seems to inevitably end up as an array of removed parts like you see below.
This stuff is old.
We can do better.
In the case of our Yellow Bugeye “Sharpie,” which we just sold to a client in Vermont, he was interested in investing in reliability at all costs. So we’ve gutted the car in favor of maximum drivability and optimized improvements.
[Read more…] about Adorable Classic Sports Cars with Modern Reliability UpgradesIt’s heater season! For those of us who choose to drive their Bugeyes in the winter months, the heater, however diminutive and inadequate it may be, is a potentially important part of the cold weather driving equation. We do sell heater cores, (which you can purchase by clicking here) but more often, the component that fails is the switch that operates the blower motor.
The original switch actually served 2 functions: the first was to operate the blower motor, and the second was to operate a flap in between the blower and the heater box to allow for “recirculation” of the “warm” air already in the car once warmed up. Shown below is a video explaining this in better detail:
Unfortunately, this original combination switch/cable (used on all Spridgets from 1958-1970) is not reproduced, and as the switches became older and more worn out or become frozen internally, they have become something resembling unobtainium. If you can find them, they are quite expensive. We offer a solution: a simple push/pull electrical switch, the same one we use to operate the windscreen wipers on Bugeyes.
[Read more…] about Turning Up The HeatBugeye windscreen stanchions are fastened to the body by four large machine screws. The front screws on each stanchion (towards the bonnet) are held in place by captive nuts welded into the area where the A-pillar and cowl meet. Unfortunately, these captive nuts often corrode, or strip, which makes it impossible to attach the front mount for the windshield frame to the car.
We occasionally get calls from customers who wonder what to do when those front captive threads are stripped. Once you’ve exhausted efforts to rescue the threads in the car, which we always strive to preserve, this is the next best solution that we’ve used to make these fixtures tight!
[Read more…] about Hanging By A ThreadThis week, we received the photo below of a Bugeye car getting some bodywork done, and much to our dismay, the entire dashboard and beautiful recent wooden steering wheel are still in the car as shown, coated with a special breed of bodyshop dust. Body filter, once sanded and airborne, tends to permeate everything, especially electrical equipment and mechanical Smiths gauges.
Everything can be cleaned, but I worry about the guts of the already finicky horn push, the pull cables that already have more friction than we might like, basically anything that has to move… all this stuff was engineered more than 60 years ago and we’d like to give it all the highest probability of great longevity. Evil permeating dust is not reccomended.
[Read more…] about Dust BustingOf course you can! Not only can you drive a concours Bugeye, but you can have quite a bit of fun with one, too! In the short video below, taken down the street from the shop at our local train station, you can see Betty, our Concours gold 1960 Bugeye, going through her paces. This is what it would have looked like to corner with a 100% stock Bugeye on bias ply ply tires in 1960 if you threw her into the turns with gusto; it’s good fun, analog, basic, simple, and very entertaining!
Betty is still for sale as of this writing, you can see the full listing by clicking below on her photo!
