Bugeye Restoration

When Bad Things Happen to good Bugeyes

June 17, 2022 by bugeyeguy

From our “never seen this before” department, here’s something ugly we found this past week. As ugly as this situation was, this car has actually been this way for a lot of miles.

On this particular Bugeye, the car has been driving with no rear washer on the control arm mount. This allowed the control arm to wiggle in its mount! That’s not desirable because it results in alignment changes with every bump and turn, and a less than stable front suspension. It’s amazing that there were no real issues as a result of this omission; I can assure you the suspension is much tighter now that we’ve installed the proper control arm washer and bushings in their rightful places!

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Being A Little Nosy

June 17, 2022 by bugeyeguy

Nose jobs are a part of our daily routine.

Every Bugeye nose has been through the war and has been smashed in its own unique way. Bonnets don’t usually fit the way we might like, and so we have all sorts of tricks to try to get them back into shape so they look good on the front of your Sprite.

One of the drastic measures we sometimes need is to cut off the mounting receptacles that live on the front frame horns. This is often necessary when the bonnet “chin” (beneath the grill) gets pushed aft from a hit and the locking pins cannot be engaged in the receptacles on the frame horn. By moving the actual receptacle on the horn it’s sometimes much easier than to reshape the bottom of the front of the nose (and the resulting body and paint work).

Sometimes these frame horns are bent from even the slightest previously unreported fender-bender. This causes the pegs for the bonnet to no longer line up and create all sorts of headaches.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done here for “Benji,” a car that we’re preparing for Steve in West Virginia. In this case, we sliced off the mounting flanges from the frame horns to move them aft just enough so that the cones on the nose could engage properly when the nose was lowered. This is a bit of a drastic measure, but it’s something that we often have to do to get these noses to open and close and lock properly, which is critical so that you have a nice parallel line at the “A”pillar, where the nose/wing meets the body of the car.

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Jay Leno’s Bugeye Survivor!

June 10, 2022 by bugeyeguy

Exciting news!

Jay Leno has made a new video chronicling his 1959 Bugeye, which is linked below. Jay’s car has many similarities to “Muffin,” another white Bugeye survivor, just purchased this week by Bob in New Jersey (our 354th). Jay obtained his original survivor and has spent the past few months going through it and this is the first peek at how the project has moved forward. This video is one more mainstream endorsement of the car that we love so much, and you can see how giddy Jay is while he plays with it!

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The Quest For Gold!

June 10, 2022 by bugeyeguy

As I write this, AN5L 501 should be loaded on its second container ship and on its way from Cartagena, Columbia, to Edison, New Jersey, where we can retrieve it after the long voyage from Australia and begin our quest for concours gold! The gold medal we seek will (hopefully) come when we bring the car to the Austin-Healey Club Enclave in the Pocono Mountains this September, where the car is entered in the Concours judging competition. Our goal at this event is to attain “gold” certification which means that out of 1000 possible points, we are able to attain 950 or more, as determined by a team of four judges and a roughly two-hour stem-to-stern inspection.

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There’s Always A Catch

June 7, 2022 by bugeyeguy

Here is an essential item we’ll make sure is present on our Concours restoration of the first Bugeye, AN5 501 (which is projected to arrive in our building some time this July). This is the bonnet safety catch that was built-in at the factory. It was installed just in case you failed to latch the nose properly with the twist latch, so that the nose didn’t fly up at speed.

If you’ve lifted one of these conventionally hinging noses recently, you know all too well that it would take typhoon-like wind speeds to lift the nose even an inch; and with a realistic (if not ambitious) top speed of around 100 miles an hour, there’s just no way that a steel Bugeye nose is going to lift on the highway.

As a result, we remove these catches.

The bonnet safety catch has caused trouble with many a paint job in the past 65 years.

Aside from their redundancy, another main reason is because of what you see in the picture above; they are commonly not aligned with the square hole they cut into the bonnet, and, consequently, they bend and scratch the daylights out of the underside of your nose.

So, if you have one of these things installed, you’re invited to remove it. Your nose will thank you, and no one will ever know!

If, however, you’re into Concours details and wish to keep your Frogeye 100% factory correct, then you’ll need one of these latches. We just so happen to have good stock! You can purchase yours here!

Why We Do What We Do

May 27, 2022 by bugeyeguy

This is the 350th Bugeye we’ve sold, “Mooney,” and this is a big moment for us Bugeyeguys. We are extremely excited to have reached this milestone. It seems like just recently that we sold our 100th (and that’s when it became clear to me that we really had something here), so to now reach our 350th car is a milestone I had never imagined possible.

More importantly, Mooney represents a true rescue of a forlorn Bugeye that was waiting its turn in someone’s garage for years. Intentions were great, but life got in the way, as most of us know all too well. We are grateful that the previous owner gave us a call so we could acquire the car, and thus, Mooney could come out to play once again.

Mooney is a good car with good bones; our job was to revive the important systems to make it a driver once again for the new owners, a wonderful father/son team who will certainly bring this car to new heights!

We rebuilt the dashboard, installed a new wiring harness, re-plumbed and replaced the hydraulics, and the rest is up to the new owners. Check out the before and after pictures in the video below!!!

For this car, we have been the conduit to bring a hibernating Sprite back onto the streets for all to observe and enjoy, and for all to ponder how we once routinely transported ourselves from point to point. In so doing, we created a new way for a father and son to come together with a common goal, which is to have fun and to keep this car alive for generations to come.

That is an accomplishment truly worth celebrating.

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