Finally the garage caught up to us.

On Thursday Steve and I both had the whole day off together.  We finally finished cleaning out the garage that needed it so badly.  Now we have some room to work on the dune buggy.

                      

Elwood is a fantastic supervisor for this project.  He really holds us accountable and makes sure we don't get distracted.  LOL

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We ended up taking the front suspension, tires and wheels apart and took them into the garage to start the cleaning process.  We are going to clean each piece and then paint it so that it doesn't rust during assembly.

 

Steve is attempting to take off the two cross bars in the front.  It makes a lot of noise and a lot of sparks.  It will take a while for this as the air compressor has a difficult time keeping up.

Here I am cleaning the metal with a wire brush attachment.  This is taking forever too.  The drill batteries also had a hard time keeping up so we decided to call it a day.  Elwood was pooped anyway.  :)

No Turning Back: more progress on the donor car....

Well you'll all be happy to note that Steve's welding lesson went well, he did not burn himself and he is actually getting pretty good with some practice.  Our next task in the project is to take apart the donor car and separate the parts we need and those we will not be using.  Yesterday Steve and I attacked the body of the car to remove it so that we can get to the guts of the car, which is what we will need.  It took a while, but we finally got the pieces separated.

You'll note that we felt victorious when separating the pieces.  Steve got the engine running pretty smoothly again after that so the next step will be to take the engine apart and clean it and prepare it for fitting on the frame.  At some point we will also have to get on the welding of the frame.  Lots of work to come.  Hopefully it does not get overwhelming.   By the way, we are going to attempt to sell the body since we do not need it anymore.  It is in good condition.  If you know anyone who is interested have them send an e-mail!

I bought a dune buggy from a guy at a truck stop...

Berrien Buggy had a scheduled delivery to Fisher Buggy in Tampa and we managed to get our frame on that truck, saving a bundle in shipping. As such, I met Dave and Sue with Berrien at the Flying J truck stop in Dade City where I took delivery of our new Cruiser frame knock-down kit and a variety of other parts. Dave and Sue are the founders of Berrien Buggy and couldn't be nicer people. They are now in their 40th year of building buggy frames; they estimate that they've made somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 frames in that time. We've now got lots of parts; should keep us busy for a while!!!