Chirco is building a Baja Bug! Many of the air - cooled VW parts and procedures used can also be used on Dune Buggies, Sand Rails. These pages feature links to the Chirco online parts catalog.


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PART 8- Bodywork and Primer

The body was brought into the shop where our paint & body pro "Jackson could guide us through the body work.

I was able to recruit some child labor to help sand the body down. We even convinced little Emma to help. (She is only a couple of years away from her car project - Project Pink Convertible $$.) 
We started with 60 grit sand paper to start stripping old paint off. We found 4 layers of paint had been applied over the original red factory paint. 
In these photo's you can see that a fuel cell was mounted in the were the back seat will go and filler hoses ran out the sides. We will weld a backing plate behind the holes and weld and bondo them up.
Smaller holes in the body were filled by welding them up. We have been very fortunate the our body does not have to many dings in it. 
After three days of sanding, fixing low spots and filling holes we are ready to primmer the body. If you want to build up strength in your arms, forget going to a gym. Sanding down a car will help find muscles you didn't know you had. The hole thing has been sanded down with 220 grit sand paper. We purchased an acrylic sandable primer that we will put on very thick to help hide any errors.
Since we gutted the whole interior, we did not worry about any over spay to the inside of the car. Well it looks pretty good for the first go around. With a sharpie pen we started to circle all the errors that the primmer males stick out like a sore thumb. We will continue to lightly sand and re-primmer until we get to 1200 grit sand paper.

If you have any questions or comments about Project Baja please e-mail don@chirco.com we sure would like to hear from you.