Building a Manx-Style Dune Buggy

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Published 2021-12-24

On today's video, I show the process of renovating an old 1964-vintage dune buggy! This project took most of Summer 2021 to complete, and it served as my daily driver from mid-September to mid-November this year. I cover all the steps, including improvements to the VW beetle chassis, design and construction of a custom roll cage, implementation of a custom EFI/HEI engine control module, preparation and painting of the fiberglass body, and finally the assembly and testing of the new buggy build!

The referenced chassis improvement video can be found here:    • Dune Buggy Rollbar System: Part 1

The referenced fuel injector throttle body build video can be found here:    • TBI Fuel Injection for VW Air-Cooled ...

Audio clips from NCS are as follows:

Elektronomia - Summersong 2018 [NCS Release]:
   • Elektronomia - Summersong 2018 | Hous...

Unison - Aperture [NCS Release]:
   • Unison - Aperture | House | NCS - Cop...

Thanks for watching!

All Comments (21)

@johnkoury1116 8 months ago

Really great!! Thanks for sharing!!
@sck7458 1 year ago

You make building dune buggys look easy 😂.
@JMKGarage 1 year ago

Nice work on the build, the buggy turned out awesome 👏
@Ernesto1070867 2 years ago

Can’t wait to se the revision of the custom fuel injection!!
@user-vn8pv3yd3c 2 years ago

This is very cool John did more than wonderful there is a great effort in this video
@aliasmari 1 year ago

Great job great buggy
@JackLangenkamp 2 years ago

I have really enjoyed your videos! I appreciate the effort you put in to explain what you are doing, how you are doing it, and even what tools you are using. This is excellent content and I am subscribed for more!
@Thee_Finger 1 year ago

What a fun video. Awesome!
@onepairofhands 1 year ago

great job sir
@aliasmari 1 year ago

❤I love this buggy so much , I have the French copy of meters Manx , Savran LM1
@customprints9358 10 months ago

Awesome build you inspired me to build my own
@nickdifilippo4055 2 years ago

Glad to see a new video. The production quality is awesome and maybe the best so far?
@SuperiorTuning 2 years ago

I saw you on rural the other morning. I had the off road Volvo wagon xc70 in blue. Was me and my girlfriend. Going north from the 60. Knew it was you. Goodjob on videos bud
@eugenpaustian5211 6 months ago

Awesome job! ❤ Respekt 😃👌
@MLFranklin 2 years ago

Fantastic build video. Among the best I've seen. I especially like the attention to detail, including tube sizes and even the brand of the penetrating spray used to unstick the new engine. With that kind of detail I'm guessing you're an engineer. Now I'm trying to figure out if electrical or mechanical. Maybe electro-mechanical. :-) Congrats on the excellent build! (I'm a mechanical engineer, but in grad school I designed and built a few PFI engine control systems, from scratch [well, PC-based, with prototype cards] to support my research or generate a little cash).
@FedericoGi 2 years ago

Stupendo. Bravi
@Miley_00 2 years ago

NICE, old BTC shirt over the seat! I hope you have some coins as old as that shirt! Awesome video btw!
@t.s.tractorworkstrickland5828 1 year ago

The old buggy is sweet the new Tesla is for nerds lol. Nice video
@savagecustoms541 5 months ago

Great video. I just picked up a buggy with this same body style. Any guess who the manufacturer is?
@kpaven72 2 years ago

Hi. Enjoyed the video. I just inherited my dune buggy from Dad after his passing. Still drives good, brakes need some work. But would you do restoration work for other people?