Respect Mr.Bosch

The interior of the Baja was painted, badly, with some kind of red paint over a crappy black over a decent white.
I wanted to remove the red and black so I could key up the white for spraying.
Copious amounts of cellulose thinners wasn't doing it so out came the chemical paint stripper.
I used some large rubber gauntlet gloves to protect my little pinkies from the nasty flesh-eating goo and set to work.
Once the paint stripper had done its work I used a wire wheel on Mr.Bosch the grinder to get back to nice, shiny metal.














Now hindsight is a wonderful thing.....
With hindsight I should have removed the thick, clumsy rubber gloves once I'd stopped using chemicals.
With hindsight I should have used a pair of leather gloves to work with the grinder.
"Should have" and "did" are two very different things!
You can probably see where this is going?
Allow me to elaborate.

New, bitey wire wheel

Catches hold of thick, clumsy rubber glove 

Result = Sudden, painful reminder from Mr.Bosch 

Somehow the rapidly spinning wire wheel caught the bulky glove and ripped off one of the fingers.
In that split-second of realisation I glanced the floppy flying digit out of the corner of my eye and noticed it was empty.
Surprisingly all my extremeties were intact even if the glove was toast.

Cat-like reflexes.....and dog-like stupidity!

In summary: spinny wire wheels are great for taking paint off old car bodies, it turns out they're even better for taking sizeable bits off my finger.

Baja's on it's feet again, the £50 flip front and Baja Karma

Flipped the Baja back the correct way up - about time too!
Lobbed the old flip front on for a chuckle.
Yes, forgot to mention I'd bought a flip front, there's a funny story about that.............not funny ha-ha though.

The funny story goes like this.......
A long, long time ago, in a land far away.
Actually about 1986 if I had to guess, in MansfieId probably, I had my first Baja build going on.
I got hooked up with this chap in Derby who raced a Baja and had a mould for a flip front.
I managed to snag a loan of the mould and got my very own shiny new flip front made; straight out the back door of the local boat-builders for £50.
I ran the car for a few years, latterly with a beast of a 1700 Type IV motor complete with a Weber twin-choke carburettor on a homemade manifold.
Good times indeed but I digress.

I retired the car with all good intentions of turning it into a race project; we even worked on it a fair bit.
More ideas than money and young families eventually put paid to that grand plan.


We broke the car and sold everything including the flip front, more than likely for £50 and we were thankful to find a buyer - times were 'ard................and we ate coal for breakfast! - not really. 

Fast forward to 2006 and thoughts of a Baja come flooding back, so we built Tom's Baja.....detailed elsewhere on here somewhere.
A thinly-veiled excuse for me to spend time in the garage when I should've been doing something useful.
Tom's Baja.....that Tom has finally conceded will be mine.
Ian's Baja now.........
Digressing again.

A few pictures of the Baja that started it all, fluorescent day-glo orange no less

Huge Type IV engine hanging out the back

Looks red in this pic

Towed a caravan round Wales

Nice flip front

Although the Baja currently has a fibreglass 4-piece front end I still loved that old flip front and wondered if I could find another one.
I put a request onto a VW forum and got some replies; one of them with an eBay link for a flip front for sale locally - looked a bit tatty but beggars can't be choosers as they say.













I didn't notice immediately but looking at the listing picture above it looked familiar somehow.

It was only my old one from 25 years ago!
Check it out, even has part of the old number plate sticker still on it.
No other bids and I won it for, you guessed it - £50!

Some kind of Baja Karma?
It hadn't been polished every weekend that's for sure and it's a bit ragged round the edges but we can always use it for a plug to make another mould.......
 
So that's the story of the £50 flip front, dull and boring but you just read it :)

Painting the underbelly

While I had the Baja in the prone position I painted the underside of the boot-floor, heater channels and under-bonnet area - they'd already been spray-primed with cold galvanising paint!
A few liberally brushed on coatings of Zinc-rich and black MIO will cure like concrete and should take all the knocks I can throw at it.

If a job's worth doing it's worth overdoing I always say

Micaceous Iron Oxide paint pretty much rocks!

I thought it would be prudent to strip & prime the underside of the footwell area while access was good

This area will be sprayed with silver/grey MIO when the rest of the interior gets done, just a coat of cold-galv spray for now
Next time out it'll be on its feet again.

Nixie clock's finished

Nixie clock update

I tried several case options for the clock with varying degrees of suitability; managed to snag a couple of enclosures, polished them up but never thought they were truly worthy of the project.

I revisited the site I bought the clock from and noticed they now sell an aluminium case specifically designed for my clock.

This is the site, check it out - http://www.pvelectronics.co.uk/index.php

Here's the case, image from above website

Took the plunge and bought one, what a piece of work it is - a 3lb. CNC machined chunk of billet 6082 alloy highly polished to a mirror finish. £55 is expensive on the face of it but a no-brainer if you want the project to look professional and properly finished - which it does, and then some!

Sexy, no?

Looks cool in the dark

Awesomely geek-tastic

Baja's upside down

Bloody Hell, Baja's upside down now!
Who needs a body/chassis roller when an old mattress will do?

Looking good and quite minimal at the back....
With all that metal missing, access to the engine and gearbox will be easier.....and it'll look way cool as well.
Ooh look, an oval window roof section! Wonder what I could do with that?

Cleaned, dressed and galv painted the bulkhead area.
What a complete bastard of a job; a mixture of rust, old wax and areas too tight to access with a spinny wire wheel.
Perseverance with pointy things is the only way!

And the front end, just as awkward to access and just as big a bastard of a job!

I'm not too worried about the beaten up state of the front as plans are afoot for a flip front........
A short day in the garage, but I'll soon be finished the underside.
Everything will be treated to liberal doses of MIO paint before we roll it back over and fettle the inside.
Oooh, can't wait!

Baja's on its other side

Rolled the Baja onto its other side and repeated the repair process.......
Removed the (now) surplus rear body mount panel.
Surplus as in I no longer want the triple-skinned rust trap on the car. Now I do realise I have removed a body mounting but there's less body to mount on a Baja and I can always put it back later if I need to.
Might tie the rear bodywork into the roll cage when I fit one, might not.....who can tell?

Rusty metal that would otherwise be inaccessible for repair

Cut off the surplus skin and stitched the inner arch to the boot floor

Found a small area of bad pitting that would rot out if left so I cut it out, as you do!

Nice work, damn I'm getting good at this shit

Soon dressed back neatly, almost like it grew there

A lick of cold galv spray and we're good

Made a small repair panel for the wing mounting area

Dressed back the repair

Finally I made a panel for the complex shape that joins the boot floor to the inner wing area.
Yes I know this is the other side but it's a better picture. I did do both sides, honest.
There's a bit of dressing back work to be done but that's for another day

Sprayed outside all up and called it a day
You can just see Tom's bug up in the air while he cleans and paints the underside for winter protection

Baja's on its side

So we could close up the cross-member to heater channel area and access the underbelly for cleaning, painting etc. Matt and me lifted the bodyshell into the garage and turned it onto its side.
Sitting on an old mattress it looks exposed and vulnerable, hopefully it won't get like this during use......
I drive like a loon offroad so better consider fitting a roll cage at some point methinks!

Matt cleaning the area for welding

Welding pigeon helped join the metal

Dressed back and zinc primed
Better get jiggy with the wire-wheel and some paint, there's plenty to do!

Back on the Baja

Now that the front of the Baja is pretty much complete it was time to get busy at the back end.
We set about removing the rear cross-member panels.

First job was to remove all the factory spot welds.

Removal was quite easy and soon the new panels were sliding into place, the old scrap floorpan was used for alignment and location.

Fits like it ought.

Both panels are now fitted and welded in, this job was done outside as the weather was nice and outside isn't as crowded as my garage!

The rear "boot" floor has not been welded to the cross-members at this point as I may well remove some or all of this area to allow for engine/gearbox fitment and future maintenance.

Audi 80 aVANt

Been having a tinker with Paint Shop Pro........
How cool would an Audi 80 van be?
Audi 80 aVANt, A-van-t see what I did there?

Nixie Clock

Remember those old petrol pumps and calculators with glowing orangey red numbers as readouts?
Well some of us do!

Turns out the little "valves" full of numbers weren't valves at all but little doozies called nixie tubes.......
Nixie? - The name nixie comes from Numerical Indicator Experimental 1....interesting, no?

Anyway, nixies were widely used before the advent of fluorescent displays, LEDs, LCDs & the like and were made from the late '50s to late '70s.
I've seen clocks made using these bad monkeys and decided to buy a kit and build one for myself.....as you do.

Here's the circuit board

A few hours with a soldering iron and all the components & the Russian IN-8 nixie tubes were mounted.
There are even some blue LEDs to light the bases of the tubes, nice.

I'm proper impressed with this, here it is sat on top of some computer junk in a darkened room

The clock is controlled by a quartz crystal oscillator and some software on a PIC.
There are many operating parameters to tinker with, my favourite is the "slot machine" option - cycling of all numbers to prevent cathode poisoning of the tubes and increase their lifespan.

Check this out


Time can even be synchronised by an optional radio module or via GPS
All I have to do now is build a case to finish it off.....

How cool is that?
Fucking well cool I can tell you!

So what became of Matt's Baja?

All the while Matt and Man-John were coming over to help me weld the bodyshell they were beavering away with the previously welded floorpan back at home.
Every part was either replaced or refurbished, essentially creating a new floorpan - just waiting for the bodyshell.

We finally dragged Matt's bodyshell over to his gaff so he could paint it.
No fancy spray booths or owt like that, just good old-fashioned "spray on a fine day"- Old School!

Matt had already shot some primer on the 'shell during the week before I got there.


Here's Matt laying on a coat of John Deere green

He's doing quite a thorough job. Oh look, there's the floorpan over there - nice!

The finished job, 'shell is on its nice shiny refurbished floorpan and awaiting fitment of the freshly sprayed panels.

Pretty soon Man-John and Matt got the Baja MOT'd and road-legal, that was a while ago........

Here's the beast just the other day, sat next to Tom's car

Nice job, considering what we started with. Fo' Shizzle!