Yikes. I am so sorry I haven't updated this since February. I had a bit of a rough year with staph infections, and you know it just sorta snowballs away from you. Given that the car has progressed quite a large bit since my last update, I think I'll probably break it down into short updates on some major components, and answer questions or provide more details as requested.
Body
After a spring of driving events, I got back home in May to a body ready for pickup! In my head, I had planned to have the whole chassis assembled and ready before picking up the body, but of course that didn’t happen. Turns out you need things like the body in order to work out seat mounts and other details!
With the carbon dash, I ultimately decided that the AiM dash was the direction I wanted to go. With an analog car, however, you end up needing a lot of expansion ports to make it all work. So I decided to go nuts and simply put a whole PDM into the car. That decision (both financially and time wise) was pretty much a guarantee that this was going to be a long term project to the end of 2024. No Rally Bug for summer or fall driving events.
Floorpan
The floorpan didn’t require a tonne of modifications, outside of the pedal box area. After welding in the new baseplate, and adding some stiffening bars, the pan went into and out of the shell about 3 or 4 times. My buddy Wayne fabricated the seat mounts for me, which required working out exactly where I wanted the driver’s seat to sit. Everything comes with a compromise, even with the exception that I’m willing to fab/move almost everything. The roll bar couldn’t move, I can only adjust the steering column
so much before it needs a completely custom solution, but ultimately I ended up with a seat position that isn’t very far off from the other Beetles, but works out quite comfortably.
With the seat sorted, I could figure out the shifter location, setup the switch locations, and a few other bits on the inside…before pulling the pan and finishing it off for the final time. Thankfully I remembered that I’ve got a new Kafer bar, I’m changing the oil filter location, and a few other chassis bits that make a difference, and mocked it all up while body and pan were together.
The Arcdroid CNC plasma cutter came in super handy for the seat mounts…
Also visible in the next few photos are the slider mounts I put in for the passenger foot-rest. One of the nice details/upgrades for this round.
You’d think I’d have uploaded photos of the finished painted pan…but possibly not!
-Dave