The bending was usually in front, around the frame head and the braking was in the tunnel itself. I also was told about the pans on glass buggies bending or breaking.
Dune buggy bodies fiberglass how to#
I got several answers on how to do it but, to a person, I was told the ride of the car (the part you can feel) would be very obvious. When I finally got around to trying to keep the body and the tires apart for real I did a lot of asking around to people whi had already done body lifts. The body mount tunnel, like the forming ripples and the foot well in the rear of the floor add some structural integrity to the pan halves bot not what the body itself added. The body mount parameter channel only supports the floors on the outer side and, with the body off, it isn’t hard to deflect the outer sides of the floor. What you end up with, strength wise, is the tunnel which supports the frame head and rear torsion tube attached. When you remove the VW body off the pan, you are taking away most of the strength and integrity the VW body’s roof supplies. I ran with the “looks cool” thing for a long time too. Also, the show hoop was not a “safety thing” but a “looks cool” thing. One of the good pieces of information I didn’t take was if I was going to play off-road with my buggy was to strengthen up the pan. When I started working on my (glass) buggy in the early to mid 90’s I was given a lot of bad information and a lot of good information much of which I didn’t take because I trusted the guy who gave me the bad information more (the bus stub axle being an example of this). If you have a positive draft and the form changes to the negative too much you can’t slide the body out of the mold ( two sides of a body with 1 ½ draft on each side ends up being 3 degrees total which will cover a lot of mold movement) This amount of taper allows for temperature affected changes to the mold.
Drafts are usually a minimum of 1 ½ degrees positive taper to each wall of a closed sided mold. The draft is there so that is so you can get the body out of the mold. Information for what it is worth You also have to remember that there is a “draft” on almost all molds. There are some drawbacks though but they are that you can’t staple well into metal for upholstery.
Wood, fiber glassed in place can do a lot for body integrity but the industry had found that metal is (usually) better.
(If this doesn’t make sense, please forgive m e as it is allergy season and the trees, mold and mildews are having sex right now so I am pretty rummy at times)įiberglass (F/G) is in itself not particularly that strong.