As of this moment, I’m about an hour away from hitting the road to go to the Autopian readers’ meetup in Detroit, so I’m kind of in a hurry to write this. To expedite things, I just opened up Facebook Marketplace and grabbed the first two $2,500 cars it showed me – and they were both unfinished dune buggies. The algorithm seems to confuse RC buggies (which I search for all the time) with full-size ones (which I don’t). But what the hell; we’ll roll with it.
Yesterday was a tough one for anyone on a diet, because it was all about carbs. It’s a little earlier than I usually call the vote, but the Dodge Ram 50 has such a commanding lead at this point that there’s no point in letting it run any longer. The plain-jane little Tercel will find its audience, I have no doubt, but it isn’t you lot.
I’m with you. I love little two-door hatchbacks, but if I were going to get another one, I think I’d rather have almost anything than a Tercel. It’s an almost impressively dull car, even with a manual. Not that an automatic Ram 50 is exciting, but it’s a truck, and I can always find use for a truck.
Who doesn’t like a dune buggy? (Put your hand down; we’ll do something different tomorrow.) The idea of stripping a VW Beetle down to its bare essence, sticking a roll cage or a fiberglass tub body on it, and blasting across a beach just sounds like a hoot. And surprisingly, you can still find half-finished or worn-out dune buggy projects for fairly cheap, even here in Michigan. Are they worth it? Let’s check them out and see.
1973 Volkswagen-based dune buggy – $2,500
Engine/drivetrain: 2.4- or 2.7-liter OHV flat 6, four-speed manual, RWD
Location: Mulliken, MI
Odometer reading: Does it matter?
Operational status: No idea
Bruce Meyers captured lightning in a bottle when he created the original Meyers Manx in 1963. It just simply couldn’t be improved upon, so nobody tried. They just copied it. Lots of other companies offered fiberglass dune buggy bodies for Volkswagens, and I couldn’t tell you which company made this one. It’s not a Manx, and it’s not an EMPI Imp, which was another popular one. If someone in the comments recognizes it, please enlighten us.
What I can tell you is that it’s a bit spicier than most VW-based dune buggies. In place of the VW flat four, this one has a Corvair flat six. You don’t need a lot of power in a car like this, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be more fun with a little more oomph. I don’t know how well, or even if, it runs; all the seller says is that it “needs love.” It does have plates on it, but the tags expired in either 2012 or 2022; I can’t tell which.
The rest of the car is a bit of a shambles, but it can all be fixed. It looks like just about everything is there except seats. I’m sure you’d find other things missing when you dug into it, and of course you’d want new tires before you actually tried to drive it. But nothing about it looks insurmountable.
1974 Volkswagen-based sand rail – $2,500
Engine/drivetrain: 1.3- or 1.6-liter OHV flat 4, four-speed manual, RWD
Location: Hillsdale, MI
Odometer reading: Doesn’t have one
Operational status: Runs and drives, but needs work
After the Beetle-based dune buggies like the Manx came the sandrails, purpose-built tube-frame buggies that still use good old VW suspension and drivetrain components. From the sound of it, this one has just been built, and isn’t quite finished yet. The seller says it doesn’t have a title “yet,” which I assume means that was the intent. Jump through enough hoops, and you can probably get license plates for this and drive it on the street. Or, you could keep it as-is, get a trailer, and just tow it to the dunes when you want to play.
The seller says the engine and gearbox donor was a ’74 Beetle, and I assume the suspension came from the same car. I know you can buy sandrail frames, but I don’t know if this one was bought or made. You’d have to ask the seller. It’s finished to the point of running and driving, but it still needs some “fine tuning,” according to the seller.
If you like your vehicles bare-bones, you’ll love this thing. All it has is a steering wheel, a shifter, pedals, and a bank of toggle switches which I assume are for the ignition and lights. There’s no speedometer; who cares how fast you’re going over the sand? If you’re laughing, it’s fast enough.
I can’t think of a less practical vehicle than these, but practicality isn’t everything. And if you live in a beach community, then maybe I’m wrong; you could roll up to the Kroger in one of these, I suppose. You’ll have to do some work before you get to that point, though. Which one looks like a better starting point?
Manx Body simply for nostalgia. I would probably be the only one that recalls Speed Buggy, but I would certainly paint it to match the old cartoon.
Speed Buggy is always my first thought whenever I see one of these.
“And surprisingly, you can still find half-finished or worn-out dune buggy projects for fairly cheap, even here in Michigan.”
Especially in Michigan. It’s got the combo of tons of car people plus huge lake dunes.
The Manx clone is actually an interesting project. But for simplicity’s sake, I’d try to sell the Corvair engine and get a VW one. The sandrail needs overkill, the dune buggy doesn’t. In the end, a metal flake paint job on the Manx would be worth it all.
same, the Corvair engine sticks out too far..
Easy choice today. I’ve always wanted a dune buggy and it looks like the important pieces are there on this one’s body including the windsheild and some sort of dash looking thing. Since it does have a plate it likely has a title and thus could street driven. The Corvair engine is a minus in my book but from my understanding the usual thing was to use an adapter plate so it shouldn’t be too hard to convert it back to VW power for the correct ambience of a dune buggy. Sure I’d try and get it running and driving on the Corvair engine, if for no other reason to make it an easier sell.
I am making some pretty significant assumptions here, but since there is a plate on the Manx-a-like, I assume it has a clean title, and therefore its the winner in my book. I have zero time, space, or energy for vehicles that aren’t street legal. I might also be a little naive, but I don’t think it would take much to get the Corvair engine running and keep it that way.
Neither. I have no need for a toy that needs to be trailered places.
I am curious how the steering wheel on that buggy could get so rusty considering the beaches in Michigan don’t have salt.
If it was used at all in the winter before it’s conversion it was exposed to plenty of salt. Also we have super high humidity in the summer, you don’t need salt water to cause metal to rust round here.
I hadn’t really thought of using buggies in the winter but I guess they are an older version of a UTV
Having grown up in Michigan and then moved south to VA, TN, AL – I would say MI has moderate humidity in the summer. Humidity alone also shouldn’t rust chromed or painted metal. Here in the coastal Northwest we have humidity high enough that it is basically foggy rain for months and our cars are rust free.
I’ve got a rusty tricycle in the backyard that would like a word 🙂 all the chrome has gone to a nice rusty patina over the past 12 years of just sitting in the yard. It’s never seen salt, just hangs out under my tree abandoned after my kids outgrew it.
Fair point. Maybe the steering wheel manufacturer and your tricycle manufacturer used the same crappy chrome plater.
That’s what I suspect 🙂
You don’t have to trailer them. As long as it has a VW front end they make tow bars that you can put on really quickly.
sand rail, less body work.
when I was younger and full of idealism, I had catalogs from a “sand rail” manufacturer that sold the frames, you just needed the VW parts to make it work. Later when I could drive, I didn’t think this was a practical New England winter car.
How much for the full size yellow bunny (Peeps) costumes?!
… and why does one of them have the legs tied …… and are their people in them?
Okay, I zoomed in to see what was going on, it looks like there is some sort of metal shelving in front of the left costume, and its legs just LOOK to be tied up. Seems like a bad place for storage though.
I’m more interested in what’s going on with the signs in the background of the sand rail garage than either of the two “cars”. Both are death traps that I have no need for.
As a fan of the Hanna-Barbera classic “Speed Buggy”, I gotta go with the Manx clone. It’s not the logical choice; but it is the nostalgic one.
I’ll take the beach buggy I guess. I live at the beach and always thought it’d be fun to have one…except where I am, you can’t drive one on the actual beach. You need 4×4 for that. And there’s nowhere to use a sand rail around me either.If I were out west, that sand rail woudl probably be the no brainer
I would normally say Manx, but I do not feel like dealing with someone else’s engine swap. I know my way around an air-cooled VW engine, so I’m going with the sand rail.
I’ll take the Corvair powered dune buggy. That will be a lot easier to get legal in my state.
Back in the day, my uncle (one of several uncles, to be clear) had a Corvair dune buggy. He had that, because it could be had with an automatic. He needed an automatic, because he didn’t have use of his hands. He had to drive with his feet.
So my other uncles got together and decided, hey, if Dicky wants to be helpful around the farm (and he did), then we should rig up some kind of ride so he can move stuff around. We burn a lot of daylight moving stuff around, Dicky can be the designated parts and supply runner and that works for everybody.
So they did that. Cut about a foot-and-a-half of length from the middle of the Corvair, put some taller suspension under it for added ground clearance, fake up some kind of roof – I think plywood was involved – move the steering to the floor, paint it blue and send it.
To look at, Dicky’s dune buggy looked a lot like a modern side-by-side UTV. Stubby little cargo bed, tiptoe stance, no regard whatsoever for aerodynamics. The boys were all very practical, Dick’s ride wore knobbly snow tires all year round.
And Dicky drove like those parts and supplies had been ordered from Amazon and were due yesterday. It was the 60s and 70s but you get my point. He would get air going over the driveway because driveways on farms in the Midwest are often higher than the ground around, because you want some elevation. Makes it easier to clear the snow off. And the side of the driveway makes a perfect ramp for sweet jumps when the weather is nice. And we’d go flying and somebody would get clobbered because if you don’t remember to tuck Dick’s arms down inside the seatbelt, you’d get smacked across the face in the jumps because he couldn’t stop them. “Sorry,” he’d say “…but I did warn you,” and you’d try to tuck his arms in while he was still careening across the fields.
So for the memory of my uncle and his utterly fearless tearassing across rural Minnesota, his brothers’ well-meant but perhaps ill-conceived ideas, and because I do love the bonkers fan belt routing of the Corvair, that’s my vote today.
The Manx-looking Corvair-powered whatever that thing is.
This was an awesome comment on so many levels.
The story of how his car – his other car – got stolen once is also an eye opener.
O: some ACVW goodn-
Corvair!? That’s way too much motor (physically and power wise) for that thing. Also they run the wrong direction for the VW transaxle, meaning in a lot of cases people would run the engines backwards. Strapping that to a bus makes sense. Strapping it to a shortened sedan chassis with a fiberglass bathtub attached is a recipe for death. If you can even get the engine running. If it is a reverse rotation engine, good luck finding parts.
Besides, I’d rather have the runner with a cage. That seems generally safer as a concept. Lower CoG, smaller engine, stronger.
Just turn the diff over in the transaxle. It’s fully baked, it’s been done by lots of folks.
Right, but not everyone did that. There were kits you could use to reverse the rotation of the Corvair engine. My dad knew someone who did that with a bus. You can’t really tell without giving the car a close look what they did.
No personal experience but that sounds harder. Custom camshaft, oil pump, you can probably fake the fan by crossing the fan belt at the crank pulley but then it’ll rub and might not clear other stuff, you’d need a completely different length which might be a custom length. Flipping the diff is pretty straightforward, thrust angles are about the same on the ring gear and you might have to shim things to get it situated correctly in the housing, but I’ve heard about it from more than one source. A whole bunch of involved fixes all over the engine vs. a few fixes in one place in the transaxle, I’d go for the latter if it was me.
I heard of someone else engineering a reverse rotation engine. I think they adapted practices from either aircraft or boats, I can’t remember.
I can think of two reasons:
Even with a flipped diff, you’re spinning the entire transmission backwards, and it might be a quirk of the VW gearboxes that they not lubricate correctly, or the synchros might not like it, or the change in thrust loads from the helical gears would cause excessive wear, or something else that caused broken gearboxes.
The other reason: it’s a lot easier for a shadetree mechanic in the 1970s, with no access to a lift or anything other than a floor jack and jackstands to drop and replace the engine in a VW than dropping the transaxle. Besides, the Corvair engine is already out of the car and sitting there: it probably was much easier to overhaul an engine you were probably going to overhaul anyway than taking the transaxle out and apart.
If I had to guess, though, it’s the reversed thrust loads caused by spinning the transmission gears themselves backwards. Remember, we’re not building a mid-engine car where the only thing that is being reversed is the output, we’re spinning a transmission with helical gears backwards, (and increasing the torque) which reverses the thrust loads of those gears and puts them into areas VW never intended.
That IS a point, and a very good one. I should have thought of that.
You know what, I think those people talking about flipping the diff were adapting the VW drivetrain to a mid-engine layout. The rear-engine drivetrain, but with the whole package turned 180 degrees to move the engine to the middle of the car instead of cantilevered out behind the axle. Engine rotation and transmission rotation stay the same, but then flip the diff for spinning the wheels the other direction for correct travel.
Now I’m imagining doing this for a front-drive aircooled VW. I think VW do Brasil even had a model or two using the aircooled H4 in a front end installation, I wonder if they did it that way. I’ll have to read up on that.
This is remembering something I read way back, but IIRC, VW transmissions could be flipped upside down.
That would make for an interesting shifter linkage!
I have no idea how it was done, I was looking up options for some odd design I was working on and it came up, but the transmission would be far too weak for what I wanted. Maybe they converted to cable?
Carbs? Groan
IIRC, the dune buggy in the Thomas Crown Affair had, per McQueen’s spec, a Corvair engine.
Still, I’ll take the sand rail b/c I’d enjoying saying that, and just look at that dramatic shifter. Even putting around, you’d feel like a total badass.
Tough call for me. In the platonic ideal, I prefer buggies over rails. But I also prefer VW aircooling over GM aircooling. Ultimately I voted buggy only because a VW engine swap should remain pretty straight forwar.
I did a similar analysis, and got fairly stuck on the VW air-cooling over the GM air-cooling due to my childhood experiences with Corvairs not staying cool. But then I remembered that oil cooling has come a long way since the heyday of the Corvair and keeping it cool shouldn’t be too hard these days.
I came to the same conclusion, if the buggy still had a VW engine that would have been my pick. If I’m gonna go full madness engine swaps on that buggy I’d grab something out of a Subaru instead. I’d also be writing monthly life insurance checks.
Having grown up in the 70s dune buggies were everywhere and always put a smile on my face. Not sure I want more power in that package than VW provided but I’m kinda fascinated with the Corvair engine. It’ll need some crazy metal flake finish once you’re done sorting it out.
I’ll take the sandrail. Least it has a driving video. My neighbor’s had one when I was going up and we’d have a blast running that thing down in Mexico.
There’s nowhere near me that it would be legal to drive these things, so I’ll take the one with seats. At least I can lounge and read a book.
Manx clone all day. Corvair engines are a whole other ball game with fun things like hydraulic lifters and 3 digit hp ratings.
Pardon me while I go try to get my type 4 bus to start!
I’ll take the Covair powered one. It looks more usable all around.
I’d love to have my own Speedbuggy but the sandrail looks like it’s closer to ready. When I was a youngster in the early 80s my uncle had one, he made it street legal fairly easy.
Michigan, being Michigan makes it fairly easy to get a constructed vehicle title. As long as the VIN on the engine is clean this should be a quick trip to the Secretary Of State to get titled and registered. Just make sure you have the proper receipts in place beforehand.