Growing up, my father always dreamed of taking an old Volkswagen Beetle and turning it into a classic Meyers Manx dune buggy.
When I was about twelve, he finally bought a VW Bug from 1965 that was in rough shape. It did not run, but it came with a spare 1200cc flat-4 engine and a collection of extra parts. Over the next years, I worked with him to rebuild the engine completely, all the way down to the crankshaft. After finishing the engine, we moved on to the body. Instead of using a true Meyers Manx shell, we chose a more affordable clone that was designed for two seats and required shortening the chassis by about a foot and a half. Rather than cutting the frame, we decided to extend the fiberglass body so it could seat four people. This meant cutting the original shell, creating a mold, and adding a custom extension before repainting the entire body in the same bright red.
I also helped design a custom wiring harness for the electrical system, and my father let me take full ownership of designing the dashboard and gauge cluster. I found a design that inspired me and built ours from varnished wood.
This project became the thing I looked forward to working on every day after school, and I was always excited to wake up early on weekends to keep working on it. The project was fully completed in 2017 when I was sixteen. It was also the vehicle I used to learn how to drive a manual.
Tragically, two weeks after we finished it, a fire at the neighbor's house spread to the side yard where the dune buggy was stored, and it was destroyed, leaving only melted fiberglass and metal. Even with that loss, the experience remains one of the most meaningful and formative projects of my life.
