Purple VW Buggy

Dune Buggy Done Right

The best thing about doing what I do is meeting all of these amazing people. The crew over at Zind Customs in Huntington Beach, California has to be one of the luckiest bunch of guys I have ever met – To have that much passion for custom cars and the ability to transform a customer’s vision into a reality is simply a gift. My guess would be, that they have never used the term “I have to work tomorrow’, it’s more like, the ultimate creative playground and I’m thankful to be invited to play from time-to-time.

Let’s talk Dune Buddy history; Meyers designed and built a dune buggy that was more shapely than most of them and he took it out and showed it off and found he had a lot of interested people. Drawing on his experience in sailboat construction, Meyers modeled and built his first dune buggy, "Old Red", a shortened VW Beetle with a monocoque, fiberglass shell and an IRS trailing arm suspension, in late 1963 to May 1964 in his garage in Newport Beach, California. The first known street-legal fiberglass dune buggy, it featured a unibody shell that fused body, fenders, and frame, retaining just the engine, transmission and other mechanicals of the VW. The use of compound curves throughout provided great rigidity. The fenders were arched high, to make room for large, knobby dirt-racing wheels.

What a pleasure it has been to work on such an iconic piece of California car culture history. I’m sure this Purple Flamed Dune Buggy will turn heads wherever it goes and secretively I wish it was part of my collection. Time to do some Dune Buggy shopping (lol)!