Dave's la(te)st buggy build...

Brilliant!

Thank you!

So, after prepping the crossbrace, I decided to mock-up the back of the buggy...



The rear hoop had just turned up from a seller on eBay, you can probably guess who , so I hole-sawed into the right-hand (driver;s) side of the rear of the cab infill, and inserted the end of the hoop, and propped up the other end on a Royal Mail box!

I then cut the waffle boards to size - they're now 33" x 10.5" - to fit in the back, they'll be some racks for these soon, and the offcuts were used to make two 10.5" squares for the left side to fill it in matching, these can be used for hi-lift jack spreader plates, but are mostly there to make the two sides match, as the clutch of the winch is in the way of having a full length waffle board there...

The box section behind the spare wheel will actually fit inside the back of the cab when it's finished and be sheeted over, so that the buggy ends up with a little wall at the back of the cab, so that it can wade to around 33", rare we go deeper than the diameter of the tyres? Which are 30" on the buggy...



I also added the eleptical tube hoop 'stays' to the sides, these are meant to emulate the Ford EX concept car shown a few times in this build thread, and to also look like the original soft-top shape a little as well... They need fis-mouthing on to the top of the rear loop eventually too...



The rear wings will eventually sit under the rear loop and upto the waffle boards, with SJ / Samurai lights in the end of them (the wings / mudguards)



Inside the rear bed...

Note the position of the winch to the donut fairlead infront of it, and how the spare wheel sits inline with it, the idea of it - coming back to the drawing of the roofline hoops - was that there would be another small fairlead on the roof line behind the cab, in the pointy back bit of the loop, I could hen pull a loop off the front of the winch and up through this small fairlead to self-right the buggy, or support it if it got tippy, etc, but the cost of the custom bends was prohibitive...





Up here above the winch...

So, my thoughts now are to buy THREE basic hoops, made to my dimensions again -



So that two would make the roofline hoops, and I'll cut the third one up to get one big angle shape to add the triangulation to the back of the roofline for the top fairlead, and the other small angle will be used to...



... frame the fuel filler...

That;s the thinking at the moment anyways, as buying three hoops works out cheaper than the price for the custom tube work quoted earlier from my sketch...

More soon!

Fascinating - great read.

Thank you for all the posts and photos

SURPASSING - and a great read

How much do you anticipate it will weigh once complete, lighter than the blue one obviously but as light as a factory car?

A good question...

I'd guess it would weigh slightly more than a standard Jimny?

I'll weigh it when it's finished and compare...

Dave