Blog – Page 35

2022 in Bugeye photos!

December 30, 2022 by bugeyeguy

Happy New Year!!! We wish you a wonderful 2023! Per our tradition, here’s a brief recap of the year in Bugeyes (& all things British)!

We had an amazing 12 months and served a lot of customers with significant restorations and adoptions. We’ve now placed 375 Bugeyes and we are delighted to have helped so many people realize their dream of ownership of a wonderfully sorted classic British Sportscar. We also restored, improved and/or modified dozens of additional British cars this year, ranging from a Daimler Dart to a classic Mini. We’re very excited and optimistic about what’s to come in 2023!

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Build your ultimate Bugeye

December 21, 2022 by bugeyeguy

This week, we take a deeper dive into our super Sprite “Gray,” and get closer to what makes this car so special and unique. Countless hours over the past several years have been spent to make this car particularly special, and here are a few videos to give you a taste of our latest creation.

There are so many mods on Gray, I thought you would enjoy a detailed tour. And you can also see a drive in the second video below. Keep in mind this is a brand new engine with very few miles, still breaking-in.

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Be gentle with your Gearbox!

December 21, 2022 by bugeyeguy

I came across a couple Bugeye driving videos that are great teaching material, because they illustrate why you have to be gentle with your shift lever or you will destroy your gearbox. In the videos, every time this driver shifts, you can hear the gears crunching, and crunching doesn’t come without a cost.

These videos have now been removed from YouTube, so we can’t reference them any longer, but they were valuable because you can hear how it sounds when you your gearbox is in pain. Ultimately, it is up to the driver to modulate their gearshift lever at a pace that is agreeable to the particular gearbox… yank the lever too fast, and the gearbox will complain or grind. Keep doing it, and the gearbox will need a rebuild. We’ve replaced the videos with pictures of smashed teeth from clutch issues and/or excessively rapid shifting.

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New product! Our 501 Floor mat set is the closest you can get to an original Sprite Mark 1 and 2 floor covering! Exclusive!

December 16, 2022 by bugeyeguy

One of the trickiest aspects of the Concours restoration process of a Bugeye (or Sprite Mark II) is the flooring. All Mark I and Mark II Sprites (And Mark I Midgets) from 1958 to September of 1962 had rubber floor mats that covered both footwells, both front cross members, the transmission tunnel, and several smaller areas around the seat mounts. Over time, these thin factory mats have proven to be incredibly brittle and fragile, and in the decades since their installation almost every one of them has deteriorated into an unusable mess.

Our concours floor mat set, as installed on AN5L 501, the first production Bugeye.

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Bugeye Beads

December 16, 2022 by bugeyeguy

An often-overlooked and challenging aspect of body work on a Bugeye involves the body seams on the nose and back deck. The beading strip along the top fills the seam between the fenders and the center sections of the body, and these strips are often damaged or corroded. Before paint, these pieces have to be right. They have a factory profile (shown below) and it is nice to restore that original look. Make sure your body shop doesn’t sand the top of these strips as they will quickly lose their factory profile.

Look closely, and you’ll see that the beading strip is missing on this nose. This is a nose fresh back from media blasting. It had no beading when it was previously restored; we will now install our kit to make it look like the original.

Beading just like this runs the full length of the bonnet and rear deck.

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Outstanding, Olde English White, completely restored 1959 Bugeye Sprite For Sale!

December 9, 2022 by bugeyeguy

Now SOLD to Andrew in California! Thank you for giving our happy 375th Bugeye a happy new home!

This is a good one, a perfect car for a collector who wants a top-shelf car to show and drive. If you like well-restored and tidy Bugeyes, give this car a serious look!

We sold this this 1959 Bugeye, “Lawton,” (AN5L 16996) in 2013 to a collector who has driven the car very little since then. The car still looks wonderful, and we just updated all the brake and clutch hydraulic components, as well as the fuel system with a new gas tank. The car is in great shape as-is; I might change the muffler to a stock version as this one is a bit loud. That’s a minor detail considering all the great things that have been done to the car during the restoration, by a particularly conscientious restorer. A summary of the work done is below:

The body was completely dry-stripped.

Bodywork/paint – PPG Concept, acrylic urethane paint and clearcoat

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What color is your Bottom?

December 9, 2022 by bugeyeguy

The industry standard for complete rotisserie restorations includes painting the entire tub body color. 90% of the restored Bugeyes that you see have an underside color that matches the top-side color. This is how we generally prepare our Concours gold level cars, and, per the national concours judging standards, we’ve never had any point deductions for a color-matched underside.

There is, however, a group of people that believe that Bugeye bottoms should always be brown.

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Adorable Classic Sports Cars with Modern Reliability Upgrades

December 2, 2022 by bugeyeguy

Every online beauty that’s marketed as “perfect” seems to inevitably end up as an array of removed parts like you see below.

This stuff is old.

An array of parts removed in favor of stronger and more reliable alternatives!

We can do better.

In the case of our Yellow Bugeye “Sharpie,” which we just sold to a client in Vermont, he was interested in investing in reliability at all costs. So we’ve gutted the car in favor of maximum drivability and optimized improvements.

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Turning Up The Heat

December 2, 2022 by bugeyeguy

It’s heater season! For those of us who choose to drive their Bugeyes in the winter months, the heater, however diminutive and inadequate it may be, is a potentially important part of the cold weather driving equation. We do sell heater cores, (which you can purchase by clicking here) but more often, the component that fails is the switch that operates the blower motor.

The original switch actually served 2 functions: the first was to operate the blower motor, and the second was to operate a flap in between the blower and the heater box to allow for “recirculation” of the “warm” air already in the car once warmed up. Shown below is a video explaining this in better detail:

Unfortunately, this original combination switch/cable (used on all Spridgets from 1958-1970) is not reproduced, and as the switches became older and more worn out or become frozen internally, they have become something resembling unobtainium. If you can find them, they are quite expensive. We offer a solution: a simple push/pull electrical switch, the same one we use to operate the windscreen wipers on Bugeyes.

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Hungry, Hungry Bugeyes!

December 1, 2022 by bugeyeguy

I was talking to a client today about adding a luggage rack to a Bugeye for carrying more cargo. While this is an option that is available, I want to remind everyone of just how much cargo space a Bugeye provides without adding anything additional to the rear deck. With the seat bottom removed on the passenger side, you can carry a ton of gear in a Bugeye or Spridget. I’ll routinely remove the passenger seat bottom and leave it at home; this allows me to use my Bugeye far more frequently without having to break out a larger car. More Bugeye fun is facilitated when you can utilize the car for hauling cargo on various errands!

Should you decide to add a luggage rack to your Bugeye (or want to replace a worn one already installed), click the photo above to check ours out!

Of course, a luggage rack is a wonderful addition if you wish to haul a golf bag, or a folding bike, or even a wicker picnic basket; however, not everybody wants to drill holes in the back deck of their car. We do sell luggage racks; you can find them in our catalog here. But never underestimate what can be carried inside a Bugeye fuselage.

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