The seller of today’s Nice Price or No Dice VW Dune Buggy notes in the ad that, at 80 years of age, they do not need the project of bringing it back from a decades-long stint in storage. Could it be well enough priced for someone with a bit more time on their hands to do so?
The 2001 Ferrari 456M GTA that we looked at last Friday was a consignment sale carrying a price tag of $69,500. That’s not a crazy amount of money when it comes to Ferraris, but most of you still averred that to spend a stack of that size for a Prancing Horse, it’d have to be a manual, gated shifter edition. We do, after all, have our standards. The result was a lamentable 58 percent No Dice loss for the otherwise lust-worthy grand tourer.
Have you seen Dune Part Two yet? Hopefully, you saw Dune beforehand, so the sandy storyline made some sense. One takeaway from both films is just how sad and angry everyone is living on the eponymous hot, desert planet. I think, however, that I understand the motivations behind those dire emotions. It was manifested by living in a world full of sand dunes but with the total lack of dune buggies to enjoy them, owed to some sort of worm that might eat you should you desire to go out and kick up some sand.
Fortunately, we live on a planet where the threat from worms in the dirt is limited to the threat of the icky diseases then carry rather than digestion. Because of that, we have cool old dune buggies like this 1968 VW-based White Wind Meyers Manx knockoff.
Born in the 1960s, the dune buggy was the answer to the question, “What are we going to do with all these old VW Beetles we’ve got just lying around?” Bruce Meyers designed the now iconic “bathtub with fenders” dune buggy first as a sand racer. His experience with boat building meant he knew how to work in fiberglass and that medium proved perfect for Meyers’ simple but strong design. A VW Type 1 (Beetle) chassis, including the suspension and drivetrain, served as the donor for the car, shortened by a foot, with the whole thing proving lighter and allowing for bigger tires than the stock VW.
Meyers’ only significant failure in designing the Manx dune buggy wasn’t even his fault. The design’s success bred a slew of copycat makers, and while Meyers had patented the design of the Manx, it was ruled too basic a design to warrant a patent and the courts rescinded the exclusive rights to the shape. Meyers would address this issue with his follow-up, making the Manx SR a much more difficult-to-copy design.
Before that, however, Southern California saw Manx copies sprout like weeds, filing the backs of car magazines with ads touting the opportunity to “build your own in just a couple of weekends!” One such company was White Wind, and according to the ad, that was the source of this dune buggy, which was built by the seller in 1969 and has been kept by them ever since. The same design, with its nostrilled nose, was sold by a company called Desert Fox under the “Spoiler” name, proving the incestuous nature of the whole dune buggy building biz.
Remarkably, the VW chassis upon which the buggy is built was only a year old at the time. Perhaps it had been totaled in an accident or suffered some other indignity that made it a ready component of a dune buggy conversion. The ad notes that the car was moved to Montana from its original home in Texas in 1971, where it was used for more than a decade, racking up 4,169 miles (3,000 of those towed, likely behind and RV) before being parked in 1986 and left to its own devices. As you would expect, the seller claims it “ran when parked.”
Since then, however, things have gone slightly downhill. The padding and upholstery on the fiberglass seats are now totally gone, having been sacrificed to the sun and the weather. The gel coat on the sparkly fiberglass has also worn in a number of places, and the chrome is showing some pitting and rust.
Interestingly, the engine isn’t out of a Beetle but is a 1600 cc VW mill from a Type 3. That’s mated to a four-speed transaxle, and this being a ’68 chassis, that should feed an independent suspension with joints at both ends rather than the earlier swing axle design. The tires are huge and look to be as old as the hills and hence will require replacement. The engine will also require attention—and a new battery—as will the brakes, fuel system, and… well, that’s pretty much all there is.
On the plus side, the title is clean and the seller has tidied up the car so it doesn’t actually look like it’s been sitting outside for nearly 40 years. The ad claims that age and an already full dance card preclude the present owner working on the White Wind, and hence, it’s up for sale with an asking price of $5,900.
Does that seem like a good price for a classic dune buggy that just needs some sorting? Or is that too much for a simple car that actually needs so much?
You decide!
Helena, Montana, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to mpssweeney for the hookup!
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