Desert Dingo Racing

Category: Photos

  • The last quarter inch takes the other 90% of the time

    Crusty welding on our pristine paint job

    Crusty doing what he does best. Which is, basically, everything.

    Yesterday, Crusty and I spent the day shouting the back end of 1107 into place. Today, we reprised that role with the front end. By the end of the day we had the front end bolted on and Crusty had what he needed to to cut the pan for the fuel cell and make some general tweaks that put us in position for final interior painting, electronics and everything else.

    For the love of Pete, don’t click on this photo gallery link unless you’re honestly thinking of building a Class 11 because…boring.

  • The last inch takes the other 90% of the time

    Dump run

    So much for Shawn’s awesome paint job.

    Scott, Bob, Crusty and I met up Saturday morning to move the new body over to the old pan on the other side of the county. The body mostly fit in the trailer and there’s nothing that 800 grit sandpaper and a roller brush can’t fix on Shawn’s paint job.

    The easiest (and I mean “relatively”)  way to mount a VW body on a car is to cut the body in half, slide the back half on, then repeat with the front half. We needed a cutting torch, sawz-all, crow bar, a smaller crow bar, a couple of hammers and a healthy amount of invective to get the back end in place. The last inch easily took the most time and I’m pretty sure we made cuts in at least nine spots on the car to get it to snug down.

    Scott delivered a handful of sleeves we’ll use to re-attach various portions of the roll cage. Things will be coming together pretty quickly moving forward.

    Here’s a gallery of roughly 60 photos of different angles of the roll cage and body, among other things.

  • The new body gets a coat of paint

    Shawn's painful new tattoo

    Shawn and I (mostly Shawn) spent most of yesterday painting 1107s new body. Shawn did the painting. I manned the tweezers, picking pine needles and other detritus falling out of the trees that landed on the wet paint.

    Body will be attached to the pan next weekend. Yerington at the end of the month. Gallery of painting photos here.

  • Class 11 roll cage

    Why racing this car is safer than driving what you drive.

    Why I feel safer in 1107 than I do in pretty much any street car.

    Crusty has been working two weeks straight prepping 1107’s roll cage and pan for the new body. We’ve minor tweeks to the roll cage, reinforced the front beam support and overall tightening everything up.

    More photos of Crusty’s handiwork here.

  • 1107s new home

    It's got million dollar views

     

    Gravel floor = swank.

    We moved 1107 to its new home over the weekend. Back up into the Santa Cruz mountains (from its previous location up in the Santa Cruz mountains). The move went amazingly flawlessly and we’re hard at work to get ready for the first desert race of the season May 27-30 in Yerington. The pan is being worked on there. The new body being massaged at Desert Dingo HQ. Work day at both locations this weekend.

    Some photos from the move. The parking lot photo was taken just before Shawn, Skid, Billy and I got into an argument over which form of racing is more awesome – IRL, NASCAR, MotoGP or motocross (it’s NASCAR).

    Two other bits of news. Just passed 25,000 downloads of our iPhone, iPod and Android mobile app. And we nailed a trifecta in the current issue of Dusty Times. A photo of 1107 appeared in the VORRA full page ad for the race season. We got mentioned in the Prairie City I race recap.Black and white doesn't do justice to Skittles rainbow of colors

     

    Thank you Jessica and Nathan for your help at PC I.

    Last thing: Planning for the 1000 has already begun…