I would like to start by making very clear that I received a huge amount of help on this project mostly from my trusty team of technicians who really put in the hours with me and from my brother Nathan who steadfastly held shop while they did so. A special thanks to Roberto who proved to be as fearless of failure (read “just as crazy”) as yours truly and brought countless contributions to the various facets of this project.
It would however be unfair to forget the neighbors and friends who would lend a hand or a tool, on occasion, offer of a cold beer or just a kind word when things were a bit stressed out. Thank you for being there.
Scani with his backpack
Where this crazy idea came from
While working on the initial Magirus truck building project (more on this project to come soon) it was quite quickly apparent that we would need to include a second form of transport. During vacations or even just weekend trips we would often find ourselves up back alleys or down some discreet track that would simply not be doable with a huge truck. I have commuted to work for years on a modest 125cc scooter and although that certainly does not make me a “biker,” I have tested, and would readily step up to something much bigger if the situation justified the upgrade. Fay was eventually warming to the idea of learning to ride a motorcycle. Although she's brave and always keen to learn new skills, having two kids in tow would need two very confident riders or it simply would not work.
I mulled over different options for a while with a clear list of the bases I wanted covered:
A: Transportable without a trailer which, in my opinion, would considerably compromise the off-road capacities and maneuverability of the truck.
B: Seat 4 persons
C: Have the range, power, and potential on/off-road capacity to be a viable “escape pod” if we became stranded in the middle of nowhere with the truck.
D: Fun factor!
“A” was the biggest challenge of course. I have seen a couple of overland trucks with 2 seater smarts or even a 4 seater Polaris buggy up on a platform on the back but I was extremely keen to avoid the huge overhang (at least the width of the carried vehicle) that is created with that setup. Anybody who has driven a long vehicle will know that every centimeter of superstructure beyond the rear axle reduces maneuverability and increases the risk of accidentally hitting something when cornering.
Why not take a car that has a low overall height and just "snap it on the back like a backpack"?
Advantages: the overhang would be limited to the height of the vehicle and you could exploit the height of the truck instead of the width of the truck to dictate the length of the vehicle to be carried.
The width of our truck is 2.5m, the maximum legal width of any vehicle at 2.55m which is not much to work with as a maximum length of a 4 seater car! By using the height one could stretch that out to 4 meters (minus ground clearance.)
You have to admit that it also marks a few points in the “fun factor” column!
Disadvantages: No car is designed for this position so it will need some serious modifications, notably to manage the fluids, to render this position possible at all.
The mounting and harnessing of the vehicle into position is clearly going to be far more complex than it would be in a conventional transport position.
Based on weight, length, and budget I whittled the list down to an old short wheelbase VW Dune Buggy as it ticked all of the boxes on my list and had 2 non-negligible bonus points:
rear engine and transmission put all of the weight on the back of the car so in transport position, it retains a very low center of gravity
The vehicle is about as simple as you can get mechanically and you can find parts for it just about anywhere.
I had been monitoring the classifieds for a while before coming across our buggy. It was being sold by another garage in Neuchatel. The Buggy had been restored just enough to make it drivable for a test drive which we did…..and all the ladies in the house said “YES”! After about an hour of negotiating, the beast was ours and was eventually delivered on a trailer about a month later.
This was back in spring of 2013, long before Scani came along. Although the purchase was earlier than I had planned, even for the Magirus project, the SWB buggies are pretty rare, and affordable ones in usable condition are rarer still so I thought “what the hell, at least I will have it for the dimensions when I get around to the car cradle part of the project.”
The car spent several winters outside just sitting there, although I did my best to keep it covered up, countless times the wind would tear everything off and I would find her sitting there braving the elements looking rather pitiful. Fortunately twice a year she made a completely mandatory appearance for the girls’ birthdays as no excuse was ever good enough for them. Birthday = Daddy MUST go get the blue car! I have to admit that although I quite often went out rather grumpy I would inevitably come back with a smile (and the car) because it is simply fun to drive. (barring the 2 times when I was stuck in traffic with a massive thunderstorm, that…….. was much closer to taking a rather cold bath).
Birthday outing
I never did get to the “car cradle part ” with the Magirus before pulling the plug on that project but the technical possibility to transfer that idea was always part of the prerequisites when looking for an overland truck and was certainly one of the reasons why I wanted a 6X6 base.
When Scani came up on our radar I very quickly reached out to the builder (ActionMobile) about this and received the following reply “There's a hydraulic driven motorbike carrier already installed at the rear end of the body. Very powerful. So it seems to be easy to adapt/modify that system for your buggy. And we have a 6x6. So no problem to carry a buggy with 600 kg”.
That box was ticked.
Sometime in 2019 when we had the timing of our sabbatical more clearly in our sights there came a point where I had to decide OK, are we going to do this or not?
The truck was built with an extremely robust motorcycle carrier platform on the back which is lowered on hydraulics to allow loading the motorcycles and then raised back up to a fixed height which is then mechanically pinned so that nothing can move in the case of a hydraulic leak.
My first step was to find a way to crudely manhandle the buggy onto the back of the truck, if possible without breaking either vehicle, basically to find out if the whole project was viable or not.
To do this we bought a second-hand Warn winch and built a support that would allow us to attach the winch onto the front of the frame of the buggy.
We also needed to make a system that allowed us to extend the pivot point when lifting the buggy into the air or it would lift off of the back wheels directly onto…..everything further back like the engine casing and tailpipes and even the body itself. Picture dragging a suitcase that does not have wheels on the bottom edge.
We got around this by mounting two parallel longitudinal tubes directly under the frame into which we slide 2 other stainless tubes with big heavy duty caster wheels welded onto the end. The pairs of tubes are pinned at the desired length to allow everything at the rear of the Buggy to clear the ground when lifted vertically. The second pair of tubes can then be simply unclipped and left at the truck while using the Buggy or even left on there to serve as a rear bumper.
Jockey wheel supports
Once this was done I bolted a beam up onto the wall of our workshop to see if : A. we had enough lifting power and B. just how many fluids were going to come gushing out the first time we put her nose in the air. A. was a go and B. was messy but manageable for testing purposes.
Test haul
The next step was actually getting the buggy up onto the back of the truck. This entailed building a stainless steel beam that could be bolted onto the heavy duty upright pillars of the existing motorcycle carrier on the back of the truck. I did not have a TIG welder for this at that point so I prepared all of the parts and assembled everything with spot welds before calling in a favor at the Geneva mechanics school.
Xavier welding the initial hoist crossbeam at the mechanics school.
With the beam in place, we were ready to haul the buggy up and compare the crazy idea with the reality of what is or is not feasible. The platform of the motorcycle carrier is still on the truck in the photo, allowing us to rest the weight on it and then secure the buggy to the mobile part of the motorcycle carrier with a big Spanset strap.
This allows the winch hoist point to be released (or just slackened enough) to allow the hydraulic platform to travel full stroke allowing some impressive ground clearance behind the truck BUT the front of the Buggy exceeds the height of the truck and indeed the maximum legal height of 4 meters.
I have no problem with this as to date I have never encountered extreme terrain while in a tunnel or under a bridge…
The aim of the initial check seen in the video below was to determine if in “normal ride height” ie. NOT exceeding the height of the truck, the installation would be viable for normal road use or would we risk bottoming out every time we encountered a ramp for example. Although it’s hard to see in the video, the test is actually extremely steep, you bottom out, for example, with the front bumper on any standard vehicle unless you gently ease into the slope. I was quite relieved to see that in the normal /legal transport height we had plenty of room to spare even on a ramp, that steep, which could be compared to a steep ferry loading ramp or similar.
Test Mount
A keen eye will notice that the Buggy is losing various fluids during the test as this was before any attempts to modify the mechanics to manage this issue.
Although all of the neighbors present during that initial test confirmed that our venture was stark raving mad neither they nor we could actually pin down anything that rendered it technically impossible so we moved ahead. “fortune favors the brave”.
The next step was a complete overhaul of the Buggy which had barely been touched since purchasing the car and of course we needed to get creative and find a way to manage the fluids. I mean it’s cool to be able to easily drain the oil when she is in the air and all but for practical reasons, I would kind of like to avoid doing it systematically!
Before stripping the car down I took the car through the very rigorous swiss vehicle inspection (MFK or MOT) to ensure that we did not have some hidden or unknown problem with the car as I had never registered the vehicle* and indeed did not right up until our departure date. I also wanted to know what the swiss inspectors would make of the, obviously not original, stainless tubes welded under the car. After struggling with the brakes because of some ovality in the rear drums we got the all clear from the inspection center and it was time to strip her down.
*The occasional use of the car was done legally with our garage trade plates
And then Covid19 hit and hit hard
We went from a normal business with a fairly dependable routine to having our order books literally cleared. Two months of appointments were canceled over a 24hr period with no real idea of what was coming next.
For the first week or so as my team of technicians finished ongoing jobs, I switched them from garage work to stripping things down on the buggy. We quickly realized however that nobody was able to supply the parts needed to proceed in a normal time frame as everything and everybody was grinding to a halt and the financial realities of running a business with zero work were starting to hit home!
Long story short, I had to completely put this project aside while I fought to keep the company alive. The planned timing of our departure was also suddenly put into question (at some points its very existence too) for the first time.
Many months later we picked things up again but in all, we probably lost a year between down time, finances, lost or delayed orders, and let’s face it, my general motivation took a punch to the gut.
Engine out support beam
Engine rebuilt
What are the actual modifications we did?
Battery: we modified the battery well to allow the installation of a red Optima 60Ah battery that will support being in a 90degree position and also added a fixation system as there was no provision for this initially.
Engine oil:
The biggest challenge as the designers of the old flat 4 (ours is a 1.6L AS) did not really give much thought to sealing the engine. There is not even a shaft seal on the pulley end of the crankshaft which was a first for me and the crank breather assembly seeps oil even at the best of times and when it is pointing the right way up!
I have removed the oil bath type air filter which was completely incompatible with the rotation of the axis of the vehicle. When we eventually installed the dual EMPI carbs they come with dry “washable” filters which resolved that issue.
I have drilled into the engine casing as close to the lowest point (when vertical) as is technically possible and threaded the (very thin) casing in 3/8” to install a suction port adding a very thin nut behind that to lock things in place. It just barely clears the cog of the camshaft.
Engine oil suction port
There is a hose attached to that port going to a 12V oil pump which quite effectively sucks the oil out of the engine while the buggy is being lifted up and pumps it into a reservoir placed in the right wheel arch.
The reservoir which started its life as an asparagus steamer (stainless steel pot, right shape, right volume) has a drain positioned on the front right bottom edge in such a way that as soon as the car is on the ground the oil just pours back into the engine by gravity. By the time you have unlatched the car and it is ready to start, all of the oil is safely back in the engine oil pan and ready to go.
The oil returns to the engine via the original breather port which originally incorporates the engine oil fill point anyway so we simply widened the holes in the oil condensate separator to ensure an unobstructed and rapid return of the oil to the sump.
We added an extra port onto the original breather box which allows both the crank case and the new oil reservoir to retain their “breather” circuit.
We also added the “off the shelf” radial seal and pulley kit to the front of the crankshaft and I have not seen any sign of leakage from there since.
This overall setup works very well as long as you get the timing right for when and for how long you activate the 12V pump to start pumping the oil out of the engine. If you forget or pump too late then some oil gets trapped around the mechanical fuel pump which is higher up than the suction point which I have installed resulting in oil seepage through the mechanical fuel pump assembly.
I have the hardware with me to set up a timed trigger that can be adjusted to the ideal pump duration. I will update once I have found the time to install and test that.
Gearbox :
I have the 4 speed “swing axle” gearbox. It’s not my favorite gearbox but as they say “if it aint broke don’t fix it”.
The primary shaft is placed fairly high up compared with the oil level so in normal use although some seepage may occur it is rarely going to prove problematic. Flipping everything 90 degrees is however a whole different ball game. The original seal is little more than a dust cover as it does not even have the radial spring in the seal to keep it compressed around the shaft. Keep in mind that all of the gearbox oil is going to be trying to escape through there because that shaft seal becomes the lowest point in the transmission when it is flipped up 90 degrees. Even a small amount of leakage is going to be problematic here because the first thing it will do leak into the clutch and spoil it.
I replaced the original seal with something with the same dimensions but made… sometime AFTER the Second World War. I then made a tube just like a clutch thrust bearing guide that would allow me to place 2 more radial seals facing opposite directions to allow me to create a small pocket of graphite grease between the 2 seals to keep them lubricated as I do not think any/enough oil is going to get past the first radial seal to avoid frying the seals by running them dry otherwise.
The challenge was then to find a (VW beetle) thrust bearing that could fit into the very restricted space left available. After trying various models and brands we found one which works although we had to grind it down a bit to allow for the extra diaphragm movement that will occur with the wear of the clutch some time down the road. It was extremely tight for space but it works fine.
Fuel:
The tank itself fortunately did not present a problem. The filler point is right on the front so unless you really fill her right up there is no leakage from the filler cap. I had to change the level sender so it now has a new seal which is a good thing because the old one was cooked. We have simply added a cutoff solenoid (as well as a proper filter) right at the exit of the fuel tank. I can flip a switch on the dash and the engine runs about 30 seconds until the carbs run out of fuel thus avoiding any fuel spillage or engine flooding when the car is lifted up. It’s simple and it works.
I may eventually install an electric fuel pump to avoid the annoying 8 second crank which is presently necessary to refill the carbs before it starts but as some beetles crank that long every time they start it is not high on my list of priorities at the moment.
Brake fluid: surprisingly I have absolutely no sign of leaks from the brake fluid reservoir so I see no reason to touch it for now.
Antifreeze: has never seemed to be much of a problem on this engine….
Lastly because the frame of the car was never designed to carry the weight of the engine and transmission in that direction I have installed reinforced engine mounts and, more importantly, made 2 stainless steel cables with eyes on each end to carry the weight.
Each (6mm diameter) cable is looped around the front of the tube of the rear axle and then bolted onto the M8 studs on the casing of the gearbox. Finally the cable is tightened to the point where they are carrying the majority, if not all, of the load of the engine and transmission when the car is being transported.