Beach Buggy

There will always be people prepared to buck the trend, of course, but come out with a 'flake-painted, Manx-style body (without side pods, naturally), rolling on some form of five-spoke and with a simple, uncluttered interior and you won't upset too many people. However, that wasn't going to be enough for Joe Williams from Poole, down on the South Coast, who set out to build a Buggy that was quite unlike any other he'd seen. Though he had some definite ideas of his own, he knew there was only one body style that would do it, and that was a Manx, or at least the nearest he could get to an original Manx.
Having scoured the classifieds for a suitable base car, he stumbled across an advert for an East Coast Manx tub. It sounded perfect for what he was after - it was a Manx body for a start, but it was also still in the Brilliant Moss Green Metalflake gel coat that it had been moulded in and it had never been built up or fitted to a 'pan so had not been modified in any way. In fact, the only downside was that it was in Aberdeen, but that wasn't about to put our man off, so he arranged to buy it and had it shipped, along with a load of the bits that the previous owner had collected to build it up, all the way back down the country and straight to the premises of the Kustom Kandy Shop (KKS) in Poole. KKS is a newly-formed enterprise, partly owned by Joe himself, but run on a day-to-day basis by the aptly known Sparkly Derek. Between them, they decided to make this Buggy a rolling advert for the new business. With a name like that, it's not surprising that the focus of the project was to be the paintwork. "I wanted a cohesive theme throughout the Buggy," says Joe, "so we came up with the Moonshine idea - partly to reflect the paintwork, but also the use of Moon products on the vehicle."

For the full story on this car make sure you pick up a copy of the April 2009 issue of VolksWorld 

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