Hey, Nathan. You match your car. Yeah, I do. Yeah. Gray shirt, black shorts. Hold up. I do. Yeah, you’re right. I can’t tell where Nathan ends in the car begins. Nathan, you’re becoming part of the Volkswagen Baja. Yeah, I know.

Back at it again. It’s a new day. We’re getting there. We’re doing the prep work. What did you do here on the kick panels? uh cut some holes with a jigsaw, drilled a hole, and then went boink. We used a speaker grill for reference on where we wanted to make certain we had room for that. And then we took the round styrofoam template, basically what the speakers were sitting in to cut the hole. Did you test fit the speakers in these holes? Yes. And they fit perfectly? Yes. Awesome. So, we can get that stuff prepped and ready to go there.

What are you doing now, Nathan? Cutting out the carpet padding. Since we don’t have seat rails, we’re not going to use our pre-cut pads. We use our standard pad as a template to cut a one piece pad out of one big piece of cy. We’ve got this piece ready to set in place just like Nathan’s doing there. And I will do the same thing over here. It’s already so much softer in here. So, we’ve got the holes for our seat mounts cut out of the way. And then we drop the pad straight into the rear seat footwells. Like so. Nathan, you need a taller seat than that, buddy. Yeah, we need more carpet padding. Need more a lot more padding. All right.

Now, I guess we can get to work on pre-mounting our speaker kick panels. And yet again, I’m going to do something non-traditional just because of the way that the speaker kick panels would normally sit. They are essentially just reverse molds of this area here. And with that, when you pull that panel out, you kind of the standard piece of carpet that would sit there ends up leaving the top edge of the kick panel exposed. I’ll try and mock that up here momentarily just to show you guys what I mean. And then I’ll go over what I think I’m going to do to remedy that.

All right. So, a standard installation, we would normally set the speaker in and then move it far enough back to the point where the magnet isn’t going to contact the body back behind. Now, we got a little bit of space there. That’s fine. We just got it taped here and taped there. And then we’d come in with our carpet and line it along the back edge of the door jamb. That’s option one. And that’s a normal standard installation.

However, we have a 3D printer and that gives us the option to do I think we’re going to do with option two. And I’ll show you that in a moment. Option two, because we have a 3D printer, we can actually make a spacer ring to hold the speaker off the kick panel just a little bit. Give us the space off the back that we need. And the nice thing is is we eliminate a lot of the gap that would have been up the top here. Now, we still run into the issue of not totally covering the top edge of the kick panel here. So, we can just take a strip of carpet and glue it across the top. Wrap it over before we install the kick panel. So, what we’ll end up doing is cut some of this strip off the back carpet here that’s just overlaying off of the back of our rear seat and use it to cover that top edge there. And that will eliminate that big top gap where you would normally have this panel spaced off where you’d be able to put your hands in the backside like we would have done like that. And that’s junk. You don’t want stuff falling back there.

So, I think we’re going to go option two. Put that panel all the way forward. And that way this edge will be much less of a gap. And with the carpet tied in place there and that screwed in place here and here. I think that’s going to be the way we’re gonna go. We’ll just have to have Nathan print up some spacer rings on his 3D printer. Yeah, we can do that.

Over here, we’ve got a scrap piece of carpet glued on top of this. I already went through and taped this up in place and put a little mark on here above where the other carpet overlaid. So, this is going to get covered up. Most of what is going to be our speaker grill. We want to make certain that it just looks finished because Baja bug. I knew that’s what he was going to say. Totally. I didn’t even know I was going to say it. I knew he was going to say it because that’s my son and I know him.

So Nate, you want to go set that one in place? Is this for the other side? Well, this one side’s already done. So, I’m going to guess. Yeah, you’re right. This is for this side. Um, yeah, right there. And over here, let’s see. We’ve got that piece just literally marked up in place. But let’s get some light on this situation. Oo, look at that. We can see what we’re doing now.

Nice and tight up against the body. Nice and tight up against the body. Virtually no gap. And we’re not even screwed in or just taped in right now. Just temporarily. We’ve got our wire sitting out here. We do have some gap here. We’ll have to pull that in with the selftapping screw. We’ll just mount it here with the Lord’s fastener selftapper. And once that’s in place, again, that carpet will just kind of sit right up there, covering all that. And then our speaker will sit somewhere in that area right there. And everything up on both sides will be nice and tucked away.

I mean, can we at least screw these in right now at this point? Maybe. Seeing as we’re going to have the 3D printed and imprint spacers in it, we should actually sell those. Um, I mean, they’re kind of speaker specific.

In lie of making a 3D printed spacer, a lot of guys will actually make uh speaker rings out of MDF and uh either upholster them or paint them or otherwise. Now that we have a 3D printer, that just makes life so much easier with they’ll match the cup holders. And these and that and that and that and that and that and everything. All the blockoffs.

All right, Nathan, what do we got? Holes. We have holes. What are these holes for? Speakers and speaker spacers. We’ve got our four holes. drilled with our spring tension clips. You grab a pair of pliers and you crimp them down and then you slide them over the holes. Now, we do have these four holes drilled offset from our other four holes so that we can put our speaker ring and mount it to the kick panel. And then we can mount the speakers to the speaker spacer and not run into the same screws that we held the spacer ring in place with.

I’m getting smarter in my old age. Thinking ahead, not just having a giant gap on the top of the thing of the speaker kick panel and then having it showing things and I’m getting better at this stuff. I swear. Yeah, it’s weird. It’s like after you do it a thousand times, you’re getting better at it. My Super Beetle that stereo came out really well. I’ve been looking at that a lot just to figure out how stuff goes together.

Super Beetle kick panels go in a little bit better than these do. We’re going to get these mounted in the car now. Hopefully, at least we’re gonna get this one mounted in the car. And then we’ll do the same thing on the other panel and get it mounted in the car. Yay.

It’s crazy how well the paint ended up under the dash. It’s like extremely good. And that little opening on the bottom just for the wires. In all the other times I’ve ever done it, I put the panel down super low. But in this particular case, we’re doing differently. This is the first time I’ve done an install like this. I normally put the K panels down at the bottom and have a gap at the top. But now you’re being smart.

Also note that we’ve got two red marks here. I used those and a measuring tape to get us square for our speaker. So, our speaker is parallel with the ground for proper product placement. Yes, Dad. There’s a fender right behind that. You probably shouldn’t drill into it. Probably should got to pay. I think I might be able to. That could have hurt me really bad. Oh, there’s a light. There’s a light. That was like right on the like arm of my shirt. Projectile. That was a good launch. Almost took out your son with that one, Dad. I’ll try one more time.

Fiberglass plenty good for your lungs. Fiberglass is great for your lungs. I know. I was I was wearing a jacket and then the shirt under that, the hood on the jacket, goggle things that we got from grandpa’s and a mask and pants and socks and everything and gloves. Perfect.

Now we can put a speaker. I really like the orange and the brown and the black all like tying in right here. It’s really good. Oh, fancy lock. Yeah. You know what? Almost don’t even need a spacer ring. How did that happen? We were smart, I guess. I don’t know. Well, look at that. Uh, sorry. I guess we’re not 3D printing spacer rings. Well, we’ll see how the other side comes out. Well, especially after the carpet goes on, too, you know. Yeah, it’s going to be even better. Or that’s uh Okay, let’s screw it in.

Well, at this point, we could move our tabs to here and up into there and to there and put the grill and the speaker on and go and then we could mount listen to jams those. Well, I just threw that up there so we can still listen to jams. I’m going to do the same thing I did right here over there. And hopefully we have the same luck over here. Yep. We’ll find out. All right. Sounds good. Sounds good.

All right. With that, well, what time is it? 8:47. And I am up way past my bedtime. Yeah. Well, at least now all of our speakers are in place. We got that speaker sitting over there with pretty much no gap behind it. This one with no gap except for like right there. A little bit at the front, but but who cares? When you’re sitting You’re up hereish. You can’t even see anyways. It’s fine. It’s still fine. It’s still fine.

All right, Nathan, we’re back at it again. Yep. We’re going to Next step at this point is work on the carpet. Nathan’s working on getting that piece in correctly this time. Yeah, this way’s harder. It installs with the strip on top, not on the bottom like Nathan had it previously installed. Yeah. Push it in, peel it back. Push it in, peel it back. Oh, and you can kind of feel it goes in place. And what you’re trying to do is get that lip right there. Underneath it. Yes. Underneath that edge. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Well, I’ll go do that on the other side then. All right. Sounds good. We’re going to get these pieces in and we’ll be back.

I got my side in. I’m working on this side. And afterwards, I just came back in with a dead blow hammer and beat on this edge all the way down. Basically hammering that piece to hold this carpet in place. Uh, I guess also worth note, we did pull out the roll cage. I put towels on the end so we don’t hit our heads cuz I figured that would happen. We’re going to keep on keeping on. Yep. And make sure it’s pulled this way tightly before you hammer it in towards me. Yep. With one hand, pull it back into the inside. And the other hand, hammer. Yeah. like that. We’re going to get these pieces glued up, I think. Um, and we’ll get to work from there.

Howdy. Hi. All right. So, we’re just getting these pieces mocked up here and here. And we’ve decided to go with this piece overlapping this piece as opposed to that piece overlapping that piece. Cuz that looks like paperier-mâché tacky. Yeah. This way. Yeah. This ends here. And then this goes down like that. Yeah, it makes more sense. Makes more sense. Yeah.

So, I’m going to start by getting this piece glued in here first with this piece peeled back. Now, you can see a carpet nail hole right there. And actually, there is a one right there as well. What’s up, Nate? Can we open the garage when we do the glue? It’s very You don’t want to get high on fumes of glue to open the garage and get to laying down some glue. Opening the garage is a lot easier when there’s a Baja bug right here. Especially when it doesn’t have the front end on or when we wind the beam.

And that side is now in. It looks really good. The first bit of front carpet on my car that is permanently installed. So now we can go through and cut this opening out and put a speaker in it. I’m going to go through and cut this seam perfectly straight just like I did on that one and right there so that those two edges actually butt up together and then instead of being overlapped like this cuz then it gets like big and bulky. So if you trim it straight and you just butt up one side next to another, the surge is a nice trim line and not that big old chunky.

So pull that back, lay that over, give ourselves a nice little line. And this is just a dry erase marker. We’ll just butt up that edge right there and it should be good to go. Just like that. A nice smooth transition without a big overlap like that. Perfect.

Now I’m just taking a sharp razor blade and a utility knife and just being cautious not to snag the carpet. We want to slice it. You don’t want to get a run in a carpet really. And when you get to something like that, just use a pair of scissors. Don’t pull it cuz if you pull it, you got to that run in your carpet. Not fun. And then I just use a pair of flush cuts to go ahead and dig out for our speaker mounting screws. Yeah. And we got one small section right here left.

I mean, that took like what 20 30 minutes. Yeah, there about. That’s for just all that. That’s like probably maybe the hardest bit. Yeah, this is probably the hardest bit. And it was pretty simple, honestly. Well, everything’s simple when you’ve got the experience. Yeah. Well, at least I’m not doing it by myself, or else I would have probably definitely screwed it up.

But as I’ve learned from somebody who’s worked on a lot of Volkswagens, that’s how you learn. You either learn it the right way the right the first time or you learn by yourself. A thousand ways not to do a light bulb. Yeah. There we go.

A lot of carpet on your phone. Safest place to put the speaker is where it belongs, I guess. So Nathan’s going to put the speakers in. You need to be very careful, especially on that cuz if you grab a snag of carpet, it’s going to yank it. So yeah, be very cautious. I would start them all by hand. All right, on to the next one.

Nathan, did you plug the speaker in? Yes, I did. All right, that seemed like it grabbed. Boom. All right, they all grabbed. Put them all in. Good. Awesome.

I got three out of the four speakers and one of the one subwoofers in. Yeah, buddy. That looks pretty darn good, I’d say. I know. It’s super nice having this extra piece right here in which I’ve just that little piece of scrap carpet adds so much underneath the back of our seat. Just that little piece of carpet right there at the top makes the biggest difference. Yep.

Now we got to move on to the other side and then the other three pieces and then the front and then that and then we still have to glue those in. So, um, you want to peel that carpet back and start laying some glue on the back of it? I do want to. So, you can start to work on that and I will start to work on this. Okay. Nice.

Nathan’s working on getting that carpet laid in place. While he was doing that, I’m getting our front carpet piece laid in place. You can work on getting that front edge laid in. Get all that pushed in nice and tight. Yep. I need a touch of glue all the way down into the edge. Nice. All right. We’re going to keep on keeping on.

All right. Just got finished up with some dindins. So, we’ve got our front mat set in place. I just have to work behind the pedal assembly, which is just loosely set in place. We got to make sure that the cutouts for the brake pedal and the clutch pedal and stuff and everything else that tucks in behind can still be pulled up to access the pedals as needed. Uh, notice that we do have our air conditioning lined junction pulled out for the tunnel piece of carpet along with our clutch pedal access and AC line access panel that’s pulled out as well. We’re getting there.

So, we’ve got our cutout for our brake line right there. Cut out for our pedal assembly. Now, we can peel this carpet back and glue it down to right about here. Just so that this piece can still come up later if we ever have to do anything as far as replacing a master cylinder or anything.

How do you like it, Nate? Uh, it’s really cool. There’s carpet.

All right. Since Nathan designed a center console that can only be installed and taken out with the parking brake out, we can’t put our boot in properly, which kind of leaves a couple of issues, but as always, I will adapt and overcome. I set this in place. I got the back edge of this marked. Just use a straight edge and eyeball. And an Expo dry erase marker is actually really handy cuz it actually wipes off relatively easy. Quick and sour tip.

I’m going to now cut this out and then we’re going to set this carpet test it. Possibly cut our holes for our seat belts or we’ll maybe cut those while we’re we’re actually not even going to cut them. I’m going to melt them while we’re doing the install and we’ll work from the center out to the left side and the center out to the right side on installing this carpet piece. And then the front carpet piece and then that’s our car. But it looks very fancy. It’s like it looks finished up here. And that’s just laying in place.

We should just lay all the pieces in place. It would be just like gravity hold them. That’s fine. the speaker kick panels maybe not so much, but everything else maybe. Whatever. Yeah.

So, I was a little bit off on my corners, but I’ll take a hot razor blade and cut these corners out. And then this carpet is ready to start gluing up from the center and then down and then all the way out. How’s it looking, Nathan? I mean, I’m pretty stoked about it so far, but once it’s all the way in and all together, I’m going to be real happy.

Hey, Nathan, you match your car. Yeah, I do. Yeah. Gray shirt, black shorts. Hold up. I do. Yeah, you’re right. I can’t tell where Nathan ends in the car begins. Nathan, you’re becoming part of the Volkswagen Baja. Yeah. I know.

One thing I’ve been doing the last couple carpet kits I’ve worked on is cutting overlapping carpets like we saw on that front kick panel here. Here’s another big one. What looks better? That or that? Definitely that. Just cut out any overlapping pieces, glue it, butt it up, and that’s good to go. And then this piece right here might just fit perfectly where our carpet doesn’t cover cuz this is where a seat track would have been. That might work out just perfectly for right in there as a filler panel. Yeah, I’ll take it.

I’m going to start gluing this piece down and then we’ll do the same thing on that side. Teamwork makes a dream work. Yep. And this is why restorations are a lot easier with two people. I can hold, Nathan can glue.

And if you’re wondering what kind of glue we’re using, this is essentially what used to be our old headliner glues, but since we can’t ship it anymore, we just use it as needed on projects like this, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than going out and buying a whole bunch of spray glue.

Now that we’ve got the rear carpet all glued in, start working on the front. We’ve got it set in place. Just using a nail and a torch and make sure that that’s the right spot. That’s a hole for our shifter. Yay. Holy Toledo. So now I’ve got a hole for our shifter. I have a good idea where it’s at. I’ll take my dry erase and mark this out. Cut it out using a hot razor blade. I’ll grab that and a pair of vice grips, heat it up, and cut that out.

And then we have to worry about our holes for our AC lines way up here. But one thing at a time. Yep. And then after we glue that in, we can put the whole car back together. Fun, fun, fun.

There’s carpet and center console. Not too shabby. We got our air conditioning lines in the back. Nathan got his center console in well enough. Carpet made it a little bit wider than he anticipated, but it should work.

All right. We haven’t glued this side of the carpet down so we can access our air conditioning lines when that time comes. So, with that, um, going to keep on working. And everything here is stuff that we’ve done repeatedly probably almost five times at this point. Yep.

I’ve got our seat belt holes melted using a nail. That’s a weird sentence. And a torch. The seat belt holes melted. Similar to what we did on the seat belts there on the tunnel and there on the tunnel.

We’re just about ready to throw the rear hoop in. And then I’m going to call it a night. And then I’m not going to call it a night. And then Nathan’s gonna keep on keeping on and probably have this thing fully assembled before I come back in tomorrow.

All right, we’re making better progress than I thought we would. Roll cages in, seats in. Now these back seat anyway. Front seats can go in now. And wow, it’s like full interior. It’s a full interior in a Baja bug. Weird, huh?

There we go. Full interior in the baja. Nathan putting in the last seat bolt and then the seat belt. And then the seat belt. [Music] Let’s see. Come on. You You sat in my car before I got to sit in my car. Wa. I’m weird. With that. Wa. Kick pan.

We’ve got the full interior of the car installed. Nathan, well, it’s weird sitting in it again. It’s like different. It’s like even quieter. I know. That’s weird. And it’s like it feels kind of smaller but at the same time taller kind of. I don’t know. It just feels like a completely different car for some reason. Do you like it? I do like it. Well, that’s all that matters. Okay. Y.

All right. Nathan’s going to sit out of here and enjoy some music for a little bit. Yeah. We’re hopefully not to get copyright infringements with little gorillas playing in the background. Feel good ink by gorillas. Yes. We’re not trying to play it. We’re not trying to steal it. Yep. But with that, I’m Sam. And I’m Nate. Good night. Good night.

All right. Saturday morning. We’re back at it again. We’re just buttoning up the front end. We got all the interior fully reassembled. Mhm. Seats are in. Yep. Carpets patched in the couple spots where the seat tracks were. At least on the outside edges, not so much on the insides, cuz you don’t see those anyways. We’re going to get this buttoned up and then we’re going to take it out for a drive. We’ll see how it goes. I like it. I like it, too.

With that, I’m Sam and I’m Nate. Thank you for life’s full of good people. If you can’t find one, be one. Later, guys.