bugeyeguy.com

The largest restorer and reseller of Bugeye Sprites in the world


CURRENT INVENTORY IS SHOWN IN THE SMALL PICTURES JUST BELOW THIS TEXT!
(if a car is not pictured here, it has been sold)

Excellent restored 1958 Bugeye Sprite for sale

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Now SOLD to Kevin in Calgary area! Congratulations to you Kevin! Excellent choice! Our 281st sold!

AN5L 3884 is an early car, shipped in September of 1958 and first sold and titled in 1959. She’s beautiful!

Bugeye trivia! The car was shipped without windscreen washers per the heritage certificate (never seen that before), and sure enough, there are no washer squirters in place currently! And so we call this car “Squirt.”

The car was completely restored on a rotisserie in about 2009. She still looks quite fresh, and drives nicely. She has the stock 948 engine, four-speed smooth-case transmission and drum brakes all around.

The engine is fit with a Weber downdraft carb and she runs and drives nicely! Electric fuel pump, minilight wheels and performance exhaust all complete a very nice package. Three point seat belts, new top and tonneau and great windows too. This is a great car.

Call or email if you are interesed!

Stunning and fully restored concours 1960 Bugeye Sprite for sale

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NOW SOLD to Russ in California! Watching for a while, he grabbed a great one! Congratulations, Russ!

Concours Bugeye for sale, $2,109!

In 1960, that is… Check out the original window sticker for this car!

If you have been waiting for the best of the best, this is your car.

AN5L 34264 was the subject of more than $40k in ground-up restoration costs in 2012/13. Care and quality are evident throughout.

Look at the photo album and you can immediately see the tremendous amount of quality that went into this job. Many of the correct fasteners are present, such as the correct fuel line barbs under the car and the correct hose clamps in the engine bay.

The quality of this restoration is top-shelf. Only a select few customers invest in their Bugeye restoration at this level of detail, and the new owner of this particular car will get to enjoy an amazing example of this iconic little car. This is one of the best we have seen this year in terms of accuracy and originality.

The car can be shown in any concours show, and will likely bring home ample trophies. If you wanted to have us prepare the car for national Austin Healey club concours events, we can help with that too. The foundation is there, and a few minor details can be addressed to bring the car up to the much more exacting AH club concours code.

If you are unfamiliar, in many concours events, your car is judged for the overall quality by judges with a broad array of experience. They spend five or ten minutes with every car, and are looking to see the kind of quality we have with this car.

At National Austin Healey club concours events, every single detail matters, and each car is scrutinized by four judges for up to two hours per car. This car is ready to be prepared for that level of competition if that is of interest, and we can help you get to the gold level if you are interested.

But I think most people would love just having a near perfect specimen, in the right cherry red, with the right parts and pieces, and set up for a joyous celebratory drive. You can use this car. You can drive it to shows. You can drive it to get coffee. And you will know you are driving one of the best.

As with every restoration, there are a few inaccuracies… but they are minor. For example, the SU electric fuel pump that was added is a nice enhancement. And reversable. For example, if you were going the national concours route, a mechanical fuel pump is required. For local concours, an electric fuel pump on a car like this is just fine! The rear deck tonneau fittings are also incorrect. These too can be changed if the new owner desires.

The next step will depend on the desires of the new owner. If you want a near perfect restored car that you can drive and show, there is nothing more to do. If you want to win a gold medal at the national Austin Healey club concours, this car is a great starting point that can win gold with a few revisions.

Give a call if you would like to discuss owning one of the best!

Don’t do this to your Spridget! (How NOT to upgrade your car to wire wheels.)

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Below is a photo of the wire wheel adaptor kit for Spridgets that is readily available from many catalogs. This kit is so unsafe, it really only has one useful application, and that’s right here, on a display car that will be entombed in a building and will never drive again.

The original wire wheel front hub assembly works beautifully, and is bulletproof. But notice how this aftermarket piece bolts on the lug nuts and those mounting nuts prevent the wheel from mounting properly to the taper. We have had several of these come to our shop with loose nuts under the wheel, a recipe for disaster. We remove them permanently, and have found a perfect use for this kit, right here on a car that will never drive again.

They make things look great! But if you have this kit on your car, don’t drive another mile until you check the torque on the nuts under your wheel that hold the flanges to your drum. Better still, get a new set of wheels and go back to bolt-on. Much safer! In fact, send us a picture of this kit on your car and we’ll give you 15% off a new set of minilights rims. We need you to stay safe and this is potentially a lot more dangerous than any virus!

Above you can see the new lowered stance on our display car (scroll up to see the “before” picture). It has been a lot of fun to design a car that will not drive again, with the priority being maximum durability for people climbing all over it. We painted it with more durable Imron, and this week we lowered the front end so that it looks like an engine is present, even though most of the driveline is gone. Engine and transmission removal was only way we could get the car to no longer leak oil!

If you are just joining us, this is a car we extracted from the weeds and “restored” to permanently park in a 300 unit condo building in New Jersey. Above you can see the “widow-maker” wire wheel kit now installed.

Here, Austin tries out the white wall option… do you like it? We might want to add more bling, perfect for a car stuck in a speak easy for the rest of its life.

Above, Kenny fits the template for the panel in front of the butt-guard. We’ll need access once we mount a transformer in the boot so the lights glow around the perimeter of the car.

You’ll also notice the black vinyl covered cockpit trim installed. This is not factory correct, but we did this to stop oxidation from the many hand prints we anticipate, again, for more durability.

She’s coming along, and looking great!

Our next Super Sprite, for sale!

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Above is a custom rendering of our next super Bugeye. The drawing is a little too silver, but the actual color is a Jeep gray paint with red and black highlights. Notice the red center pin stripe and redline tires. We’ll also build-in black and red seat piping and black hardura mat with red thread. Special thanks to Erik of Envision Automotive Design, who helped us fine tune our color scheme with the rendering above (email if you would like his address).

Below you can see the tub, just painted today.

This one reads gray with a very slight olive hue, and it’s a milky solid color you will see on lots of late model cars these days. It’s interesting to see how colors come and go on everything from 911s to Subarus, and this car is something different, and we think something very special. We’ll all watch together as the build unfolds!

Many Bugeye projects reference the original palette offered for Frogeyes. The original choices were simple… light blue, light yellow, dark red, off-white, beige and two different greens.

There is something liberating about going off the map, especially when building a supercharged, fuel injected and five speed Bugeye with a custom interior. This one is available and we can build it to your specifications. Call or email if you are interested!

Bugeye Sprite, with Butt protector

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Pick a Bugeye, any red Bugeye.

Above is an amazing assemblage of cool things. In the foreground (with gold wheels), you’ll see Mr Krabs, a Bugeye that was once pronounced dead and buried as a coffee table in a beach house in Texas. The car was brought back to life by our customer in Houston, and now we have restored the body for him and repainted it in the proper cherry red. This dark red matches the original red you’d see in a showroom in 1960.

Behind Crabby on the lift is Mr Powell’s red Bugeye. This one is getting all new floor pans before it moves to New Jersey. This car is painted a more traditional red, which is not technically correct, but very popular.

And then in the corner is the topic of this post, “The Illusionist.” This car, also bright red, is the first car we have built with its very own butt protector. Notice the steel structure supporting the back deck above. This is all about the people we anticipate will sit on the back deck of this shiny restored car, while smiling for photos and dangling their legs in the cockpit.

Why, you might ask? Illusionist is heading for a happy retired life in the common space of a 300 unit rental condo building in Harrison New Jersey. Soon, we will be lifting the car into the building with a Lull (a giant fork lift, if you are unfamiliar). There, she will be permanently parked in a speakeasy/meeting room that renters can reserve for meetings and parties, made all the more merrier because of the smiling red Bugeye in the room.

We anticipate people losing control as they clamor all over this display, and thus we have reinforced the back deck to proactively prevent the inevitable butt-print on the Bugeye back deck. We’ve also painted the car in super durable bright red Imron, which will help protect the car from the selfie-stick assault that awaits.

Now that the car is painted, our fun begins, we because we get to stylize the car and get creative. The nose will be permanently secured since the engine and transmission have been removed. To create the illusion, we will modify the front springs to level the car. You can see how high the front of the car is sitting in the profile photo above. We’ll fix that.

Rendering of the Speakeasy, with square Sprite instead of Bugeye

We’ll also switch to wire wheels and wide white walls, to make the car sing. We’ll use the bolt-on wire wheel conversion kit on the market for disk wheel cars… we have a few in stock that we have removed from cars that have shown up in our shop because they are UNSAFE and have arrived here in the past with hubs about to fall-off the car. The original wire wheel hub is secured differently and works… these bolt-on kits are truly scary, but they are perfect for this application, where the car will never roll again!

In the coming weeks, we will be fitting-out the interior, and will post more pictures here. In case you missed the “before” pictures of this vehicle, you can click here to read more.

Bugeye Sprite brake performance test, our best yet…

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This is “Gumby,” my personal 1959 Bugeye that I have owned since 1978. We restored this previously ratty Bugeye a few years ago with the best of everything, in celebration of our 200th Bugeye sold, which was an unimaginable milestone when I started this business. Without Gumby, Bugeyeguy would never have existed. 300 Bugeyes sold is not far off… this week, we sold our 277th.

Thanks Gumby!

Lately, we have been trying to add some empirical data to the performance parts we build into our cars and we have been informally measuring the stopping distance with various brake configurations. Gumby has the best brakes we have built yet, with larger front rotors with twin piston calipers in front and disk brakes fit in back.

Come for a drive in Gumby below, you can see the stopping test near the end of the video:

From 30 MPH, Gumby stopped in about 38 feet, almost 10 feet shorter than our red car “Zippy,” which is fit with stock Spridget single piston front disk brakes and stock drums in the rear.

In case you missed Zippy’s brake test, you can see it below:

That 20% reduction could make all the difference in a panic stop. Sure, it cost a whole lot of money to accomplish this but isn’t it always that way? The last 20% of anything always seems to cost 80%!

To be fair, Gumby has an advantage with 175/70 tires while Zippy rides on 155/80s. I’ll do some more testing in the coming months to determine how much difference we gain with a wider tire when all other variables are equal.

For now, if you want the best brakes in your Spridget, our big brake front kit mated to rear disks and good fresh tires is your ticket. We sell all this in our parts catalog, call or email for details!

Contact us at David@bugeyeguy.com or call (203)-208-0980 during business hours