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A Father-Daughter Story - Owner: Casey Fortson
My name is Casey Fortson, I am 25 years old, and this is my father-daughter VW story. My father Chris Eller and I have always tinkered with and built things as a hobby together, as a way to bond. At a very young age, my father assisted me with building skateboards and as I got older, we progressed to restoring and building vintage bicycles. Once we got the hang of that, we decided to build a car. We toyed with the idea of building a Volkswagen Beetle because, at the time, it was my dream for a first car.
So, in 2012, we started on the hunt for a solid Beetle. We found a 1979
Volkswagen Super Beetle Convertible in Ohio and my father drove up there
from North Carolina to go and pick it up. Once he got it back home, we
noticed the whole car was leaning to one side. We began to tear it down
and noticed that it had been hit in the front end. The frame head was
twisted, and the previous owner had replaced the front clip of the car
with one which was completely rusted out and couldn't be saved.
In an effort to try and fix this car, we bought another one in South
Carolina which we thought was better, and it was just as rusted as the
first one after we had it sand blasted. Unfortunately, we ended up scrapping
both of those cars and parting them out. My father and I had just about
given up the car building experience when our friend mentioned that his
father had a dune buggy and that would be a great way to salvage the parts
we had left.
So, we scoured FaceBook Marketplace, and we found the perfect donor body and chassis which had already been shortened, and it was only an hour away from home. $500.00 later, we came home with a fiberglass Dune Buggy body and a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle chassis that had been cut to fit the body. For the next eight years we tinkered and tinkered with this body and chassis, not knowing a thing about Volkswagens. Together we learned how to use a Dremel and fill in fiberglass stress cracks, how to properly lay fiberglass mat and all sorts of other bodywork techniques.
We spent years doing trial and error research on how VW's work, and finally we got it all put together. I wanted to build something with my father that I will have for years to come and something that we can both be very proud of. This was a hard project but without the help of my father and Lloyd Snider at Mechanix VW in Lexington, NC there is no way I could have done this alone. I started this journey in high school, worked on it throughout college and finished it a few years later.
I am now grown, married and a teacher at that very same high school I graduated from. My students are obsessed with my Dune Buggy, they are very interested in how air-cooled engines work/operate and want to learn how to build VW's as well. I try to teach them everything I know about VW's and fiberglass work every chance I get.
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