Bruce Meyers is an interesting mix of man. Not only does he have a firm view of the future and how it should be, he also has a picture of the past and how great it has been. Now mix that with a raw creative talent that is not only spurred on by the urge to design fine shapes but the ability to turn those thoughts into reality just perfectly.
Meyers’ hand skills are legendary, his imaginative mind has produced interesting results, whether it’s using hand tools, working with a gallon of resin and 10 yards of glassfibre cloth, or designing at his drawing table. Bruce’s life has been a crazy tumble that only very creative people seem to weather. His inventive and dynamic nature has contributed a lot of soul to every car nut in the world. He became the Henry Ford of kit cars. He would design, build and sell a car that just about anyone could assemble in their own backyard, the Meyers Manx dune buggy.
A go-fast freak from the start, Meyers won his first race at nine years of age with a go-kart featuring a folding top, lights and bumpers. Bruce was not given toys as a child; he was given tools and told ‘go build your own’. He did, and those rich years of experience developed Bruce Meyers’ extraordinary touch of turning his ideas into reality. Bruce was a typical Southern Californian teenager, hanging out at the beach, surfing, and cruising when it was the real thing, and racing ’34 Fords on the dry lakes. Sadly Bruces older brother died whilst surfing, so he was forbidden to go into the water, he was often kept in his room for every time he came home with sand in his trunks.
The Second World War interrupted his fun and put him in the Navy. He served on the aircraft carrier ‘Bunker Hill’. The Kamikaze attacks on the ship were bad enough, but Meyers suffered a worse time with a severe bout of rheumatic fever. Emerging from service in 1945, he was almost ready to go back to the Californian lifestyle by the sea. However, he loved sailing and. when offered a trip to the South Seas, jumped at the chance to sail to Tahiti for two years and then build a trading post in the Cook Islands.
Returning to California he started redesigning his own boat, a 42-foot Catamaran. Working in an empty sand lot in Costa Mesa, Bruce built the yacht part-time. At one point he used the shade provided by the cabin area between the hulls as a workshop. There he would shape surfboards to earn money to continue with the boat. The project took a number of years to complete but when finished turned out to be one of the fastest multi-hull boats around, winning the Newport to Ensanada race first time out from the back of the fleet. During the building of his catamaran, Bruce earned most of his living working on glass-fibre boat manufacturing projects, including the famous ‘California Series’ yachts of Bill Lapworth.
For the Lapworth boats Meyers built the tooling and moulds. They were huge glass-fibre moulds ranging up to 40 feet long, 20 feet high, and 28 feet wide. Bruce’s work with these boats led to other glass-fibre product work and he became an expert on moulding glass-fibre on a large scale. He developed rollover moulds and several other critical techniques for building large boats in fibreglass that are now used industry-wide. One Australian company used Bruce’s techniques to mould a 50ft yacht. When it came to removing the first boat from the mould, they found they couldn’t budge it. After six weeks of trying and many phone calls later, they found Bruce in California and offered to fly him to Australia to help extricate the new boat. The outcome was that Bruce flew to Sydney, got off the plane, went to the boat yard and, within 20 minutes, had popped the boat out of the mould.
Being close to the sea, Bruce was a surfer riding the waves when the surf was up. Bruce also loved VW Kombi buses and with his wife Shirley, would explore Baja and the west coast surfing, diving and fishing. One day Bruce was asked to go along to help assemble and sail a new sand yacht on Pismo Beach. The sand yacht, not one of Bruce’s pieces of work, ended up in a pile of splintered wood. Afterwards Bruce noticed that off in the dunes were some weird looking vehicles; ‘Dune Buggies’ they were called apparently. These buggies were stripped down and shortened chassis powered by V8 engines and some were VW-powered, but nothing fancy. They were all home-built and crude but they started Bruce thinking that they could be built in a much simpler way. He pounded his VW bus around the dunes that afternoon discovering to his delight that the Little Red Riding Bus made a surprisingly good dune jumper. The next week he started modifying his VW Bus bus with cut-out wheel wells and bigger tyres like he had seen on the buggies. The wheels he made by fitting the VW centres to scrapyard Buick rims fitted with 9.50×15 tyres. That may not sound such a big deal today but back in 1962 it was a revolution, especially for a street car.
