Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2021 i VolksWorld

It doesn’t seem right to try and cram 14 months and 1,100 hours of hard graft into a few pages of a magazine. But, when the pictures look as good as this and the magazine is VolksWorld, hopefully we can pull it off. If you’re a member of the Split Screen Van Club’s monolithic forum, you cannot have failed to miss one of its cornerstone threads. Lurking in the Rides and Projects section lies a build thread to end all build threads. Entitled ‘My first VW!! Mid Life Crisis’ it runs to over 300 pages and has had in excess of half a million views, and documents one man’s battle against a basket case ’66 Split. Spoiler alert: he wins and the finished Bus made the front cover of our…

The engine in Paul’s car is a standard, four-cylinder Volkswagen motor running on carburettors, with just a sniff of nitrous. Yes, as 2332cc it’s large displacement but there is no turbo or supercharger, just good old-fashioned tuning techniques, combined with years of experience. “drag racing is all about being able to effectively use the available power” We will come back to the full engine spec and details of the car in a future issue but, right now, we’d estimate this engine to push out somewhere in the region of 240bhp, with an additional 100bhp available via nitrous. That’s not a huge amount of power by modern standards, but drag racing is all about being able to effectively use the available power. If you’ve got 500bhp but can’t put it down,…

Patina has always been a bit like Marmite. You either love it or hate it. Fontana, California resident, Nick Bevis, firmly falls into the love it camp, as evidenced by the hardcore patina Bug you see in the pictures. Having been into VWs since the mid-1980s, Nick has owned over 35 classic VWs to date and, while many have just come and gone, some, like this sunburnt ’63, have got under his skin. Maybe it’s the history behind it, the story of how he came to own it, or just the experiences he’s had with it in the last 10 years, but this car is one he’s not about to let go easily. Nick originally found the car up in the mountains around California, after responding to an ad where…

It began as a very rotten Herbie replica, but the outcome of nearly two decades of on and off work has turned this one time donor car into an absolute peach. “I’m not sure how long I’ve owned it, but it’s got to be getting on for 18 years now,” says chilled-out Bristolian, Rich. “I gave £800 for it from the cousin of a bloke who used to campaign a Fugitive racer in the VWDRC [sounds like Craig Winstanley to me-MP]. It was definitely before the VW scene became expensive and we all got old, but I’d always dreamt about owning a UK-spec ragtop, and an Oval, and somehow now I’ve got both.” If ever there was a guy with the knowledge and ability to back up his chat, Rich…

“Al used almost exclusively recycled timber throughout” No, your eyes do not deceive you, this really is a wooden car. And not just any car, but an accurate representation of a Type 181 or, as we here in the UK know them better, a Trekker. Or Thing for our American readers. And yes, we know there are differences between all of them, but that’s an overview. We first heard about this car when our dedicated snapper, Dokke, sent over a couple of shots he’d fired off whilst visiting a VW event in Indonesia. At first we assumed it to be some kind of wrap, or maybe timber-effect paint, or cladding, but when we confirmed it really was made of wood we were blown away and definitely wanted to know more.…

Having managed to inflate the old, perished tyres enough to get the car rolling, there was no way we were going to risk driving on them on the street, so it was time to do some online tyre shopping. It wasn’t long before I realised stock size (155R15) Beetle tyres are a lot more expensive these days than I’d expected (Pirelli Cinturatos come in at £190 each! Michelin X are £152, and even Vredestein Sport Classic are £122 a corner), so I decided to open up my search by considering good used tyres, and some alternative sizes, too. By chance, I stumbled across a pair of good, used Michelin 145XZXs on Facebook marketplace. Priced at just £20 and less than five miles from my house, that was a result. With…

Following a disappointing summer, I’d all but given up on car shows and drag racing events – that was until I took a call from an old friend, Paul Bate, who explained that his 2332cc street car was back on the road. “The weather looks good tomorrow [19 October], so I wondered if you and Jolly [Jim] fancied a little day out? “It’s just there’s a test and tune day at Santa Pod, and I thought it might be fun to drive the car there, have a crack at running a 10-second quarter mile and then drive it home again. What do you reckon?” Of course, I didn’t need to be asked twice. Despite knowing full well there was a caveat, which would involve us transporting tools, slick-equipped rear wheels…

Seat recliner brackets were a popular aftermarket accessory in the 1950s and ’60s and allowed the front seats of a VW to either recline further then the VW design or, in some cases, lay completely flat for sleeping on. They were aimed at the travelling salesman in the marketing material, but found favour with outdoors types and those who took their Volkswagens camping. Of the brands available, Hüls are probably the best known, and are identified by a large recliner knob and Hüls cast in the brackets, but several other manufacturers made similar kits, including Volmac as Rich has used on his car here, EMPI and other more generic kits. Some of them require you to cut off the lower portion of the seat frame, which means there’s no going…

“there was two feet of snow on top of the Bug, while the chassis was buried in the snow” This Beetle came into my life through a series of events. A good friend of mine, Carter Hickman, who lives several hours south of me found an advertisement for a 1967 Beetle that supposedly ran, drove and was in really great shape. Rather than spending a day driving up and checking it out, he called me and asked if I would go and inspect it for him. Of course, I was more than happy to do so, and found it to be in decent shape, but badly painted and with some poor previous rust repairs. Still, it was okay for the price, so I reported my findings back to Carter and,…

Ever since the introduction of the Volkswagen in 1938, German toy companies have been producing the ‘people’s car’ in scale form. But in1948, when the Volkswagenwerks was recovering from WWII and producing limited numbers of civilian Beetles, Wiking (pronounced veeking) Modellbau of Berlin was commissioned to build a plastic promotional model of the Volkswagen sedan to be given away as gifts at VW dealerships. Rather than the more commonplace pressed tin models of the time, the company opted to use a plastic injection mould process instead. Wiking’s 1/40th scale Split Window was of a construction type and came in a small cardboard box with a colourful design and named ‘Das Gläserne Auto’ (The Glass Car). Inside the box, the model pieces were mounted on a sheet of cardboard and held…