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14 Articles

volksworld.ed@kelsey.co.uk So, it’s peak summer show season right now, yet I’m sat at home while some of the VolksWorld crew are swanning around Europe attending some pretty darn incredible events. Life sucks, sometimes. At the start of the year, I mentioned that I was keen to get involved in some road trips, with one of the biggest being the combination of the vintage VW meet at Bad Camberg in Germany, followed by the California Look Caravan tour week, which terminated at Chimay in Belgium for the European Bug-In. However, a combination of family obligations (including a university graduation and a house move) meant the timing couldn’t have been much worse for me. Clashes aside, I was planning to take my Cal Look Beetle on that trip, roughly a 1500-mile round…

Email: VolksWorld.ed@kelsey.co.uk Email news, thoughts and products to VolksWorld.ed@kelsey.co.uk M194 arms Extended mirror arms were original fitment to Bay Window emergency vehicles or commercials where extra visibility was required, their twin arm design minimising vibration. Supplied in pairs, these reproduction arms are cast in aluminium, just like the originals, but with the option to have them chrome plated, polished, painted ivory or left in their raw finish. They are supplied with stainless steel hardware and attach via CNC-machined polished aluminium door mounts, which fit to the existing mirror thread. Aircooled Accessories also offer the option to add a pair of stainless steel mirrors, which function perfectly with these mirror arms. How much? Arms only: £180 for polished / ivory / raw or £200 in chrome (+ £85 for optional mirrors)…

Like many people, Paul Warman didn’t plan to build a car this good. He’s owned a ’69 RHD Porsche 911 for 25 years and, as he neared retirement, decided to tick another lifelong dream car off the list, in the shape of a Karmann Ghia. He didn’t even set out to own a Type 34 Razor Edge version, this one found him at the tail end of Covid. “Most of it was in boxes and I ummed and ahhed about it for quite a while before pulling the trigger,” remembers Paul. Having restored his first Beetle and given it the UK Cal Look treatment in 1985, the plan was to re-enact that home build ethos, but this time to do it with his son. Unfortunately, shortly after the car landed,…

Rolling THUNDER

’74 NOSTALGIA DRAG BUG Jeans Beetle were largely unloved for many years before one was slammed on air and suddenly everyone thought they were cool. Before that, they were just another late model, so Noel Florent had no qualms about chopping the roof of his in 1986 to differentiate it from the host of other brightly coloured ’Lookers out on the French VW scene at the time. Being European, he chopped the top by 13cm, which equates to just over five inches. After a while, though, life got in the way and the car was parked up for a few years before he got his enthusiasm back by channelling the body 15cm (almost six inches) over the floorpan. In this form, the car made its return to the scene at…

Rolling THUNDER

’64 CUSTOM BEETLE We all find our way to Volkswagens in our own way. Some stumble into the fold by accident, or are influenced by friends. Others are fortunate enough to be born into it, like Ryan Mattice from St. George, Utah. He lives in West Valley City now, and has done for the last 10 years, but grew up riding around in VWs. “My entire family has always owned Volkswagens,” he says. “I remember when my mum first bought one. It was a 1964 model. I remember the smell and standing up on the back seat while she drove around. Then we had a ’74 that my brother eventually made into a Baja Bug, while both of my older sisters also had Beetles. There was no way of me…

Power to my people

’57 SPLIT CAMPER Gene Balyasny lives in southern California and has been into old Volkswagens most of his life. He had a 21-window Split at the age of 17 and today, alongside the ’57 you see here, also owns a rare ’59 seamed gate Double Cab pick-up. He’s also an active member of the Bus Bros club (see @bus_bros on Instagram) and loves nothing more than to drive his VWs regularly, taking advantage of the climate and all the southern Californian VW scene has to offer. It was 2010 when this ’57 first came onto his radar. Back then, it was lowered on BRM-style wheels and rocking the grey primer look. I guess if the Bus hadn’t already been primered, we may have been looking at a feature on a…

Power to my people

Re-appearing act

1987 was a pivotal year for the British VW scene, thanks in great part to the launch of VolksWorld and the hundreds of slammed, pastel-coloured, air-cooled VWs that seemed to come from nowhere and began prowling the streets. But where did they all come from? Well, some of their owners found inspiration in articles published by our (then) sister publication, Custom Car, as well as Street Machine, going as far back as the early 1980s. Another huge catalyst came in the shape of a book simply titled Air-Cooled Volkswagens, written by former Street Machine technical editor, Colin Burnham. It was released in the UK in 1986, but revolved in great part around California’s VW lifestyle. Readers wore out the book’s 128 pages (I now I did) and many enthusiasts can…

Re-appearing act

Jean-Philippe Delavenne is one of those people that has just always been into Volkswagens. So much so, when we asked him when he caught the bug, he said, “I can’t remember, it was over 40 years ago!” His passion for them has never waned, though, and first became a reality at the end of the 1980s when he bought his first VW, a 1968 1200 Beetle, for the modest sum of 500 francs. That’s about €80 today! Next up came another ’68, this time powered by a 1300cc engine, but that was soon replaced by a 1600, which gave Jean-Philippe the confidence to try his hand at a bit of amateur drag racing, notably in front of the McDonald’s in Pontoise on Friday evenings, together with his bunch of friends…

The great pretender

I admit, not being a ‘sk8ter boi’, I had to take a minute to understand just what Nike SB Dunks are. You kind of have to understand this to really get what Martyn Hawkes has done to his 1980 Porsche 911 Targa. But once you do, you start to comprehend what makes his Targa even more special. It’s the colab’ that keeps on collabing. From sportwear giant, Nike, and skateboarding trainers to Ishod Wair and Magnus Walker and all the way to VW and Porsche, which goes some way to explaining its presence here in VolksWorld. Martyn has melded all three of these pairings into one big, beautiful automotive masterpiece. The phrase ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ springs to mind. Ishod Wair (if you didn’t already know) is an…

The great pretender

The bottom line part two

With the cost so far for machining and various bearings and gaskets running close to £400, we’re mindful of the final cost of this overhaul. After all, it’s supposed to be a budget, DIY rebuild, and we have yet to consider our options when it comes to barrels, pistons and cylinder heads. Things can get pricey here pretty quickly if you’re not careful. For now, though, there’s very little left to spend on assembling our 1600 short block as, to keep costs down, we sourced a good, used set of genuine VW connecting rods and are re-using the original cam followers. While they’re not expensive to replace, as ours were still in good condition we chose to stick with genuine German parts rather than replace them with cheap, Brazilian-made replacements.…

The bottom line part two

SHOW REPORT - STONOR VW Very few VW events can boast four decades' history, so it’s fair to say Stonor Park, or Stonor VW as it has become known in more recent times, has stood the test of time. And some. Not only has the event run uninterrupted (well, apart from Covid) since 1984, it’s never moved from its original location at the glorious Stonor Park, tucked away in Oxfordshire’s Chiltern Hills, a stone's throw from Henley-on-Thames. Sure, there have been some organisational changes in that time, notably the Association of British VW Clubs (ABVWC) taking over the event in 2010, but the format has remained the same. Hey, if it’s not broke, don’t try to fix it. The ABVWC was founded in 1987, and welcomes all air and water-cooled…

Karmann conclusions

Modifying Volkswagens is not a new hobby. You only have to look at old copies of magazines like Gute Fahrt from German, or Sports Cars Illustrated and Foreign Car Guide from America to see how many accessories were available for the VW in the 1950s and ’60s, and how many people were modifying them. Many of the accessories available were somewhat flippant, but others such as dual carburettor conversions from the likes of Express and Okrasa offered Porsche-like performance from your VW, but for a lot less money. The Karmann Ghia, however, was rather overlooked in the accessory marketplace. Sure, you could buy a fake grille to bolt on the nose to make your Ghia look like a ‘real’ car but, apart from that, there weren’t too many Ghia-specific accessories…

Karmann conclusions

Dealer’s choice

TOYS PINPLAST OVAL WINDOW Despite the huge popularity of Volkswagens in South America, not so many really desirable VW toys have come from that continent over the years. However, Pinplast of Argentina manufactured the large-scale Oval Window Beetle we’re looking at this month. The orange-coloured plastic body has cut-out windows and good details of the bonnet, engine lid and door seams. Silver paint is used to highlight the bonnet trim, VW emblem and the 14 (incorrect style) louvres at the rear. Similarly, the headlights are also painted silver, while raised orange circles at the rear suggest the tail lights, which are detailed with round plastic discs with concentric circles painted silver. The plastic front and rear bumpers are glued to the body and a red, white and blue decal stripe…

Dealer’s choice

BORDER PATROL If you’ve been part of the VW scene for any length of time, you might have noticed that VWs and surfing appear to go hand in hand. If you’re my age (49) or older, you’ll probably remember Billabug and the surf fabric interior craze, too. But how did this link come about in the first place? Well, like most things in the air-cooled scene, it originated in California. Surfing began to gather pace as a hobby in The Golden State in the early 1960s, and by that time the state was flooded with Volkswagens. As Jim Douglas put it in The Love Bug, VWs were “cheap, honest transportation.” But we all know they were a lot more than that. California developed a reputation for counterculture, and that really…

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