Up top there was one of my favorite Beetles from the show. It wasn’t by any means the nicest restoration, or the rarest or oldest or most unusual, but it was a really delightfully rugged-looking 1965 Beetle, with big wheels and grabby tires and an overall look and feel like a Class 11 Beetle, the sort used for desert racing. I loved it.
This is Otis. He’s a friendly old man, and he’s having a great time sitting in a terribly nice Type 2 single-cab pickup with the rare canvas top setup. These are fantastic old workhorses, and that’s a good boy in there.
Here’s a lighting detail that I liked, as it’s a nice example of the sometimes useful clash of modernity and vintage. It’s a Type 2 bus light, but in place of the birthday-candle-bright parking lamp bulb that usually sits in that headlight unit next to the sealed beam, we have a modern LED bulb, which I bet dramatically changes the light output there.
Oh man, this thing was absolutely gloriously bonkers. It’s a tiny sandrail-type VW, built on a dramatically cut-down Beetle chassis with nothing but a tube bender and a healthy disregard for comfort or safety or, really, human rationality. It’s so good. Even better, the guy who built this wonderfully mad little thing drove it into the show. No trailers or tow bars or any candy-assed things like that. It’s street legal, and as such drives on streets. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the owner/builder uses this thing to commute to their job at what I assume is the Ambassadorial office of the People’s Republic of Badassistan.
Here, on this Super Beetle, I want to point out this delightfully strange oval foglamp. Neat!
Another VW Type 2 pickup, but I wanted to show you this fantastic stripe job. It just looks so good, and I even like the restraint of the grayscale palette. Plus, not sure if I’ve seen a Type 2 pickup with a stakebed before.
For this, I’d like to draw your attention to the lower center of the picture, specifically that bit of screw-on tin that covers the front of the crankcase pulley. I’m showing this to you because it’s missing on nearly every other Type 1 VW I’ve seen. That bit of tin is more rare than, say, a rooster that speaks Dutch and wants to make you a Cobb Salad, for free, if you wouldn’t mind reading their screenplay.
This ’52 was absolutely immaculate. It had all the little details I love: semaphore turn indicators, split rear window, and crotch-cooler vents.
And finally, here’s a rare thing: this is an Empi Sportster, a very early dune buggy kit for shortened VW pans. It was made with mostly flat metal panels and as such had a cruder look than the more popular fiberglass buggies like a Meyers Manx. Also, kudos to the owner for understanding proper car face eye placement. I’m not feeling the stripes on that pick-up though, the Z on the door doesn’t work for me, would look better running in to the top guard rail around the bed instead. Every day another tidbit learned for me ! 1: Alright, he will do. I guess we just say something really rude about Ford Cortina tails while using Tesla self drive beta to summon him? 2: That should work. Idk, show organizers probably. How much gear reduction do those boxes give? Are they portal axles? I imagine those would have an impact on your top speed. That’s a gorgeous split-window, especially given that it’s probably worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100k. Those used to be much more common back in the day when I was going to VW meets (e.g., the mid 1980s). Soon those will be cars that one only sees in museums. Wish we could post pics, I’d just go out to the garage and post up some visuals.
