Type 3 I had was great. Wen’t camping off road and hell of a chick magnet. Slow but nearly rolled it chasing game one time ooops
from 1984, my $250 68 Type 1 with aircraft spec 1776cc engine. Got bored over Christmas so iy got a rattle can flame job.
Helping a mate rebuild an old’64 Dune Buggy fitted with the big block 2.0 Litre Dak Dak Type 4 engine
It’s an old late 70’s-early 80’s build that has been through several owners over the years and seems like none of them took much care of it and all had a fiddle with it adding all sorts of “accessories” along with chopping up parts of the the body
Luckily he’s an old panel beater/spray painter who had his own business for many years, so this project really isn’t a big challenge for him, even though this thing was so rusted out……. he’s a pedantic bastard and has chopped all the rust out and replacing everything with new steel, including all the sills, the entire floor, A pillars/door hinge mounts, doors and everything else that requires repair
He swapped a Kwakka 650 Twin ATV Bike for this rusted wreck, but he was struggling with the go hard ATV in the dunes in his old age, so finding a Buggy with steering wheel, seats and a roll cage is much easier to fang around rather than wrestling a big powerful quad bike
He just finished a ground up restoration on his old Ex-Military Land Rover, which gives a good sense of how pedantic he is when restoring vehicles, and is applying the same amount of work on this old VW Beetle, even though it will only ever be used in the sand dunes and along the beach
Nice I had Orange type 3 Notchback, same running gear but had the twin 30mm solex carby setup. Hand built my own 1776cc with a mild. Still slow haha.
I drove a 74 Superbug for a few years back in the early noughties… dead nuts like the one in this pic which I pilfered off the net.
Soo much fun to drive, accelerator on an elastic band but chooched along quite well. Always made me smile, I nicknamed it the clown car because of how small the wiper arms were.
That’s the same colour I had. I named mine Alisha because I scored Alisha with it
I had one, for my first car…
Mellow Yellow…
74 model, 1600, wrap around windscreen…!!
And, carby ice, in the wet…!!
Still have this thing sitting in my mates yard where his friend has left it sitting here until he gets around to driving it back to his town one day
At least it has eyelashes. Looks like square window not Oval can’t quite see.
Hold on to it be worth something more $5 shortly
I paid $3K for mine back at the turn of the century.
Sold it under duress when I moved up here to a VW dealer for $500… next day I called in to pick up something I’d left in the glovebox and he had it out the front of his business with a $5K price sticker on it.
The shit we do… worst bit was he offered me a Kombi for $1000 because he’d bought it sight unseen and it wasn’t the model he was looking for. All there, motor out but in the back. With two days to go before leaving I couldn’t do anything with it and get it on the road in time.
Regrets, regrets.
Ah we all have those.
My VW mechanic bought mine for what I paid for it $3000 as he knew how much I spent on it all new block and running gear suspension, gearbox etc. Peter Debiasi was the man, well renowned for VW in these parts. Bought it for his wife. Top mechanic. Seen some gymkhana few years ago I think his son was in some beetle. Probably had a porsche motor in it. Was common if you could get one and bolt straight in.
I stepped up to a Holden VP ute. It actually went when you hit the slipper
The oval window beetles collect big money back then and now and they were 60’s made as VW got popular and went square rear window they 70’s dime a dozen. The twin port 1600 with genuine german heads but they renowned for fracturing around the spark plug holes. I got mine tested with dyecheck. Got them welded up and machined on good advice as the new Indian made replacements you could get at the time were not real flash on casting quality.
I did put a new case/block in though as it’s so thin that was cracked as well but unfixable on advice. New everything. About $5k later it still didn’t go much faster Decision made, Commodore it is.
Best performance part ever for a VW bahaha
Mahle pistons. Got bigger jets in the twin 30mm solex carbs that was factory for the type 3. Beetles just had the single carb and a webber was a good upgrade for them.
Type 3 had a luggage boot thing that the beetles didn’t so no room to stack the single carb on top.
This was the same model type 3 notchback I had in the orange colour above from Friendly Fire. I had the torsion bars wound down so it was dumped and 15x7" not the standard 15x4" pizza cutters. 205/40 looked neat. Haven’t got any actual photos. Quite some time ago.
What do we consider vn commodores nowadays old shit box’s or up and coming classics
Righto, time for some gumtree lowballing, I mean negotatiating….
I’ll give you $342, a box of rusty nails, my collection of wells blasters, for it…
And , a sweetener, all my flat lipo’s , which I’m sure can be brought back to life…
Sound fair…??
The Carmen Gaia.??
GAIA WTF you been smoking dude ???
I consider them a piece of modern shite myself, even though I only just sold a one owner VN S Series/Berlina sedan to a “collector” and still have my fully sick bogan VT Sedan sitting out front
I get it that all the young blokes consider them a “classic” Holden……… but for me personally, classic Holdens stopped in 1971 with the HQ Model.
Tried to import one of these from Brazil but they wouldn’t give me an export licence
This is my favourite air cooled VW
My father-in-law used to build performance VW engines for sport aircraft. Used Yamaha double ended coils, two plugs per cylinder (his design) fuel injection, twin Yamaha bike turbos, roller bearing crankshaft, roller rockers, dry sumped. H. His last engine was in a Robinson KR2 that got stolen from a hanger in Chino. After that he just went back to rebuilding Lycomings
Snippet of useless information - he used to make ring gears for VW air-cooled engines. Repco wouldn’t buy them because of some quality certification requirement. So he’d ship them to Brazil and Repco would buy them from the Brazilian supplier. The came back marked as Made in Australia and sold for 25 times the landed cost in Brazil
Worth more than a Volkswagen(note spelling) that’s for sure.
As long as it hasn’t been used for a trolley by some druggo in elizabeth my way with the series 2 V6 motor they are good to go . Mines just clocked 520,000klms with no rebuild and people are trying to buy it off me. Err no.
Don’t even look at the later model 3.6ltr pile of shit.
fk them things. Overpriced Volkswagens