About the Beetle

It all started on the 15th May 1998, with an advert in the local paper... I had always been interested in classic cars (my Dad is an MG fan and has owned his 1962 MGA since I was 3 years old) and I had liked air-cooled Volkswagens since about 1996. In fact, as a child, my Mother's car was a white 1966 Morris 1100!

I first saw the Beetle for sale in the motoring section of the local newspaper - The Daily Echo. There was a large advert for "Davies and Davies Executors Auctioneers" with a big picture of the car and information about it. However, in the advert, they had made the car sound much better than it really was - they had put down that the car was immaculate and in pristine condition (it clearly wasn't), had done just 30,000 miles (instead of 36,000) along with various other minor mistakes. Click on the picture below to read the article.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was suprised to get the winning bid and purchase the car for a reasonable price! Strangely, hardly anyone was interested in the car (a Mercedes was getting all of the attention). There was also an immaculate metallic orange 1976 Morris Marina that sold for the bargain price £50, and a really nice 1985 12,000-mile-from-new Mini 1000.

Here is a copy of the my car in the auction sales catalogue - lot3:

After I became the proud new owner, I have thoroughly researched the car's history to find more about it.

The VW had been properly cared for all its life, thanks to it's previous owner - the interior was immaculate, nearly all the chromework was perfect and the body had very minimum rust, which is quite unusual for a UK car. It came with an almost full set of MOT certificates (there are a couple missing), verifying the unusually low mileage. If you think that was good, the car also came with a hand-written 'petrol-log' of all miles covered! - yes, every time the owner filled up his car with petrol, he wrote down the date, speedo reading and the amount of fuel in the tank!!

Here are some pictures of the car when it arrived home. Notice the emulsion paint along the door bottoms and between the wing and the body join!

As you can see it wasn't long before I removed the wings to see what state the car really was in! GLJ was extremely solid, with hardly any rust, apart from small amounts on the sills where the running boards attach, slight amounts in both door bottoms and in the corners of the spare wheel well. The paintwork was faded and dirty (but nicely polished, along with the chrome!), and the interior was full of dust, fluff and old pencils that had accumulated over 32 years.

After a good 'T-Cut' and polish the paint looked superb, apart from the grey emulsion paint that the previous owner had used to touch up rusty or scratched areas. Luckily this was mainly in the rain-gutters and on the door bottoms.

The car is a Pearl White 1300 Deluxe, with the optional burgundy leatherette interior. Accessory-wise, it is fitted with a white parcel-shelf, chrome badge bar, aluminium wheel trims, reversing light, a pair of Wipac 'Stainless' Spotlights, auxiliary switch panel (for spot, fog and reversing lights), clip-on parking light, VW-logo mudflaps as well as Automobile Association and Saint Christopher's badges, all which came with the car almost certainly from new. More details of these can be found in the "accessory" section of this site.

The car also came with some rather interesting chrome parking beacons fitted. These 'sticks' with a red ball on the end clip onto the lip on two front wings to enable the driver to see where the outer wings of the car are when parking. This (in theory) would hopefully stop you from scraping them on walls - they were probably fitted after an incident like this as the near-side wing showed signs of being resprayed in the past. I have not refitted them to the car as they needed rechroming and had badly scratched the original paint, but I still have them in storage...

The interior of the car still sports the original optional burgundy seats, panels and carpets, although the carpets over the heater channels have worn. Unfortunately the car does not have a radio, but strangely has a chrome aerial fitted!