AirSpeed Feature Car

Gavin Lee's 1952 VW Ragtop Zwitter

I have been into a number of VW’s over the past  20 years and I have been a member of the the DVKK Klub for about 9 years now. Being involved with such a group you get easily motivated to want a nicer car and go faster! And I was able to finish this dream project largely due to the help of a lot of the club guys.

It took me about 4 years to convince the previous owner to sell me the car which he finally did in 2001. It was supposed to be a quick refresher over the winter. But, as with many projects, things changed along the way – it got way more in-depth, way more expensive and took a bit longer than expected… The project took almost 8 years to complete. While doing it I bought a house, got married and had two beautiful little girls. I don’t get as much time to wrench in the garage these days so the car was mainly worked on from 9pm – 12 midnight after the girls had gone to bed each night.

Powerplant:

My overall theme was to be a clean, uncluttered engine bay with big power.

Fellow DVKK club member Darren Krewenchuck (Kroc) built the 2332 (84x94) monster. Featuring Demello 84mm crank with Chevy 5.50 H beam rods, German lifters, CB cam, berg oil pump. CB 044 heads ported/polished by Kroc with scat 1.4 rockers. MSD ignition. Motor breaths through a set of  Weber 48 IDAs. The engine tine was powder coated and then body worked and painted for a glass finish. I designed an ignition wire tube that blends in with the shroud and had Cameron Shorey custom make some billet clamps that also double as a space between the tin/shroud. My favourite piece in the engine bay has to be the oil filler/breather, modified from a Porsche 356. There are a ton of LanD Products accessories throughout the car, including, hardware, mounts, and breather. Then for cooling I added a Geers Engineering billet filter, which runs in line with a Mesa 96 plate cooler and fan tucked above the tranny. This is all mated to a full race box tranny built by Terry H. Featuring 4.12 r&p and close ratio gears.

Chassis build up:

While Jason was working on the body I started on the pan build. First the pan was stripped and sand blasted, then powder coated semi-gloss black. All the components were either chromed or powder coated (by Russ @ Francis Andrew). Suspension: the front end was swapped out for a Jamar adjustable aluminum beam with a set of NOS Hurst 2 way race shocks. In the rear everything was stripped and powder coated. I kept the rear susp stock. I re inforced the clutch tube and ran new braided fuel lines front front to back. Brakes: I went with a set of Porsche 356 B brakes that I rebuilt on all 4 corners. Wheels: Running a set of OG Empi Sprintstars. I had them rechromed and painted, then had the fronts narrowed and moved the offset further out. Tires: I am running a set of 135 Michelin ZX’s up front with an old school set of Firestone recapped slicks (26x6) in the rear.

Body Assembly:

Once the body was back from paint (the colour is "Stone Grey" - a 1957-59 Porsche 356 colour), I mounted it back on the pan. First task was to wet sand and polish the whole car. The difficult areas to polish, I had Lanny Hussey go over. While the body was off being painted I had started collecting some of the missing exteriors trim pieces. Fellow club member Geoff P had a set of early split Bosch euro headlight assemblies. Once the assemblies were restored, I wanted to add a set of Porsche 356 grills. It took a lot of work to make them fit, but love the look.

Interior:

Again as with the rest of the car I wanted to design a very clean, simple, stock looking interior. I was lucky enough to have the great G-Dog (Gary Economy) stitch up the Interior and build the door panels and seat covers from scratch. It was hard to settle on color, but in walks Gary’s wife Dianna and picks the color in about  15 seconds. I needed to add some monitoring for the motor, so first was a PLX a/f gauge, mounted on the rear view mirror. Next I contacted North Hollywood Speedo to customize the early Porsche tach I wanted to run. They also made a matching set of gauges for oil temp and oil pressure.

Completion:

Gary Economy and I trailered our cars down to the Classic in June and unveiled them at Nick’s on the Friday night. That trip was definitely the highlight of owning a VW.  The response has been better than I ever expected when I started out and am very gratefull to all those that helped me along the journey.

Special thanx to a few Airspeed members:

Geoff, G-dog, Slammedbus, Lanny, Russ, Bruce, Kroc, Cameron, TrevorP, Jim L and Darren D. Extra special thanks to my wife for her encouragement/support to finish.

Cheers,

Gavin

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