Hmm...the portable garage is intriguing to me.
While I don't have a garage, I might have just enough space behind the house to put one up.
Photograph by David S. Wallens
I’m convinced that every single car enthusiast wants a classic car. Sure, you may be into brand-new M3s or Maseratis or Miatas, but deep in your soul, you’ll eventually realize that, actually, it would be pretty damn cool to have a classic in the garage.
Ask 10 people why and you’ll get 10 answers, but common ones are the pure driving experience, the striking visuals, and the simple maintenance. Personally, I find them to be fascinating engineering exercises. I love to see how problems were solved back before robots and computers ruled the assembly line.
[Your first classic car buyer's guide | 5 iconic options]
For Chris, our video editor, the reason was heritage. A lifelong Volkswagen enthusiast who always drove the fastest water-cooled VW he could afford on a college kid’s salary, Chris wanted an air-cooled Beetle. Why? Because it’s the Volkswagen, because it looks cool, and because owning one would theoretically be a cheap, easy way to learn how every single part of a car is put together without taking his daily off the road. And like any good enabler, I told him this was a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and that he should make it happen.
Which is why, when he sent me a Marketplace link at midnight listing a disassembled 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle, my reply was simple: “I’ll pick you up with the van and trailer at 9 a.m.”
I’m not sure if Chris realized just how bad of an enabler I am, but by noon he’d handed the seller a few thousand dollars, and we’d spent over an hour filling a 20-foot enclosed trailer and a full-sized van with a Beetle that somebody had disassembled into a million pieces.
Then we waved goodbye to the seller and promptly got stuck in the unimproved road leading out of his neighborhood, which meant two hours of digging and messing with traction boards in order to recover the rig. Cars are Fun!
On the way home, I leaned over to Chris and asked a question: “Where are we unloading all this?”
He lived in a tiny rental house with no garage, and I wasn’t about to scatter everything around his yard like a Beetle plane crash site. “Don’t worry,” Chris said, “I’ve got a plan! Can we swing by Harbor Freight on the way home?”
By the time the sun had set, we’d bought a $200 portable garage (basically a big tent), erected it in his backyard, and unloaded the Beetle into it. The floor was grass, so we threw down some old plywood so he’d have at least a fighting chance at finding dropped bolts.
Thousands of people fail to restore classic cars in opulent workspaces, yet Chris suddenly found himself signed up to do a restoration in a tent. In Florida. In the summer. At least he was a broke kid with a wedding to plan and an out-of-warranty GTI to keep running, too.
That was six and a half years ago, and I’m so, so proud to say that Chris’s Beetle finally drove down the road under its own power yesterday afternoon. I’d be lying if I said he restored the car by himself–or entirely in that tent–as it takes a village to build a project car, and so many sets of skilled hands have lent their experience and their space to the shared goal of finishing Chris’s Beetle.
[How to help a friend restart a stalled project]
Most of the staff has worked on it at one point or another, as have friends of the magazine like Rennie Bryant, Tom Prescott and Jesse Spiker. I’ve shed my fair share of blood, sweat and tears working on it, too.
But by far the greatest resource has been a fellow racer named Britt Mann of Southpaw Customs, who we first met when he was campaigning his own Baja Beetle at a local SCCA Rallycross. Britt has hundreds of hours in Chris’s Beetle, and he’s both the backyard painter who made it shiny on a budget and the sorting guru who took the car from 90% assembled to something that can actually be driven down the road.
So, nearly seven years and thousands of dollars later, does Chris’s Beetle make any sense? Absolutely, positively, definitely not. By modern standards, it’s a terrible car, and even Chris will admit that it’s worse than his daily driver in every conceivable way. And financially, he’d have been far better off just buying a finished Beetle–he spent thousands of dollars (never mind hundreds of hours) more than he would have if he’d started with a running car.
But if you’re looking at the spreadsheet, then you’re missing the point: Every single car enthusiast wants a classic car not because they make sense, but because they’re awesome. Chris’s Beetle looks like nothing else on the road, makes him smile every time he talks about it, and taught him more than he ever wanted to learn about how cars work.
He parks it proudly under a Volkswagen banner in the garage, which means it makes sense to him. Chris isn’t buying more classic cars any time soon–he’s actually NC Miata shopping–but he’ll always have room in the fleet for one.
Hmm...the portable garage is intriguing to me.
While I don't have a garage, I might have just enough space behind the house to put one up.
I'll be honest - it's slow, manual brakes are just okay, weatherstrip is shot leaking in fumes, seats aren't the best, the lowered suspension hits bumps hard, it needs a new muffler and the paint is crappy. Let's not mention the lack of air conditioning, heating (next) or a radio (yet).
But it's fun and I get to smile a lot.
Found these photos from the day we picked it up:
In reply to Colin Wood :
For the few years I had it up it was worth it, it survived one hurricane and kept my beetle dry.
In reply to Tom Suddard :
And one of the van stuck, good times.
I would love to have another Baja Bug but I already have two classics......three if you count the Campervan.
I think everyone should own a classic Beetle at least once in their lifetime. I had a '71 many years ago, it was in really rough shape and I only did enough work on it to make it (sort of) dependable, but I really enjoyed it. I admit that on sub zero days in a Minnesota winter it was kind of a challenge since the heater channels were totally rusted out, but if you dress warm enough and hold an ice scraper in one hand to keep the windshield clear it can be done.
Chris Tropea said:In reply to Colin Wood :
For the few years I had it up it was worth it, it survived one hurricane and kept my beetle dry.
That was going to be one of my follow-up questions: how well it withstands a hurricane.
Tom Suddard said:Found these photos from the day we picked it up:
Look at that smile!
In my stable are an electric-blue Lotus Emira and a patina'ed 1966 Ford F100 that still does Truck Things.
Both get a ton of looks when I drive them. The Ford, though? The Ford gets smiles.
Okay, so the F100 isn't fast. It doesn't tow. It doesn't handle terribly well (though it's surprisingly comfortable). It doesn't have airbags or a tilt or even a collapsible steering column. It doesn't even have seat belts. It doesn't have heat, A/C, or a radio. Don't care. It's kind of the Platonic ideal of "truck."
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