Hayley Lewis 1962 VW BEETLE

BUT A BUG THAT WORKS FOR ITS LIVING AS A DAILY DRIVER

WHEN I WAS a toddler, I was already playing with cars on the carpet!” begins Hayley Lewis on her enthusiasm for cars, especially the funny little rear-engined air-cooled cars from Volkswagen. As a P-plater a few years ago, Hayley had one of VW’s late-model new Beetles. “I drove that around for a couple of years but I always wanted a proper older one,” she says. “It took me about a year-and-a-half to find a good one. So many of them are shit-boxes and people think they are worth something, just because they’re old. Some sellers claim ‘Oh, there’s not much rust’ and you go to look and they need major work.”

She eventually found a good ’un with respected long-term Sydney-based VW mechanic and enthusiast Andrew Dodd, after finding out about him from other VW-enthusiast friends.

“I gave him a call and he said he had a ’65 model that had been covered in fish-oil [a rust preventative – yes, it’s made from fish] and stored,” says Hayley. “He’d bought it from a shed as a deceased estate and gave it a mechanical freshen-up.” With the car being perfect for Hayley’s intentions, she and Andrew shook hands on the basically rust-free, registered and running, but cosmetically challenged Bug.

“The first thing I did was get rid of the fish oil,” says Hayley. “That was the first step in making it ready for a coat of paint. Neil Higgins is a panel beater – we knew each other from church – so we worked on the car together and he painted it. I did stuff such