‘My double bass fits inside the car!’
1973 VW Beetle 1300, Andrew Leggett, Leeds
This is your only car, isn’t it?
‘Yes. I bought it in May last year from a family in Norfolk, where it did the school run for the previous five years. The engine was OK but it turned out to need quite a lot of body repairs, so I restored it with help from my father, re-sprayed it with aerosol cans and a couple of months later I set off for a long driving holiday in France with my girlfriend, Libby.
Blimey, that was ambitious!
‘Well, maybe so, but we managed 2000 miles in two and a half weeks, with no breakdowns. And we had two bikes on the roof, a tent and a folding table under the bonnet, with luggage and an airbed on the back seat. We went to Lille, Paris, Lyon, the Alps, the Verdon Gorge, St Tropez, the Pyrenees and then back up the west coast. We tried to avoid toll roads to keep the costs down but it made the journey times so much longer… it took us 11 hours to get to the Pyrenees from St Tropez.
So, what did you have to fix before you set off?
It was Mot’d when I bought it, but when I got to my parents house in Shropshire after leaving Norfolk, my dad took one look at it and said, ‘I’m not letting you drive that’. He used to be a mechanic and we discovered lots of rust and body filler, even a shopping bag stuffed in to bulk out one repair. I reckon you could almost have lifted the body off the floorpan… it was bad. But I learned to weld and started making the repairs, though sometimes my father would come back from work, check them and when I started again in the morning, I’d find he’d re-done them!
Injured pride but a safer car, then.
‘I suppose so. There was plenty to do: one of the dampers was hanging off, the brake shoes needed replacing and the steering box was badly worn. But parts for Beetles are cheap and easy to find. The engine only got a basic service, so it’s lucky that was all it needed.’
You finished off by spraying it?
‘Well, it was various shades of blue so I bought a few cans that were all the same colour and prepared the surface. It’s not the best finish but it’s a lot better than it was. That’s maybe one for the future – I’d like to make it more presentable. But it is genuinely my daily car. It’s broken down once or twice – I fixed the points with a cable tie. I’m fond of it though. I’m a professional jazz musician and my double bass fits in the car, so I’ve no plans to change it.’