Rescued from 15 years dumped in a garden!
A friend of mine had brought a load of old VW that were found at a collector’s house. Although most of his hoard were carefully housed in barns and sheds around the property Dude's Ghia had been dumped in the garden for about 15 years unfortunately with all the windows down/ or smashed. Although the car was in a very bad state, I had been a bit bored without a project to work on since I finished the ragtop (See 'Dude Beetle' Website), and lockdown hadn’t helped, so my friend agreed to sell it to me, and the journey home began. The first task was getting it out the garden!!

This very cool VW Splitty based car transporter was brought as part of my friend deal, and he will use it to transport a very special car (click here). It was fitting that the Ghia was taken away from the house on this as it was actually this vehicle that the car came into the country on all the way from Texas, many many years ago!

The car was taken back to my friend’s yard (Double H Restorations) and he kindly offered to have a look over it for me and take some photo so I could see what I was up against. It soon became apparent that I had a very big task ahead of me! It also seems the car had been used as a skip as lots of junk had been chucked into the back of it!

Despite how bad it was I still wanted to save it!! How could you not save a car that looks this cool!

A couple of weeks later it began the journey down to Wales. Thank you to Ceri (Walsgrave Transport) for safely getting the car down to me.

Inspection, clean up and stripdown
With the car finally in my lockup it was time to clean it out, strip it down, and see what I was actually left with!! As you can see its bad in places, but not as bad as it could have been given the life it’s had. Well, that’s my excuse and I'm sticking to it!!

Inspection and strip down done it was time to crack on with putting solid steel back into it! It was clear now the new project was not for the feint hearted!! Oh well, I like a challenge!!