Table of contents for Issue 153 in VWt

TIME FOR T... I am back behind the wheel of a VW Transporter at long last. And it feels good. Yep, it’s the Night Blue T5.1 we’ve been covering in our regular Our Vans section. Although it’s 14 years old and has over 200k miles under its belt, it drives like a dream. I’ve never piloted a vehicle with VW’s DSG ’box but I have to say, the gearchanges are virtually seemless which adds to its sophistication. In fact, it’s so comfortable my wife fell asleep in the passenger seat when I took her on an inaugural run once I’d driven back to France. Despite having had a pile of money thrown at it, and all of colleague Martyn’s hard work doing the brakes, suspension, DMF change and various other…

T6/T6.1 GLADEN MOSCONI SOUNDUP KIT Crank up the volume! We all know a good sound system makes all the difference, but let’s be honest, it’s often where we cut corners. You pour your heart and soul into getting the perfect stance, the freshest wheels, and an interior that pops, only to let the audio system fall flat. Well, get ready to redeem yourself with the T6/T6.1 Gladen Mosconi SoundUp kit available from Dav-Tec – your shortcut to audio bliss! Ready to transform your daily drive into a concert on wheels? This Gladen Mosconi SoundUp kit is the perfect upgrade for those who crave a richer, more immersive audio experience without the fuss. Forget about complicated installs and messy wiring; this system seamlessly integrates with your van’s existing setup. You’ll enjoy…

Spence Pritchard is head honcho at the Bristol-based Old Dub Shop. Funnily enough, when we called him he was on his hands-free hauling his ‘54 Oval Window Bug on a trailer behind the subject of this article – an ‘87 single cab T25 that he picked up a few years previously. The fact that he was on his way back from a gruelling 500-mile round trip to Clacton, battling with a busy M25 en route, didn’t seem to have phased him at all. You see Spence has a real passion for VWs so it makes sense that his works vehicle is a Volkswagen. As he explained: “If you run a business servicing and restoring old VWs and you’re a true enthusiast, you need a classic van. And I use this…

STUART MILNER, 2016 T6 HIGHLINE Hi VWt, my name’s Stuart Milner. I’m 36, I live in Stoke-on-Trent and I am a mechanic by trade. I’ve had a passion for cars from a young age and started my first car project with my dad at the age of 15, a Mini Cooper, which ended up being my first car. I then got a job as an auto-electrician within the in-car entertainment sector, which was my first stepping stone into the car customising scene. This was when big body kits and big audio installations were a thing. I had the opportunity of working on a few show cars which didn’t exactly help progress with my own cars. I constantly had projects on the go, from custom boot builds to hi-fi audio and…

There’s an old saying among car nerds whenever an improbably expensive but supremely desirable machine comes up for sale – y’know, the type of aspirational supercar that’s worth as much as your house, and you’d have to put your home on the market to buy it. That saying is: ‘You can live in your car, but you can’t drive your house.’ All of this elicits so much scoffing from vanfolk, of course, because our Transporters can very easily be tailored to live in for extended periods with superlative comfort. You can drive your house. Look at Craig Hall’s T5 here – it’s got a big comfy bed, a stove, a fridge-freezer, a quality audio setup, what more do you need on the day-to-day? (Alright, maybe a toilet and a shower…

The air-cooled VW scene owes much to the effervescent, carefree style of Californian custom culture; for generations, Beetles, Karmann Ghias and Type 2 campers have found themselves dropped to the floor on shiny wheels, with narrowed beams and eye-popping paint jobs. There’s just something about SoCal that weaves itself into the Wolfsburg mindset. And with today’s water-cooled Dubs, it’s very much the same deal – blending clever engineering and usability with effortless style, to create VWs that are ever-more creative and boundary-pushing. The new owes a stylistic and conceptual debt to the old, and in the case of Neil Allsop’s driveway this is thrown into sharp focus by virtue of the fact that he actually owns both: a 2022 T6.1 and a 1971 Early Bay. Cosmically-speaking, this was always bound…

To be honest, I had no idea the VAG DSG dual-clutch automatic gearbox has a Dual Mass Flywheel fitted. It’s there to help keep drivetrain vibration between it and the engine as controlled as possible, thus improve refinement. Like a manual gearbox with a DMF, after so many miles the components wear; the internal springs lose their stiffness and the DMF starts to sway outside its given parameters – we’d noticed it clattering on startup and while at idle. The distinctive noise was heard by my technician, Lee, who clearly knows more about DSG gearboxes than I do. I will start by mentioning that the job of removing the DSG and renewing the DMF isn’t an easy one. Lee was joined by Ben for most of the day and they…

Life just doesn’t get any better for Daryl Herod and his T4. In 2023 they entered their first ever Show & Shine at Camper Jam – one of the UK’s biggest (and most expensive!) VW shows and drove home with the trophy for Best T4. If you know your shows, you’ll know the competition at Camper Jam is second to none. “We only finished the work on Thursday night, and then drove to the show on Friday morning and ended up wining the T4 class,” confirmed a delighted, albeit rather surprised Daryl. Amazingly this was his first ever Show & Shine, and his first ever Transporter. Daryl had done a fair amount of camping in the past and indeed was briefly the owner of a caravan (the least said about…

When it comes to Transporter projects, perhaps the strongest of the seven deadly sins is envy. Sure, some of us consume projects with an unholy level of gluttony and greed; having too many on the go can lead you into sloth, while wrath fuels the angrier of engine builds. Probably best if we don’t dwell on lust too much (hey, what you get up to on your own time is entirely your business), and naturally pride has a strong hand to lay down when it comes to showcasing the fruits of your labours at the next big VW show. But envy? That’s what keeps people up at night, on both sides of the spectrum; some folks get consumed by the unstoppable act of coveting what the scene’s kingpins have created,…

Like ‘Beetle’, ‘Fridolin’ was never an official name for Volkswagen’s rather eccentric and little-publicised small van of the 1960s and 1970s. Its formal title was the Type 147 Kleinlieferwagen (small delivery vehicle). Translated, its nickname approximated to ‘little toddler’, which seemed a much more suitable description for the gawky but cute and diminutive appearance of what, in many respects, was a truncated Transporter. Compared to VW’s usual vast volumes, production was strictly limited, with sales almost entirely confined to local postal authorities. It was only after the model’s demise that it escaped into the wider enthusiast world, becoming a cult air-cooled favourite in the process. BOXING CLEVER The Fridolin wasn’t Volkswagen’s first foray into small vans. During WW2, a one-off prototype Beetle-based van was created during 1940/41 and designated the…