Trojan restores VW Bug

While the consumer market has fallen out of love with the VW Bug, CVHS junior and enthusiast Matteus Gomes certainly hasn’t. In fact, he has been working on one for nearly nine years now.

His father purchased the 1966 Volkswagen Type One sedan one day, bringing it home on a trailer around 2014, initially to work on on his own. Gomes still remembers its original state.

“It was unpainted with nothing but an engine, transmission, doors, the hood, and a couple of windows. So, other than that, we had to do the entire car,” Gomes said. 

As the years passed, the project morphed into something that Gomes and his father could do together as a way of bonding, often spending six-hour days together working on the Bug.

“We rebuilt the front suspension multiple times, and all around, the entire undercarriage was worked on. Also, since the original hood was from a different year, we had to find a new one and get it reshaped,” Gomes stated.

The toughest hurdle, however, was replacing the car’s completely destroyed electric system with a modern one. Gomes and his father had to spend weeks studying wiring diagrams before the overhaul could even be attempted, and despite all that, routing all the wires proved extremely difficult. 

What made it especially challenging was that the electronics had to be removed and put back in multiple times when the car was getting painted with the glossy black sheen it has today.

Of course, why restore a car if not to drive it, or at the very least to be the only punch in someone’s game of punch-buggy? Gomes says that driving it has been an interesting experience being his first car, and that it can sometimes be fatiguing on long journeys.

Despite the difficulties and hurdles, Gomes recollects the nearly a decade of work he had done on this mechanical member of the family quite fondly.

“Growing up with it has been really amazing, seeing how everything comes together with me and my dad. I have a lot of memories…just working on the car. And being able to look back and realize that we were making progress,” Gomes said.