The VW412 Project - Welcome

<body bgcolor=#ccffff onLoad="if (self != top) top.location = self.location"> <h1 align=center>The VW412 Project</h1> <p>I had often entertained the idea of building a 5-door Variant – long before I learned that VW had apparently designed one. I started thinking a few years ago about how it might be done and when I mentioned it to Bryan and Jane Terry, they told me they had thought about the idea too. So we decided to give it a go – we would build the car VW should have built 30 to 40 years ago.</p> <p>The Type 4 was the largest air-cooled car that Volkswagen made. It started life as the 411 with a 1700cc carburettor engine, became fuel-injected, a restyled body earned the renaming to the 412, this in turn acquired an 1800cc twin-carburettor engine for the final year of production, which ceased in the late summer of 1975.</p> <p>I wanted to use the original VW body pressings wherever I could to keep it as authentic as possible. I considered various alternatives and eventually decided to transplant the doors from a 4-door Fastback into the sides of a Variant. Easier said than done, but a challenge that had to be met!</p> <p>I started work on the project in October 1999 and, although the overall plan was clear, had to work out the finer details as we went along. Nobody has ever done this before! However, the conversion work was substantially complete by May 2000 and work then continued on general patching to repair the ravages of the tin-worm. The photographs tell the story.</p> <p>Since you don't have frames enabled, you will need to <a href="412topics.html" title="Topics">click here</a> to call the list of topics, which will then pop up in a second window. If you have a pop-up stopper, please switch it off else the topics either won't appear or they might replace the menu and you'll have to keep clicking on your back arrow to come back to the topic list.</p> </body>