Samba Number 2 Heads in for 10-Year Resto

What’s being billed as the second-ever and oldest-known 23-window Microbus was just found in a field in Germany and its new owner wants to restore it.

He’s signed up for quite the project, though, as the amount of rust on this Samba would make the Statue of Liberty twitch. More rust than metal, the now topless ‘bus wears its years.

Florian Kalff, the heroic (or foolhardy, depending on your point of view) German who’s taken on the project found the Samba in a field in the Eifel region of Germany. He checked the ID plate before buying the car, and it turned out that not only had it been built in 1951 (the first year of 23-window Microbus production), but it was also built on the very first day of production.

bulli-buildup-2

The Volkswagen archives reportedly only list one earlier Samba, which is now missing. The rest of the Samba’s history is a little less clear as the former owner of the field said he didn’t even know the car was there.

It wasn’t until a new owner took over and started clearing the field that they found the VW. Without a TUV sticker on the license plate, it seems likely that it hadn’t been on the road since 1961. Before then, though, it is known that it spent its early days in Köln as a demonstrator at a dealer called Fleischhauer.

bulli-buildup

Kalff’s theory is that when VW came out with a 34 hp Microbus in 1961, the owners simply took this one off the road and forgot about it.

Although he’s taken on a pretty massive project–so big, in fact, that he made the local news–Kalff seems to know what he’s doing. The Samba is now at his shop and he’s hired a British coachbuilder to replicate the missing parts.

The dedicated hero expects the project to take ten years and six figures, but when it’s done it should be a unique piece of VW history. You can follow Kalff’s progress on his website, samba.vewib.de.

[source: hemmings.com]

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