GFK Resto Cal Beetle... with grunt!
- Friday, 21 December 2007
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Paul Smoot's GFK Beetle
If there's one thing guaranteed both to inspire and upset me in equal amounts, it's someone who can build show-winning cars a lot quicker than I can. It's not that I have any great desire to build dozens of Bugs like this (finishing the one I started years ago would be nice), but it was seeing vehicles like this in the magazines and for real at shows that made me realise over a decade ago that the car I had then wasn't good enough and decide to do something about it. The high standards of work and detail set by others made me want to try and emulate it and to improve my own skills and standards along the way. And that's what we've always set out to do here at VolksWorld: to bring you the very best cars we can find from all around the world and hopefully inspire you in the way all of us who work on the magazine have been inspired by the work of others.
I used to convince myself that the likes of Californian Paul Smoot have got much more time to work on their cars than me, and that the cars he starts with must be complete, low-mileage, rust-free examples in the first place. And that if there are any parts he needs, then being in California he can just nip down to one of the many swap meets that seem to happen every weekend and Bob's his uncle, right? Well, not exactly. The fact of the matter is that he's just damn good at what he does and pretty damn quick at getting it done, too.
At 32 years old, you might expect someone who works fast, like Paul, to have built at best one car a year to this standard, and since very few people start building anything before they can drive, let's assume 16 or so cars would be a very impressive achievement for someone of his age (the legal age for driving is 16 in the US). Ha! Even if you doubled that, you wouldn't be close. The Alto Loma resident now has close to 50 notches on his bedpost, or his jack handle, or wherever he keeps track of these things. If he is even able to keep track of them, that is.
For the full story on beautiful GFK Beetle by Paul Smoot check out the January 2008 issue of VolksWorld magazine. On sale on 30th November to 28th December and then available through back issues.
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