Chopaholic - '54 Roof Chopped Beetle

Now, the first thing I'm going to say here is that I don't like roof-chopped Beetles. An odd comment you might think from someone who has roof-chopped a Beetle in the past, but the reason for doing that was to try and see if one could be done that looked ‘right' - in my eyes. It's purely a personal thing, of course. There are many people who love the look of a chopped Bug but, as a rule of thumb, I'm not one of them. Having studied a great many chopped Bugs I worked out what it was that I didn't like, and that was the amount they were chopped, which - again, only in my eyes - made them look squashed and out of proportion. To get round this, when Steve and I were laying out the chop on Doctor Gonzo, we decided to take just two inches out of the vertical height at the b-posts, as opposed to the more common four inches. As with all custom modifications, I've always been a fan of the ‘less is more' school of thought, and when we had people looking at the car and asking if it had been chopped at all I knew we'd achieved what we set out to do.

And when I first saw a picture of Thomas Koch's chopped '54 - and yes, it is a '54, despite its split back window - I felt exactly the same way. The extreme lowering fools your eye into thinking the car is more chopped than it is, as does the choice of semi-matt grey for the finish, but to me this is how a chopped Beetle should look. There's no flat spots, no straight or mismatched gutter lines, no ugly side window shapes, no loss of the original car's proportions, just a perfectly flowing, stock-looking roof line, albeit with smaller windows all round. Adding a stock sized split rear window section helps confuse your eye at the rear, and the heavier ‘brow' over the windscreen of a pre-August '57 ‘shell always helps greatly to emphasise a chop, but the real key has been not going too far with the amount taken out. Talking with Thomas, perhaps unsurprisingly as it turns out a car body man by trade, it seems he feels exactly the same way as I do about customised cars: "I wanted to create something that proves my skills, something with little modifications here and there - modifications you don't see the first time you look at the car, but that you discover the longer you look. Jimmy Shine's bare metal '34 pick-up is a perfect example. I can look at that and discover new things every time."This reference piqued my interest, and further into the conversation with Thomas it became clear that he's not actually a VW guy at all, and only got into building this car because his brother, Fabian, bought a '50 Split and suggested he do a Beetle as well. "I've been around cars my whole life," Thomas continues, "but I really come from the US car scene. However, after several muscle cars, I felt the time was right for a change. At that time I didn't have the money to build my long-time dream of a Ford Model A so, along with my brother, we came up with the idea of a chopped Bug instead, and so my project began."

For the full story on this car make sure you pick up a copy of the November 2009 issue of VolksWorld

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