One of our favorite building projects is the Woody Wagon, a classic recreation of a surfer's woody, built on a standard Volkswagen Beetle. The Woody has been featured in Popular Mechanics, as well as becoming a repeat feature in Hot VW'S Magazine, and there are a lot of these little Woodys in use from Florida to Hawaii. Project requires no welding or special tools and uses a premolded fibreglass hood kit available from several suppliers. A Bug from the early to mid-sixties is preferable, but anything but Super Beetles will work in a pinch. Makes a nice, tight little wagon, with lots of room; ours has been used for over 25 years and 60K miles. The plans have some full-size patterns which help builders fit the parts to the VW shapes.

The car is reamarkably cozy inside and we've had ours up in the mountains, all around California — we even shipped it to Kauai back in the '90's! It's still around, going strong, and hope it continues to for decades to come!

I can attest to the fact that it's lots of fun—I've been driving the prototype VW Woody for over 25 years and I still love it! The photo above was taken for the original article in 1983 and the shots to the right and below were taken of the same car in 2009!

Good old Woody!

There's now a fun Yahoo Group just for VW Woodies of all types! Pretty cool...

Click on either of these photos for a larger version.