volkswagen w30 beetle 3D print model

I decided to start a new topic as an offshoot to the W30 chassis restoration thread.I felt that writing about a body build-up would not be most appropriate in a thread that is focused entirely on a chassis. At the end I hope it will all come together very nicely. I’m hoping this new topic will be quite long and interesting.

The recreation of car W30/26 is turning into a very important project currently being undertaken by the same team from Hessisch Oldendorf in Germany who brought us the VW38/06. Sure there are already two nicely done replicas of the W30 cars but none of them have the detail authenticity that I’m sure this car will have. Most of all this car will be based on a genuine surviving 1937 chassis as opposed to regular, modified post-war chassis of the other two. All of the body details will be as close as possible to the originals, also something that the other two cars haven’t fully achieved. So to kick off this thread I though I’ll start with some general history of the W30.

The origins of an all-steel construction Volkswagen can be traced back to July 1935 when, after the very first steel and wood coacbuilt prototype was presented to the members of German Automotive Association (RDA), the company Ambi Budd offered to help with designing of such. Soon after Porsche’s body specialist Erwin Komenda went to Berlin on a visit to Ambi Budd to discuss full metal construction of the Volkswagen. Ambi Budd was a subsidiary of the American company Budd Inc. who were the specialists when it came to all metal construction of car bodies and they had working relationships with most German manufacturers of the time. To make the Volkswagen strong and light therefore cheaper to manufacture it was essential that the relatively new methods of full stampings of body panels should be utilised. Creasing and composite curves of the sheet-metal would produce exceptional strength making the whole body of the car a load bearing structure. Towards the end of 1935 an idea was investigated to reduce the car in over all size and see if it could be less expensive to produce. Komenda did some sketches of a scaled down body and interestingly, he incorporated a new pattern of creases into the shape, probably something that Ambi Budd had suggested. The reduced size Volkswagen was calculated to be just about 8 kilograms lighter than a full size one making such cuts quite pointless. However the lines of the new design were deemed a good way to proceed for the next generation of prototypes. The V3 series cars still had not started the official test drives when the new series of W30 design was already being planned.

The January 1936 sketch by Erwin Komenda showing a smaller body which was not built but some of the details were used for the W30 body design.