The Snail

Undoubtedly one of the stars of the world’s biggest indoor VW event (the Jogja VW Festival in Indonesia) was this hand-built Camper. Paul Knight checks out the story behind this amazing creation.

- Paul Knight

Yudi Yumos is the proprietor of the infamous Yumos Garage in Semarang, Indonesia, where his team of highly skilled fabricators and mechanics turn his visions and ideas into rolling works of art. 47-year old Yudi is responsible for many other wild creations, including a 41-window limo-Bus and some amazing one-off Porsche replicas, and the impressive 1750 square-metre Yumos Garage has built quite a reputation for creating some superb Samba re-creations in recent years, too. Starting with Brazilian-built Bay Window, Yumos cut away the front end and fit their own Split screen front-end panels and Samba window sections... It’s a huge job, but the finished faux-Sambas are simply amazing.

However, this project is a little different, and came about following a sad incident regarding a ’77 Bay window show Bus, which was destroyed in a road accident on the way home from the Jogja event in 2013. Tragically the driver lost his life in the accident, and his family eventually decided to part out the remains of the Bus, which is where Yudi stepped in with a unique plan. He explained: “I decided that I would like to create a new project based around the chassis of the Bus, which could be displayed as a tribute at a future Jogja event.”

And so, when the smashed Bay ’shell arrived at Yumos Garage, the bodywork was cut away from the chassis and Yudi soon began to sketch out some designs. Once he was happy with the proportions and the overall concept, Yudi then created a full set of accurate scale-drawings to ensure that his team would have no problems realising his dream. The plan was to create a snail-shaped Camper body, which would be 15cm longer than a stock Bus and 30cm wider overall. Incidentally, the hand-made body would also be dropped over the chassis by 10cm, thereby visually lowering the finished vehicle.