Fluid Movement

As a stop-gap to what he thought he really wanted, Jason Lister’s T4 sure isn’t bad, huh?

- James Wallace

Hydraulics. The most straightforward way to get a T4 on the floor, without requiring a mechanical engineering degree or a massive investment in fabrication time. Cue letters and social media outcry…

Okay, we’ll admit it’s not as easy as that makes it sound, but the fact is, if you want to drop your T4 as low as it can possibly go and maintain some semblance of ride quality, then ‘juiced’ suspension, particularly a system that relies upon a fluid displacement set up with a remote spring box, is unquestionably the way forward with that unconventional torsion bar front suspension. Truth be told, we’ve always thought it rather strange VW decided to go back to torsion bars after it made the leap forward with MacPherson struts on the Type 25, but I guess old habits just die hard.

Still, torsion bars makes a T4 easy to lower at the front, with nothing more than basic hand tools required. However, there’s not enough adjustment available to go really low. Air ride is still an option, but the extreme amount of cutting, welding and fabricating that’s involved to make compressed air and squidgy bags a viable option on a T4 led to a few people looking to the world of hydraulic fluid to fill their 1990-2003 Vans with lowered joy.

That’s the approach the owner of this sublime 2003 T4 2.5TDi SWB took. A few years ago we remember this Van appearing in our sister title, Camper&Bus, but things have moved on considerably since then. Back then (2012), it was fresh out of Spike’s Vintage Restorations bodyshop, resplendent in stunning House of Kolor Candy Red. These days, Jason Lister runs his own interior and Camper conversion specialist by the name of Chubby Dubs, based just outside Soham in Cambridgeshire. Naturally, then, his own personal ‘demo’ Van is a stunner and, some five years after its original feature, the paint is still as good as when it emerged.