Hey Mr. Postman

What you’re looking at here is a rare Type 147 Kleinlieferwagen, which translates as a small van (with a huge personality).

- James Peene

The name Mark Webber may be familiar to long term readers. Or if not his name, perhaps his last feature vehicle - a stunning Sea Blue and Cumulous White 21-window Deluxe shot on a hill top. Having owned the absolute Don of all Buses, where do you go next for your VW kicks? Why a Fridolin of course. But then we say of course like it’s the obvious choice, and as any VW aficionado will tell you, Fridolins are anything but an obvious choice, because they don’t exactly grow on trees, do they? And well, you have to admit, they are just a tiny bit odd aren’t they?Without doubt one of the quirkiest vehicles ever to grace the planet, never mind one to have a VW badge on its nose, the Fridolin is like the proverbial London Bus, in that we haven’t seen one for ages and then end up featuring two within the last year - dig out your March 2018 issue to see the last, and only other Fridolin ever to grace the pages of Camper&Bus.

Fast movers

In the last Fridolin feature we mentioned just how rare these old birds are, but that didn’t prevent Mark and his wife Karen finding one at the Peppercorn VW Show. Mark says: “Karen and I have our own business, M&K Auto Upholstery, in Aylesford, Kent (www.mk-autoupholstery.com, Tel: [phone]). Work comes first, and we had to sell the Samba to buy the unit we’re in now, but fancied having another Volkswagen of our own.

“I saw Ian Terry’s turbo’d Fridolin and thought that looks good, I wouldn’t mind one of those.”

“We found ours at the Slough Swapmeet. That was back in 2008 and although we did a lot of work to it, it sat in the garage for a long time as other things got in the way. In fact, it was painted seven years ago. In the end, I just had to take a week off work to dedicate to it, or it just would never have got done.”