Brasil Nut

After T3D built its seminal low-riding Brasilia, we

were expecting a glut of copycats, but nothing

prepared us for Xavier Adam’s take on the same car

Like Fridolins, it only took one person to build a pukka Brasilia and suddenly everyone knows what they are, everyone wants one and everybody has an idea of how they would build one. But it’s a pretty safe bet that few other people saw their imaginary Brasilia project looking like this. But then Xavier Adam was already well ahead of the curve when he started building this car. A member of Belgium’s most active VW club, Der Autobahn Scrapers, Xavier bought his first Brasilia eight years ago from his boss and good friend Pat when most people thought they were just a misspelt South American country. That one is now gunmetal grey, lowered and on chromed Sprintstars. Cool, yes, but not exactly groundbreaking. So what to do to top that? Build another, better, lowered Brasilia with the second Brasilia body he had managed to source through his job at Pat Stock and Performance in Nivelles, Belgium, or do something completely different...

It should be pretty obvious which route he took. “Pat only agreed to sell me the car if my plan was to off-road it! I liked the idea!” laughs Xavier, or Xav to his friends. Starting with a Type 181 Trekker floorpan, Xav started to look at ways of going up in the world, not down, but first he had to work out how to join the two main component parts together. As Xavier wanted to add a set of meaty off-road tyres and raise the body significantly, he decided to make his own floorpan halves from a combination of box-section tubing and flat steel plate. Combined with standard off-road lift kit extension pieces on the front and rear bulkheads, these gave him the 9cm/3.5-inches of body lift he was after.

As raising an air-cooled VW is essentially the same as lowering one, he did the usual tricks there, but all the other way round – rotating the adjusters upwards rather than downwards in the Trekker front beam, adding stiffer Sway-A-Way leaves in the lower tube rather than removing some, using raised Trekker spindles rather than dropped ones, and longer shocks.

At the rear, the Trekker ’pan already had IRS but, to improve the car’s off-road ability, Xavier added Sway-A-Way 29mm rear torsion bars and replace the stock VW trailing arms with fabricated 3 x 2-inch chromoly items from Esprit Dune Buggy in the US. Not only are these stronger, he specified three-inch longer ones to extend the car’s wheelbase and make it more stable off-road. He then welded lower shock mount brackets directly to them to take another pair of longer, heavier duty off-road shocks. As Xavier put it, “It’s been built to use and abuse in the country and in the mud, so everything was done for optimal off-road performance and strength.”

A stronger Type 2 gearbox was mounted using a conversion kit from McKenzie’s Performance in Anaheim, CA, together with a set of stronger Porsche 944 CV joints and Trekker driveshaft flanges. This then meant the shifter rod had to be reshaped to suit and a tunnel fabricated through the front valance so said rod could be fitted with the body in situ. Re-drilled Beetle disc brake hubs went on at all four corners using modified 1303 Beetle drum-to-disc adapters at the front and home-made adapters on the rear. Calipers are stock Beetle fronts all round, which work a treat but mean the car now has a hydraulic handbrake as the front calipers on the rear have no provision for a mechanical one.

The thing that caused the most head-scratching, however, was the steering. Xavier: “It’s an off road rack [and pinion] from Latest Rage in the States. The advantage of such a rack is that it’s as solid as a rock and much better than a standard steering box for intensive off-road use.

“The problem with this rack is that the column has to join it at the centre of the beam and from full left to full right [steering lock] there’s only 1 1/4 turns of the wheel.” The solution was to shorten a 1303 steering column by 16cm, add a steering reducer designed for oval track racecars, make a new lower steering column link and fabricate a whole new steering shaft support structure. That was a lot of work, but it didn’t stop there. The rack and pinion bolts up to a bracket welded to the front beam, which meant it now fouled on the stock fuel tank, so a custom-made aluminium version had to be made.

Which kind of neatly brings us to the bodywork side of things. You might be forgiven for thinking that you can just bolt a set of big tyres onto anything and, hey presto, instant off-roader. But oh no, sorting the suspension was just the start.

The longer wheelbase meant the wheels were no longer in the middle of the rear arches, so these had to be sectioned and lengthened by 9cm. This was done by cutting off the entire rear quarter panels from halfway through the rear side window back, then pie-cutting and pulling out the inner wheel arch lip to the desired profile, before adding some new metal to take up the gap. This shape then had to be replicated on the outer arch too, by cutting the rear of the wheel arch out of a pair of new replacement rear quarters (it was at this point that Xav was thankful of his friend Carlos in Brazil, who was able to help him out with sourcing parts for these unusual VWs) and moving the section back, before fabricating an infill piece and then using sections cut from the trailing edges of the original front arches, swapped side for side, and used to reshape the leading edges of the new rear arches. Got that? And the story was much the same up front, the wheel arches being carefully recontoured all round to give more clearance for tyres. This work continued into the reshaped heater channels and inner wings, too. Finally, after many trial fittings, Xav was happy that he had a full range of movement of both steering and suspension movement with the oversize tyres.

Alongside all that custom metalwork, things like welding up the original wing-mounted fuel filler flap, cutting a pair of post-’75 Beetle bumper-mounted indicators into the front valance, smoothing and sectioning the rear valance and relocating the battery to inside the cabin seem pretty straightforward. All that, and we haven’t even mentioned the whole world of remedial rust repair work that was required after sandblasting the ’shell.

But with the metalwork finally complete, the shell was wheeled into Carrosserie JMJ in Ciney where Xav’s friend Manu Jaumotte finished the prep work and laid on the single stage Ral 2009 Orange paint to the same high standard inside, outside and underneath. With a bit of help from his mum – stitching up the headliner – and a lot of help from a few close friends in the weeks leading up to last year’s European Bug-In, Xav got the car back together, the torquey, 2110cc engine he’d built for it installed and the car driveable just in time for the show, where we caught up with him. Not that we had anything to say of course, because we were rendered speechless by what we saw.