Werk's Demo

You don’t need air-ride to get a Bay to run this low, just a lot of lateral thinking and a boatload of hard graft, Slamwerks style

Plenty of people own or work on old Volkswagens for a living, but when the bad weather sets in, or they just want to get from A to B without any drama, they jump ship and get themselves a modern daily driver to make life a little easier. To be fair, you can’t really blame them, especially when the air-cooled VW they drive is A) something as cold in the winter as a Bay Window and B) lower than a miniature dachshund’s belly and comes with all the foibles of driving a stupendously low vehicle in a country packed with speed bumps, pot holes and mini-roundabouts. But that’s most definitely not the case with the owner of this monstrously low Bay. Arguably one the lowest Buses currently doing the rounds, it’s owned by Guy Terry of Slamwerks fame. As the head honcho of a company who’s raison d’être is lowering VW’s finest, it makes a fair amount of sense from a business point of view that he’d drive a crazy low Bus, after all, what better way to advertise your wares than with a drawer-droppin’ demo vehicle? But what I’m particularly impressed with [apart from the stance, of course] is that this is actually Guy’s daily driver, and proof that you can live with a massively modified air-cooled on a daily basis if you’re of the right mindset – and you don’t need to run air-ride, either!
Now, you might be thinking this is just a bit of free publicity for Slamwerks, but the truth of the matter is, this Bus has gone way beyond what Guy and the lads do day in and day out for their customers. What they’ve actually done with Guy’s daily hack is create a super-slammed Bay that is a rolling example of how a wickedly low Bus should drive.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone told me “It drives like stock”, when what they actually mean is, “It’s not that bad – it just breaks your spine every time you drive it and grounds out if you run over anything fatter than a Curly Wurly”. But in this instance, I can honestly say, hand on heart, I’ve been on the streets in this Bus, and it genuinely is lovely to drive. 

But exactly how did Guy create this rolling tour de force? Well, he started with a sound project vehicle in the first place. A Savannah Beige Deluxe Microbus, it was found in Sacramento and shipped into the UK by John Masey. John had it on his farm for a while before Guy took it off his hands to begin its transformation. Guy says, “It was a good solid Bus with no major rot to deal with.”

To get it to run low but drive well, Guy started by ditching the original Bay Window ball-joint beam. In its place went a Split Screen style linkpin unit but it’s not just been thrown on willy-nilly, it’s actually been raised two inches to sit higher in the chassis. And there’s a very good reason for what must have been a mammoth amount of work because, as Guy says, “The more work I did on it the better it drove and when I got thinking about how it needed to be to run right, it just snowballed”.

Guy wanted a skinny front that would put a supermodel to shame, so narrowed it until he was happy with the look. The end result? Guy says it ended up being about eight inches narrower than a stock beam to achieve the look he was after. But, to get that amount of tuck the beam now sits inside the chassis rails. The handbrake cables had to be rerouted, the steering box raised two inches and the steering shaft re-machined and re-splined. Oh, and the gearshift rod had to be modified to go over the repositioned beam and there are hoops in the front chassis for the raised track rods to pass through. 

Is that it? Er, not quite because all that work would have led to the front wheels chewing through the wheel arches, so they were tubbed, which meant Guy also had to cut the seat frames down to accommodate them – not that you would know this has been done, because the front seats still sit at the same height as they do on a stock, uncut Bay Window, which is no mean feat in itself. 
At this point you may be wondering why on earth Guy and his Slamwerks cohorts went to all the fuss of raising the front beam in the first place. Guy reckons, “Bay Windows are notoriously hard to get really low. King- and link- beams are better than ball-joint beams but to get the best ride you should keep the suspension arms as flat as possible. Raising the beam keeps the arms flat. It’s a lot of work but it was definitely worth it.” 

With the front end not so much in the weeds as ploughing a furrow, the back had to be brought down to suit. The problem with really low Early Bays is the rear hanger for the gearbox hits the ground, so to get round this the gearbox and tranny have been raised two inches. Actually, there is no rear hanger any more, it’s been done away with and the 1303 Beetle gearbox [for better high-speed cruising] now sits in fabricated frame horns like it would in a Split. 

The rear chassis has been heavily fabricated to make room for the lowered running gear, and the rear wheel arches have been raised to clear the Sprintstar wheels but Guy reckons the trickiest part was narrowing the rear end and resetting the camber. Apparently a lot of people can’t work out what looks odd about it. It’s because the camber has been set correctly – not like a lowered Bus at all – so it drives great and doesn’t chew through components like there’s no tomorrow either. 

Astoundingly, the entire Slamwerks crew used to go away in their creation while it still had its OG Microbus interior. With a modified middle seat, Guy used to get two families in it over the course of a weekend but it now has a Westy interior to make their stay a little more comfortable. This was given to Guy by Steve Johnson as he had it going spare, and Guy would like to say a special thank you to him for this more than generous gift. It also came with a wooden headliner, but much like the new seat covers he’s got for it, Guy just hasn’t found the time to fit it. I guess that’s part and parcel of running a thriving business working on old VWs and producing top notch slam products.