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The pleasure and pain of owning an old VW Karmann Ghia and '66 camper import

Mark Sheppard VW splitscreen camper

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There are two sides to owning a classic Volkswagen, and Mark Sheppard has seen plenty of both.

On the one hand, there’s the camaraderie, laughs, partying and, of course, a love of the cars and campers themselves.

But there’s also the ever-present risk of breakdowns inherent in owning any old vehicle, especially those which travel the length and breadth of the country to festivals and campsites – not to mention the odd jaunt overseas.

VW camper splitscreen
Mark’s 1966 US import camper

Mark, 49, has revelled in the fun side since his first visit to Run to the Sun in Cornwall as a teenager, and gritted his teeth when things have inevitably gone wrong.

His first exposure to the VW scene was travelling to Newquay in the back of a friend’s Opel Manta in the late ‘80s.

“I got the bug”

“My mates came away saying they never want to see another VW show again, but I got the bug and I’ve gone to shows ever since,” he says.

“I just thought it was quite a cool crowd. I was only a kid at the time, but people seemed quite friendly, it was a bit of a laugh, and obviously it was the era when it really started to expand.

VW Camper 1966

“It’s a bit more down to earth than a lot of car scenes – people tend to like having a drink and a bit of a dance. It’s about meeting up with friends, catching up with the same old faces, and having a laugh.”

But after one nightmare journey home to Kent from Monaco in an otherwise fairly reliable Karmann Ghia with virtually no clutch, Mark would have been forgiven for calling time on his long-distance travels.

Yet here he is, about four hours from home at the Whitenoise festival on the outskirts of Norwich in a far less reliable split screen camper that’s had its own share of breakdowns.

VW Camper splitscreen 1966

Fun and failures

With a freshly-brewed cup of tea in hand, Mark looks back on more than 30 years of Volkswagen fun and failures.

After owning a “dog-eaten” Morris Ital, an MG Maestro and a roof-chopped old Mini, he bought his first VW at the age of 21, a 1967, lowered, Cal-look Beetle that “used to scrape on the road every time you went down a garage forecourt ramp, and drag roadkill around and roast it under the exhaust, that kind of thing”.

Spitscreen camper dashboard
Inside Mark’s splittie

“You had to take speed bumps at an angle,” he says, using the car as a daily driver for about three years before selling it and driving a “knackered old Beetle for a while that sprung oil everywhere”.

Mark’s VW life was interrupted by three years studying geography and American studies at university, having quit his job working for the Department of Heath opposite Downing Street, and sold his car.

1966 VW camper engine
The camper’s very clean engine

A further two years studying for a masters degree followed, during which time he drove a cheap Renault 19, before he bought a 1965 Karmann Ghia coupe once he was earning money again, working for a water company.

Amazing VW Karmann Ghia

“I used it as a daily driver, winter and summer, and had it for 18 years,” he says of an “amazing car” bought from the the Karmann Ghia Centre in North London.

Karmann Ghia
Mark’s “amazing” Karmann Ghia

He was 27 at the time, and started to attend a few VW shows again, including Bug Jam, VW Action, and a return to Run to the Sun.

It was at one of these shows that issues with the resprayed paintwork revealed themselves.

“When they’d sprayed it, the primer had got wet and and on one really hot day I parked it at a car show and the water that had got caught in the primer started to bubble to the surface, causing water blisters all over the paintwork,” says Mark.

Eventually, after 10 to 12 years of daily use, the car had rotted from the inside out and needed a full restoration.

Karmann Ghia brown

“I was always going to run it into the ground then restore it, and by then it was a second vehicle,” he says, the work carried out by a company called Lust for Rust, who fixed the bodywork and resprayed it Texas Brown, an early Beetle colour.

“It was a nice looking car by the time it was done, and ended up in Volksworld magazine.”

With a relatively new South American engine, Mark says the Ghia “never put a beat wrong”.

Failing clutch turned a family trip to Monaco into a disaster

The engine may not have, but a failing clutch turned a family trip to Monaco from the best of times to the worst of times.

With wife Naomi and young son Josh, Mark headed through France, Italy, Switzerland, across the Alps and on down to Monaco when disaster struck.

Karmann Ghia interior
Karmann Ghia interior

“The journey down was amazing, one of the best times of my life,” he says. “We’d had some lovely memories up until that point, but then it went a bit wrong…”

Naomi and then two-year-old Josh headed home on the train while Mark spent a week with French mechanics “sucking through their teeth, billing me three times what it should cost to fix”.

“If I’d broken down in Germany it would have been fixed in 48 hours,” he says. “They knew they had me and were charging me so much money. It would have been cheaper to fly to Barbados and have two weeks there.”

Eventually, the car was fixed, they said, but Mark only made it as far as Lyon before the clutch went again. To make matters worse, Naomi had been taken ill at home, and was still nearly 600 miles away, plus the English Channel crossing.

“Worst journey of my life”

“I basically drove through most of France in third and fourth gears,” says Mark. “It was the worst journey of my life, so stressful. Fortunately I was on my own.

VW Karmann Ghia brown

“There was a massive storm as well, which was blowing the car all over the road in France and blew bits of trim off the car. It was pretty horrendous.

“There was one really steep hill, and I thought ‘if I can’t get up that in third, that’s it’. Fortunately I managed it and it flattened out after that.”

After 14 hours of non-stop driving, Mark was “seeing double” and pulled over at a service station near Calais at 3am.

“I fell asleep with my head on the gearstick, slept for a couple of hours, and got into Calais,” he remembers, faced with an even steeper slope to get the Ghia on to the ferry.

“I was like ‘I’m not going to get up there in third’, and I spent about 20 minutes crunching and ramming the car into first gear, then drove round the whole port in first and on to the ferry in first. I thought ‘right, I’m on the ferry, no matter what I can get home now’.

“I got it into third gear on the other side, and managed to get myself home. The clutch cable had stretched beyond recognition.”

More room required: switching to a split screen camper

About four years ago, with Josh getting a bit big for the back seat of the Karmann, Mark decided to switch to a split screen camper, which also allowed them to ditch camping in a tent.

VW 1966 Camper

“It was a wrench to get rid of it – I loved the Karmann Ghia and it was very special to us because we bought it soon after we got married,” he says. “But in the end it wasn’t so bad as I ended up selling it to my cousin. He lives three miles from Newquay, where I started off in the scene, and he loves it.

“It’s a long way to go, but it’s there if I need to go and see it.”

As for the camper, it’s a 1966 US import bought from a man in Sidcup who used it for wedding hire, somewhat unsuccessfully.

“The business didn’t really take off because he didn’t really have the personality for wedding work,” he laughs.

“It sat on his drive for a long time, and mechanically I knew it wasn’t good, but I factored it into the price and even with a full engine rebuild or a new gearbox I knew it’d be all right. I saw that it was really solid, and thought ‘that will do’.

“It’s not like it’s a Ferrari”

“The mechanics you can get around – it’s not like it’s a Ferrari. You can easily say goodbye to £30-40,000 if the metal’s gone, but if the engine’s gone you can get a new one for £3,000.”

VW camper interior

Sure enough, it soon needed an engine rebuild.

“We took it to a show down in Belgium, at Ninove, and on the way back coming out of Dover it lost a lot of power and then we had smoke billowing out the back,” says Mark.

“I thought the engine was on fire. The fuel tank’s right next to the engine, so if it’s on fire you’ve got visions of going up in a fireball. There was no hard shoulder, so we had to drive for about two miles until we found a lay-by.

“We pulled over, grabbed the fire extinguisher, but it wasn’t on fire, thank goodness. After seven waiting for a vehicle to tow it, we got it home and found out it had thrown a piston, which is kind of what we thought. So it needed a top-end rebuild on the engine.”

VW camper air freshener

While the paintwork was in decent condition, and remains the same today, the interior was a mess – probably another reason it failed as a wedding car…

1966 US imported camper gets a renovated interior

“I stripped everything out and redid the whole thing,” adds Mark. “It’s got new carpets and cabinets, extra seats, a new kitchen. Everything has to have two uses, for example the chair folds into a table, and everything’s collapsible to try to get as much stuff in as possible.”

VW camper seat

There’s a double rock and roll bed in the back, with a hammock bed for Josh over the front seats, plus creature comforts including a toilet and a pop-up shower, and solar panels on the roof that powers devices from a separate battery.

It won’t be long before Josh outgrows the hammock, at which point Mark will “probably get sent off to a tent or something until he’s old enough, and then he can get sent off to a tent on the side”.

VW camper pedals

After its engine rebuild, the splittie ran well for a while, but during this camping season it sprung an oil leak, with drops hitting the exhaust, resulting in billows of smoke.

“Unfortunately that’s an engine out job, and the fuel tank has also sprung a leak so I can only fill it a third up,” says Mark. “Any more than that it starts leaking, and you don’t want fuel leaking all over your engine. I’m having to fill up as if it’s an American muscle car. We’re probably getting up to about 80 to 90 miles before having to top up, so it’s not too bad.”

Countrywide camping in the split screen camper

One thing the bus has never, and will never, be is a trailer queen. It’s well-used for weekend camping trips all over the country, and proved a “godsend when we had the break last year with Covid, because we were able to go to sites, and even earlier this year”, says Mark.

Among the joys of owning an old camper is the reaction from other road users, who wave and give thumbs up, even if they’re in a modern car.

VW Camper splitscreen front

“I think people are always more friendly to people in old cars,” he says. “They let you out at junctions, that kind of stuff.”

There are several more years of camping and VW events to come before Mark fancies something bigger, and more reliable.

“I’d like to go travelling when I’m older, so I’d look to get something of a proper size you can live in for a few months,” he says.

As for Josh, Mark doubts he’s been inspired to follow his path: “I don’t know if he’d ever get an old one – he sees the hassle that comes with them.”

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