Over the years the venerable VW Beetle has spawned some totally awesome demo vehicles, right back to the dawn of the high-performance car audio era in the '70s. The prototype for several generations of car audio demo vehicles was the legendary (and notorious) Audiomobile 1-Kilowatt Bug built by industry pioneer Rich Coe. Coe took up the gauntlet thrown at him by Audiomobile founder Paul Starry, who said you couldn't get a pair of 15s in a Beetle. In 1978 the forward-thinking Coe used fiberglass fabrication techniques that wouldn't become commonplace until the mid-'80s to install Polydax 5 1/4" midwoofers, Philips hard dome tweeters and a pair of Philips 15" subwoofers. This laid the foundation and set the bar for the high-end car audio explosion of the early '80s when he was Alpine's product guru.
In the years since, we've been amazed at how much "stuff" can be crammed within the confines of a Beetle's interior. That being said, nothing quite prepared me for what Geoff Curtis has been able to accomplish with the 1973 Super Beetle you see gracing these pages.
Curtis is one half of J and G Customs (the other half is partner Joe Weitz) in Fountain Valley, CA, about 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. One of the West Coast's hottest shops, it turns out show stopper after show stopper for companies like Boston Acoustics, who have turned to Curtis and Weitz for several of their recent SEMA and CES cars.
Hand Over The Spray Gun
But the Super Beetle you see here shows a different side of J and G Customs. The work, soup to nuts in this case, is just Curtis'. "It all started when I met Casey Likeness, through a mutual friend," Curtis recounts. "[He] asked if I could do a headliner and interior on his '73 Super Beetle." Likeness had just had the car repainted, but not very well. "It looked as if Helen Keller sprayed the car," Curtis exclaims. Even though Curtis had no experience painting an entire car, he convinced Likeness to give him a shot.
"I spent two and a half weeks sanding the car, first stripping it back down to bare metal through three colors," Curtis explains. Since he didn't have a paint booth, he made do with wood, tarps, air conditioning vents and box fans. After priming, block sanding, more priming, painting and clear coating, Curtis left the car to dry for a few months before color sanding and buffing. If you're wondering where Curtis got the courage to paint a car on his own, note how many times J & G have been on Overhaulin' - 14! "During those 14 shows I picked as many brains as possible to learn whatever I could," reveals Curtis.
Dashing Forward
When you look inside the Bug you truly see Curtis' mastery. It starts with the reformed dash, a perfect melding of retro and contemporary, dominated by the 10.4-inch TFT screen (a raw Samsung screen), which sits below the perfectly integrated Boston Z6 6 1/2" center channel speaker and VDO gauges and above the JVC KD-AVX2 in-dash 5.1 DVD receiver. The craftsmanship is flawless. It's as if the original dash had evolved over the last 30-plus years and morphed into something that might be equally at home in a new Beetle.
The first full set of Z6's is mounted in custom-fabricated kick panels, aligned to serve up outstanding imaging and staging, a hallmark of any J and G Customs system. To give the system a sense of up-front bass, Curtis installed a Boston Pro 8.0 sub in the passenger side floor/firewall, further contributing to the sense of total sonic cohesion. Certainly the size and shape of the cabin, when the primary fullrange speakers are properly positioned, illustrates the often overlooked axiom that you can get great sound in small interiors.