Mike Wolanin | The Republic Terry Milligan poses for a photo with the 1974 Super Beetle he is restoring at his home in Columbus, Ind., Tuesday, July 11, 2023.
By his own admission, Columbus resident Terry Milligan was “always taking stuff apart” as a kid and trying to figure out how things worked.
As a teenager, this interest turned toward cars, as he had a friend whose dad was into hot rods.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, but we had access to all these really great tools at my buddy’s garage, and we had access to their knowledge, and it was like, ‘This is great,’” said Milligan. “And so you just learn and pick up on it. I was a junior in high school, I bought my first VW Bug and three months after I bought it, I already had the engine tore out of it trying to rebuild it. And I didn’t know what I was doing; I just had a book and a whole bunch of tools. And of course, my buddy and his dad, they helped me put it back together, and you just kind of build on it from there.”
Today, he’s working on a project that he said feels like coming full circle — restoring a 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle that was originally purchased by his wife’s grandparents.
“After they passed away, the car went to my wife’s father,” said Milligan. “He didn’t really want it, but he kept it at his house, because they didn’t have any where else to keep it. Of course, this was out in Maryland on the east coast. And we would go out and visit her dad every know and then, and I would see it just sitting there.”
It reminded Milligan of the Bug he’d had in high school, and he thought it would be fun to “mess around” with the Super Beetle, though it was in poor shape due to being exposed to the elements.
By around 2015, Milligan’s father-in-law told Milligan he could have the car, he just had to pick it up. So Milligan and a friend drove all the way to Maryland and hauled it back to Columbus.
The Super Beetle sat in Milligan’s garage for about a year before he started working on it.
“I started tearing it down and trying to find all the damage that was done to it,” he said. “I started that in 2016. And here it is in 2023, and I’m still — I’m about 90% complete, but I’ve done a complete, ground-up restoration. I’ve taken this thing all the way down to the very last nut and bolt that you can take out of it and just rebuilt everything from scratch.”
To date, he’s finished the body work and is now working on the interior. Milligan has mostly worked on the car in his garage, but he’s also been able to use equipment at the Columbus Propeller makerspace to create cylinder spacers for the engine.
Custom-made spacers typically cost about $200 to $300 if you order them from suppliers, said Milligan.
However, after learning how to use the metal lathe from Propeller lab technician Matteo Auteri, he was able to make spacers for just the cost of materials, which he estimated to be about $15.
“Everything that I’ve done on this car, I’ve had to make in my garage, just using whatever tools I had,” said Milligan. “I didn’t find out about Columbus Propeller, the makerspace, until I want to say, I guess it was maybe January, early January of this year, maybe December. And I was like, ‘Wow, if I had just known about this place, I could’ve made all kinds of parts so much easier than what I had to do in my garage.’”
When asked when he expects to finish the Super Beetle, Milligan said that his wife asks the same question all the time.
“I keep telling myself, ‘Well, maybe next year. Maybe next year it’ll be done,’” he said. “But hopefully, I would love to, this winter, get the engine built and get it up and running and then have it installed in the car by spring of next year so I can get it out and actually take it to car shows and drive it. … It’s going to be something that my wife and I can get out and just go cruise around in and have some fun.”
