Harlequin Montreal HABS edition winter project.

[The Red One]

Another month starts and a winter project ends.

Remember the VW Harlequin edition from the 90’s, always liked those, took me a few years to realize they came from the factory like that!

Im a long time Honda forever guy but This VW edition always fascinated me and I almost turned to the dark side because of them.

Here’s how it worked. Each Golf Harlequin went down the production line finished in one of four colors: Chagall Blue, Ginster Yellow, Pistachio Green or Tornado Red. The color swap occurred only once each car was completely assembled. In other words, every bolt-on exterior panel was switched to a different car.

Check out who was out of his mind to suggest this stuff ! The VW boss himself. I think they also tried this 30 yrs earlier with the ’64 Bug.

After looking into buying one I found out these cars are still at over a crazy 10k$

So after thinking about it and sampling a few beers in one of our cold December Canadian nights just before Christmas I thought this would be an easy, fun & cheap mod that should not cost much for a BRZ/86/FRS owner wanting to do it. And it could be reversible if we found it to be too Kooky and I have absolutely nothing to do anyhow as its too cold out.

I found out since completing our project that some US VW dealers actually re built the panels to be able to sell at least a One color car back in the day…

I did find that I was not the first one to think about this for the 86 twins as it was considered back in 02-03-2015, 03:46 PMhere:
https://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81506&page=29

Too bad the pictures have lost their links.

Not quite the same concept:
http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8022

Again : Too bad the pictures have lost their links.

So this seems to follow a pattern, don’t you just hate it when there are no picts.





A Painting Idea, but I thinks the Hakone paint mirrors this fine:

As it worked out the 3 cars finally found were garaged for the winter and would not be missed while I figured things out … I have the time so WTF lets mod these things!

It took me a few months to find a few donor cars & convince people they needed - wanted a unique look as well.

Also found that a lot of my brother’s home brew helped to sway the idea so got his sweet ’15 Suby Blue easy as the 2nd car.

Now about that 3rd car…

Had to make due with 3 colors instead of the 4 VW used as the Series Yellow edition owner’s wife that I had tracked down, was screaming hysterically at us when we proposed what we wanted to do and did not want us near his car, we had to move on!

Too bad as I really wanted some of those yellow parts, the nice wing he had would have been a bonus.

Wanted to find a Hakone edition as well to do a somewhat good imitation of what VW did back in 1996 for the green but they were hiding pretty good in my area. Pistachio Green was a European exclusive anyway on standard golfs so no great loss to the project.

Visited a few https://www.kennyupull.com/en around here but good body parts from them were scarce and would have become an expensive project I did not want to get into. I had forgotten my shovel so never found out what was hiding under some of the snow banks in their yard.

Here we are discussing the early plans; those nice late Vermont fall colors gave some great inspiration and we did find a good terrace (Idletyme brewery) at Stowe at the bottom of that hill, we got back well after midnight on that great autumn ride and managed to dodge some speed traps hiding in the middle ditches of the 87 just before the border on the way back and faced an impromptu inquisition about our rides just after the border by lone Biker intrigued by the 2 cars he never knew existed:

Sorry I had to Photoshop out the Plates to protect the innocent..

It so happens that the colors we found was to be our local hockey team colors so the cars would fit right in driving around our area;

We call it the HABS edition being from Montreal…
https://www.nhl.com/canadiens
Go Habs Go!

Had to make due with a BRZ WRB, a WHITE FRS from a friend of my bro and my RED tomato for the conversion.

We found very quickly that the car’s roof, C-pillar, and rocker panels, are formed of a single welded piece and were impossible to swap out cheaply… so had to work around that. And that FRS/BRZ bumper/light incompatibility limited the bumper swap options to 2 cars.

Volkswagen built more than 3,800 or so Harlequins, Originally slotted for a small production run. But we got only 3 copy’s out of our cheap winter body panel project swap. Most of the cost was for some busted trim items , an excuse to swap out the side markers, the dam cheap body clips and a box of large Band-Aids(more on that later). And one very badly scratched door that had toppled over onto this seasons well used snow blower that will need a repaint, and so we got our first visit from out neighbor Duke during this incident and he showed us his displeasure at all the swearing going on.

Trying to get the Side mirrors re mounted correctly was time consuming as well, especially as we were well over our beer quota by then and realized later we could have swapped the covers over only. The door handles were left in place but we may try to swap them later this year to complete this trickery.

Now that the project is over we got comments about what color are they finally?

Never crossed my mind that would be an issue for license and registration purposes!

Guess we use the 'base' color whatever that is now… front passenger door and hood?
and about those swapped badges… Im just calling the mostly Subaru’s just Bubu’s or should it be BooBoo’s^

For Toronto Maple Leaf fans this would be much simpler project just 2 cars needed! I envy you (for the simple project not the team) …

For The US owners thinking of doing this you could just perhaps reverse colors pls?
As in Red White & Blue so you won’t clash with out Blue White & Red!

For our Europeans friends just buy a real VW harlequin much easier…

And for the fans who find this too wild just do the overdone and boring Panda swap.

Will have some picture to show how all this turned out real soon. There is still some snow on the ground around here and hard to get one out of the garage and with the quarantine around that forbids any rides into other regions just now but once we get loose and wild on the roads We may do a 3 car photo shoot to show off our best colours.

On a side note one of the best moments with the project had to do with sampling a smooth amber with a pinch of rum, and for the neighbour's dog Duke who would come over so often to supervise when he would hear us stressing some metal. So we made a special batch of suds just for him (may he bless his family), a nice IPA with just the right quantity of HOTsauce. Saw him rarely for some reason at the end. We had given him the affectionate name early on as the “the Ass Biter”.

I have it from a good source the next Gen 86 will kick off with a new “multy-color” edition to get the new gen Kick started for the general public. Just cant wait.

VW were definitlty onto something back then.

Any good Ideas we can use to expand on the project are welcome!

And for all of you 86 platform nuts out there:

Take care during these C****-19 times & Please wash your hands!