The stock steering column that I purchased, all the way from Egypt, was great and will allow for the horn to work as per original engineering, but did give cause for concern over safety. There was either less regard for safety in the 50’s and 60’s, or just the fact that there were less cars on the road, but the original steering column is just not safe nowadays and certainly would not pass an IVA.
The steering column was simply a straight piece of metal between the steering box and the steering wheel. Given these replica 356’s are made out of fibreglass, there is literally no protection between the font of the car and the steering box. This means any head on impact will go straight through the steering box, forcing the steering column and wheel directly at the driver.
Possible solutions would be offset the steering box and steering column and join them via constant velocity (CV) joint. This means any impact is unlikely to travel through the length of the steering column. However, this is not really possible as the steering geometry (track rods etc) are also pretty fixed on the Beetle chassis.
After a lot of research I decided to buy a collapsible steering column from an old MGB, which works by one end of the column being able to slide over the other in the event of an impact. Under normal circumstances, the column is fixed by two pins filled with some form of plastic (in most cases when restored they are filled with glue from a hot glue gun).
However, I needed to retain the original fixings for the steering box and wheel, therefore I had the MGB collapsible part professionally spliced and welded into the original Beetle steering column, as per the photos below.
