I have been inactive in the last few months with keeping you guys up to date on my bus adventures. School got hectic, bus stuff got hectic. I had one week where I had to rip out my entire interior, re skin the front seats, do general maintenance on the bus, put it back together, take an exam that Saturday morning at 9 am and then hit the road to make the 200 mile or so drive to Pasco County in my bus. What a crazy week that was. Anyway here is what happened.

Sometime late September:
I met up with a nice guy from the samba.com that happened to have an original wood cabinet similar to my existing one but it significantly better condition. He also had a pop top that was in better condition where the wood frame wasn't destroyed and he also had a very rare and original westy sink/refrigerator.


Sometime in October.
There is a wonder guy in our VW club that makes reproduction westy interior panels out of a similar wood. I was able to get an entire set for my bus and I bought a nice stain from Homedepot to match it as close to the original color as I could.

Sometime late October.

I went to home depot and bought some snap click flooring and a saw and went to town. I think the interior floors came out nice.

The week of Early November:

I completely gutted the interior of the bus to go to town and cutting all the wood flooring and put them together. that was a mission and a half. Then when I was satisfied with that I stained the wood panel that goes between the bus and the rear bench so that the interior didn't look so bad. That was installed as well.

The front seats were completely stripped down to the bare metal. This is where my new angle grinder with a wire brush attachment came in handy. I went to town and removed all sorts of surface corrosion from the seat frames and painted them black again with a nice rust encapsulating paint so they shouldn't rust again. Then I re assembled with seats. I initially only assembled the seats 90%. I just ran out of time to finish the remainder of making them look better and correctly fastened. That will have to be a different weekend. I did replace my steering box with a replacement unit and steering is significantly improved. Yay I have steering.










November 7th

I woke up bright and early and took my accounting exam. I was rather pleased with my score and off I went with my dad on our journey to the Pasco Bug Jam 2015. The trip was long, the interior rattled, the rpms were high and the speed was low. I think we maxed out at about 68 mph on the trip. We were getting right up to the skyway that goes into Tampa Bay and I wanted to be able to carry my speed and not cause a slow down. Boy was I wrong. For a mile before the bridge the pedal was to the metal. Max speed was 68 mph. By the time we reached the top of the bridge we were now at 52 mph.

The drive was interesting. It started to rain and we didn't have working wipers (but what old vw really does). Thankfully rainx really does work so we were able to drive safely. We made it to our destination and we were at the show the next morning bright and early.

The show was great and we setup our folding picnic table and had a good time.


As we were starting our engines to leave the show my buddy's bus wouldn't start. We spent a good hour diagnosing the issue and it ended up being bad points. He is now using a pertronix electronic points system. On the way back home my speedometer cable decided that it wanted to die and not work anymore (I think it fell out of the wheel hub) so the whole way home we didn't know how fast or how far we were going. Normally that doesn't sound like an issue but I also dont have a working gas gauge. I was using my odometer to figure out when I needed to fill up and now I had neither a working gas gauge nor an odometer. Fun times were had.

We made it home safe not much else has happened since. School and work started to get crazy and my grandma's health decided to take a not so great turn so that has been taking up a lot of time as well.

All in all the trip was great and we were able to put the bus mostly together in time for it.

For my birthday my friend decided to make a painting for me. She knows I like turtles and that I have an old bus. It was spectacular.


Next up on the list of things to do is get the front nose and air scoop areas fixed from the rust and holes that are there from the previous owner, fix the horn, get the speedometer fixed and hopefully the gas gauge too (but that requires removing the engine), get BFG All terrain for my original 14 inch wheels I have on the side of my house, and last but not least to replace the shocks on the bus. Then it should be road trip worthy.