Life in the slow lane or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the trip

[Andy]

Updates

Sometime maybe 8/30/15

I received my new carburetor from Volkzbitz. I decided that for simplicity sake I would go with a 30 pict 1 with the power circuit. I removed my old carb and it was nasty nasty. The bottom butterfly valve looked incredibly chewed up.

This is the beauty I received.


I then went to town on cleaning my engine bay. I admitted that it was a lost cause. However, when I finally get around to pulling my engine I will clean the area with a brush and cleaners with a big pan to collect all the nastyness. This photo is after I spent 3 hours cleaning my engine bay and fixing a few wires that were burnt from an engine fire right before I took ownership of the bus.



I also ordered a replacement shore hookup panel so that I could cover the big gaping hole I had on the side of my bus.



Now I need to order some new horsehair material for my seats and some new seat covers. My dad and I are favoring a vinyl beige/tan color for the back of the seats and a tan cloth material for the insert part. We also found a guy that is a few hours away that has a side cabinet, original sink/refrigerator from a 71 camper and a much better condition pop top. We plan on buying his stuff and making my bus more water tight.

9/4/15

I received my new drag link and tie-rods that I ordered online. I adjusted them and they went on fine. With the drag link off I was able to better examine my steering box and it looks like my output shaft has too much play in and out and also up and down. I think that my box is toast and that I need to get it rebuilt. Here is a video of the play it has. All of that play translates to nasty clunking when I turn the steering wheel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0-ML4Zuaq0

[Andy]

9/17/15



Today was fun. I purchased some new spark plugs and wires for the bus. After gapping all the plugs I removed the old spark plugs. What I found worried me some. The old spark plugs had a fitting on the top that appeared to be a screw as opposed to a nipple like fitting that I am use to seeing on cars. Upon looking at the new Bosch plugs I bought I realized that the new wires seemed to only accommodate plugs with a similar threaded fitting. I was worried some and did some frantic googling assuming the worst and thinking I bought the wrong plugs. It turned out that I needed to get a pair of pliers and just twist off the connector that I am familiar with and underneath is the screwed connector. Phew crisis #1 averted.



Then comes the fun of actually removing all the plugs. They looked ok ish but appeared to have been running rich. They looked about what I expected them to look like except spark plugs #3. Boy did it look nasty.



After swapping out all the plugs and wires I cranked the bus up. It started and ran for maybe 3 seconds and then died. Weird, I tried again and it ran for about 3 more seconds and died. I re checked all of my wires and sure enough they were all on the correct plugs and correct on the distributor. I asked my dad for assistance and he came outside to see what he could do. His first question was, "Is there any gas?" Of course there is gas, I thought. Just to entertain my old man's idea I popped off the gas cap and peeked in with my flash light. I didn't see any fuel, but it should have had enough. Just earlier that week I was driving around a bit and parked the bus in the driveway. Well to entertain his idea we went and bought about a gallon of gas in our small container. Poured it in the bus and after a few attempts to start it started right up. I guess my old man was right and I think i need to put my faulty gas gauge situation higher up on my list.

I am assuming that there was very little left in my tank and parking on the incline of my driveway made all the gas tilt toward the front of the tank away form the fuel pumps pickup and over the course of a week the fuel went back to the tank from the carb causing my lack of fuel issue.

No issue now, my bus runs great.

[Andy]

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.

[Andy]

2/20/16

I was at a friends house and we are working on the front nose where the spot light and CB antennas were.






Late at night photos. It looks worse during the day but now I don't have holes on the front of my bus. Yay.

[Andy]

3/15/16
Spring break started for me. With that I wanted to make some headway.

day #1. Pulled the motor to fix my oil leak.


I ended up replacing my oil cooler seals as well as pulling the gas tank and replacing the fuel sender.

WOOHOO!!! I now have a working fuel gauge. That worked tremendously well on my trip to Lakeland.

[Andy]

4/4/16 I removed the pop top and started to clean it up. My replacement top showed that it was previously painted a beige color once before and it was flaking. I tried to use the pressure cleaner to get the top mostly clean but it didn't work very well. I used my dual action polisher with an interface pad and some sand paper (mostly 120 grit) and I was able to remove the the flaky paint and some problems with the top. Both the pop top and the rear pop top sanded down very well. The rear pop top had some issues with some cracks in the fiberglass. I ran down to Westmarine and bought their marine rx that applies similarly to bondo but it is to reinforce fiberglass cracks and stuff. I figured if it was good enough for boats then it was mostly good enough for the rear pop top. It worked well and I sanded down what protruded. I also filled in all the holes on the rear pop top that the previous owner thought were a good idea to put in to screw in a weird piece of edging. That did more damage than good for the roof and pop top but now the holes are filled in. I also bought some aluminum bar stock and drilled holes in it and placed it underneath all the holes where the cross bars attach. That should help reinforce the pop top and spread the load a little bit better. The rear pop top was sagging a little bit from years of pressure on one spot in particular. I also sanded and cleaned up the metal footman loops as well as the luggage rack bars.

Here are a few pictures of the process of sanding, fixing, and painting the pop tops. I rushed the painting a little bit and I was not able to get a second coat on before I had to head out for a vw meet / camping trip in daytona. I will be removing both tops again to sand the paint down and apply a second coat as well as sanding it down again to make it nice and uniform.

[Andy]

4/8/16

We left for the camping trip and headed to daytona. I pushed the bus a little bit too hard and at the first gas station we stopped at we had a pretty massive oil leak. Just a month ago I had the engine out and I replaced the oil cooler seals. I thought they seated well and I drove with the new seals for about 14 hours total mostly highway and had no issue bit I think me driving 69 mph as opposed to the typical 64 made them leak with increased oil pressure.



I topped off the oil and limped the rest of the way to the camp site and we leaked a negligible amount of oil. The rest of the way there we drove around 60mph.

At the campsite we had a blast and I was able to setup my new hammock.




Overall we had a great time and the bus made it back safe and sound. Now that summer is coming closer we will be going to town on the bus and getting it ready for North Carolina this summer.