A VW for Everybody

2012-01-27T11:56:00.000-08:00

As previously mentioned, we recently sold the our '58 Panel, and our '64 Deluxe. What I didn't mention is that we sold them both to the same buyer. Yesterday, the buyer and Craig had a conversation on Facebook which I found extremely amusing because their profile pictures alternate between the fronts and the backs of the buses. Cute, no?

As you can imagine, with the purchase of two VWs, the sale of three VWs (two internationally) and the purchase of a house, all taking place last fall, our bank accounts looked a little...interesting. So interesting, in fact, that our bank investigated us for money laundering. :-| Lemme tell you--that's not a fun phone call to get. I don't know that I've ever seen Craig turn quite that pale.

After providing explanations and bills of lading, the case is closed (knock on wood), but it was unnerving there for a while.

When your transactions look so odd that the bank thinks you are participating in illegal overseas monetary transactions, that's a good sign you should slow down for a while. So...we have. We spent a couple of months with a friend's beetle in our garage--cleaning up his engine and electrical. Tomorrow, we've got another guy bringing his beetle over for a suspension swap. As it turns out--having other people's cars in your garage is MUCH less expensive than working on your own cars (assuming we don't have any disasters involving cars falling off jacks, or people losing fingers, or CO poisoning, or gasoline explosions. Alright, that's enough of that).

I hope you all have VW adventures planned for your weekend...or have a much needed break. Whichever, really.

So many buses...which one is for me?

2012-01-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

In response to this post…

We’ve owned ‘em all early split, late split, early bay, late bay, air cooled Vanagon, water cooled Vanagon, so I guess from that perspective my opinion is worth SOMETHING, right? :-) (I will be making some gross generalizations here and this is all just my opinion.)

VANAGONS:

Pros: They are the roomiest, most comfortable (for camping and driving) of the VW family. (I suppose Eurovans are better, but I’m not going there.) They make for absolutely delightful road tripping. They still possess that feeling of freedom but with a few more modern comforts than the older campers. Don’t worry, you’ll still get the quirks and problems associated with earlier buses (i.e. changing fan belts in the campsite at the Sasquatch Festival, or changing a fuel pump in the parking lot at a WalMart in middle-of-nowhere, Utah).

Cons: They are UGLY beasts. I don’t care how you slice or dice it, they just didn’t get the cute genes. Also, to many (or most), they aren’t “real” VW buses.

My Recommendation: Buy a water cooled. They all get hot, but air cooled Vanagons are amazingly difficult to keep cool. With an AC Vanagon, you’ll spend lots of time waiting on the side of the road for your engine to cool.

BAY WINDOWS ('68-'79):

Pros: They are cute as buttons, possess the spirit and life of VW buses, and are a little roomier than split windows. They are easier to drive, and are safer than split window buses.

Cons: You won’t impress the hard core enthusiasts. Also, they are slightly more difficult to work on than earlier buses. For example, if your window won’t roll up, you’re looking at replacing a window regulator (which is a pain in the neck), whereas, with a split window, if your window isn’t moving, you will be able to see what the preclusion is, and likely move it with your finger.

My Recommendation: ’71 is the best year because it is the first with disc brakes, and the last year with the upright engine and removable rear apron—meaning you can pull the engine out the back, rather than lifting the bus over it to remove.

SPLIT WINDOWS (PRE-'67):

Pros: There’s nothing quite like the view from the drivers’ seat of a split window. There is a rich history to these. You will become obsessed with the little unique pieces your bus needs, and will spend hours each day online dreaming about whether your bus needs deluxe trim, or whether you should lower it, or justify buying a set of BRMs for it. These are easy to work on. There just isn’t much to them and for that reason they are really fun to play with. Buy a Bentley manual, and add thesamba.com to your “favorites” and dive in.

Cons: You can (but don’t have to) spend tens of thousands of dollars on these babies—just messing around with restoration.

My Recommendation: The earlier the better. Stock engines were engineered to run forever, and I don't recommend huge engine modifications myself. We've had a couple 1776 cc engines and they run really nice and have some nice energy, but I don't recommend anything bigger than that. The more custom you go, the harder it is to find parts on the fly.

Depending on the amount of work you want to do, you want to stay away from things like rotted rockers and dog legs, cut dashes, cut bulkheads, and welds in funny places (like the cargo door Craig's dad welded shut on his first bus). You'll have a preference for bullet buses (pre '62), fried egg buses ('62 and later), pressed bumpers (mid '58 and earlier), or over-rider bumpers (mid-'58 and later), or...if you are made of money and want to be a VW god--barndoors (pre '55). Really though, these variations are just stupid things that only people like me who spend way too much energy on VW history would even notice.

Keep in mind, that in order to own a bus, you need to be flexible and willing to think outside of the box…and have a good AAA policy. Part of the fun of driving them is that they WILL break down. The key is to enjoy the ride and be as prepared as you can with a solid emergency kit, a manual, and as many mechanically inclined friends as you can find. You’ll learn a lot. As Brett mentioned in his post, one day you won’t know a valve from a brake line and before you know it, you’ll be adjusting your own valves and bleeding your own brakes.

Ultimately, VW buses are a ton of fun. No matter what bus you pick, you’ll have people honk and wave at you wherever you go. People will stop you in parking lots, and at gas pumps and tell you about the VW they had, or the one their best friend’s dad had. It is a community unlike any other I know.

(Having said all of this…over the last few months, we’ve sold the Squareback L

the Panel

and a 13 window deluxe that never even made the blog (as pictured above).

What can I say? Sometimes you just need to have a car that is probably going to start in the morning, get you to work every day, and stop quickly when a permit driver slams on his brakes in front of you. To replace our cars, we bought a house (okay, the house didn’t replace a car, but the panel paid for the down payment), an ’04 Passat, an ’06 convertible Beetle, and, most recently, a ’61 Convertible Beetle—more to come on this one!

Club trip to the 2011 Classic in Los Angeles

2011-07-23T20:23:00.000-07:00

Remind me, why do we drive these things?

2011-03-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

For many months, and even more money, we've tried to get our 1958 double door bus on the road. Things were going well, then the day before Oktoberfest we lost a tire about 1/4 from home and parked the bus in the garage and walked away.

February freeze-out rolled around and the bus was all ready for its BPA debut, and lo and behold...shifting doesn't work. We got it back to the garage after a wild 1st gear-trip on State Street, parked it and walked away.

Then, somehow, we got excited again and spent more time and more money. We are road-trip people so when things were going well, we decided to plan a trip to make sure the bus was ready for the Classic in June. We got a nice brand new motor and new master cylinder and brake lines (random you say? read on...) We put 400 miles on the motor. Suddenly, I realize...wow...that heater is REALLY hot, that can't be good. I take the bus to my friend Mike Allan and looks like it is at 255 degrees. This is after I took the motor out, changed the generator, and another friend, Aaron, came to help put the motor back in. Well, I was a little bummed, but headed for home as the bus temp was topping out around 255. As I get the bus up to 55 mph on state street, and a white honda civic decides to turn in front of me, I grab for brakes, and there is this horrible metal on metal sound... you guessed it.... brake pedal, meet the floor. Why I didn't do the dual circuit master cylinder I don't know, but I can assure you I am looking to buy one before this bus goes again, but I digress. I was able to change lanes at the last moment (not very easy in a panel, with no brakes, and about .5 seconds of warning), change back, slow to 35 mph and take a turn before another car decides to stop in front of the out-of-control bus. I am really glad the bus is so low, I don't think otherwise I could have made that corner...so fast that it went slightly sideways before I could recover and finally get it into my garage without hitting the neighbor kids on skateboards. So... it sits, in my garage, and I'm walking away.

Back to the road-trip. Well, never fear, the Squareback can pull the puck and we'll still have an aircooled adventure. So I get the puck wheels off and it turns out that the only wheels that are similar that fit the right profile are on the East coast, and cost $150 a piece... I need 3. Oh, and they are 2 weeks away even if I wanted to expedite. So the Puck is in my garage, and I'm walking away.

Okay, no bus, no Puck, but we still have ole' reliable, the Squareback. I'll preface by saying, I'm glad it had a dual circuit master cylinder. Coming off the freeway, Maryn was putting all she had into the brake, and it barely made a difference. Long story short, dear Bethany helped me change the master cylinder and the Square is ready, right? No, of course it isn't, why would it be ready? The generator light is flickering. Bethany and I look at all the connections, and the next day I call Mike Allan. We ran by his place, got some new brushes, and put them in. Still got a flickering generator light and we aren't about to take a 1400 mile trip with the luck we've had leading to this point and still have a generator light flickering.

Okay, so, lets recap... no bus, no square, no puck, but 2 days off of work. Lets take the "Crapmobile" (1993 Fox). Okay, sounds great, except on the way home from work, it decides that the radiator fan, or switch, or relay, or fuse, or something else isn't working and it is overheating. At this point, ready to give all of our EVERYTHING VW away, we decide to rent a car.

1400 miles, not one incident, the brakes worked very well, the motor never overheated, the steering box never drug, the defrost worked great, the wipers were spectacular, the seats were comfortable, the XM radio was amazing, we got nearly 35 mpg and were able to travel at 5 mph over the speedlimit through 3 states, 2 countries, 3 snowy mountain passes and 1 west-coast beach.

VW's for sale.... cheap!

Guest Writer

2011-02-23T20:38:00.000-08:00

Craig here, writing a post about our European Caravan called the Eriba Puck. Here goes! It is a 1969-titled-as-a-1971-Puck in Idaho. We got it this summer and promptly took it out to camp and loved it!

We've had Vanagon campers and Bay campers, but we also daily drive our ACVW's so hauling 3 tons of camping gear around everyday gets cumbersome. So a friend sold us this Puck and we've started tearing it down as it needs some work. We've got an Oregon Coast trip planned in about a month, so my first focus is to get it road-worthy, then I'll start with the fine-tuning.

We'll be pulling it primarily with our freshly redone (I'm talking the mechanic is doing the final checks today and tomorrow freshly done ) 1958 Double Door Panel with a brand-new 1835cc engine. (It has windows now)

We got this bus on casters last May and have been working very hard to get it done, but that post is for another day, this is about the Puck! We've towed it with our 1969 Squareback, and this is definitely another option if we want the Square experience instead.

I just got a shipment from Germany today! I needed some new Hella taillights and Hella reflectors. I ended up getting two taillights and 25 reflectors, so needless to say, I've got 23 reflectors for sale...Cheap! Notice the large stack of reflectors!

Stuff I'm looking for: Window rubber for all 4 windows and Plastic filler moulding (red). I've also got to do something about the tires...they are the original european tires and I don't trust them more than a few miles, but replacements are nearly impossible to find in a decent amount of time, and I don't want to be stranded on the coast, waiting 2 weeks for tires to ship so I can tow her home...but that's just me.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blogger....

2011-02-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

I'm no cinematographer...like, not at all. Fortunately for me, in this day and age, they'll sell anyone with $129.99 a video camera. This means I can take video everywhere. Even while driving to work.

Craig and I went to Buses by the Bridge in Lake Havasu City, AZ last month. It was all kinds of awesome. I've never seen so many buses in one place before.

Here's a little insight into the kinds of things that amuse Craig and me.Your motivation to watch to the end is that you get to see video of Craig, who is normally less than enthusiastic about being photographed (isn't he cute?)

Here's a real gem. I deeply regret having pointed the camera toward my face and having said anything during the filming of this video. Anyway, the point of the video is that the bus engine is functional! Sorry you can't really see it...just enjoy the noise I guess.

Finally, here's a short one, showing the bus actually on the road, moving. As we understand it, this bus hasn't been road worthy in over 15 years, so we're really happy that she's rollin!

Big Accomplishments

2011-02-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

I started school again in January so while I’ve been sitting on my butt all day trying to increase my intelligence, and at the very least, increasing my waistline, Craig has taken complete ownership of the bus project, and he is rocking it.

Big accomplishment #1: the bus is painted. Dove blue—its original color, with grey in the cargo area to match the original grey primer.

Interesting fact—VW didn’t track the exact color codes for their primer, so there’s really no way of knowing exactly what color the primer is on your bus. It’s just grey.

Big accomplishment #2: several months ago, we purchased an 1835cc long-block which had been built and then sat for a few years without ever having been started. We had it torn down and rebuilt, then Craig threw the top end together (it's so easy when someone else is doing it!) I took a 20 minute study break and helped install the engine last weekend. (One thing I love about buses is that all it takes to install an engine is: an engine, a jack, four bolts, and two people…legend has it you can install an engine by yourself…I’m not trying it.)

We very anxiously cranked it and the thing just wasn’t getting spark. Plugs are new, wires are new, so we (meaning Craig) figured it must be the distributor. Ordered up a new distributor which came yesterday. Swapped out distributors, engine was getting spark, and then the battery died. Sigh.

Another interesting fact—Bosch no longer makes replacement distributors for ACVWs. Bummer.

Big accomplishment #3: oh man, this one is HUGE (huger than an engine and paint?) Our bus came with all of the pieces of the front door window assemblies—completely disassembled. We bought all the seals and the whole mess has been sitting on our living room floor for several weeks. I think of it with dread, my blood pressure rises, storm clouds gather, and I pray that they’ll magically assemble themselves. Last night, I got home from class, and Craig had assembled 1.5 of the front door window assemblies! He was all pissed off and tired and all I wanted to do was party, and call all my friends to come see the splendor.

A word to those who don’t know—vent windows are a biiiittch. First, you’ve got the seal that holds the vent window into its casing—which has to be pressed in (Craig used a 6” c-clamp, some pieces of wood, and super human balance to complete the task). Next, is the seal that seals the vent window to the window frame. This thing is a beast. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s about three inches wide by two inches high, with flaps and flanges all over and has to fit into a half inch wide channel. We borrowed a little white plastic pointy flat thingy from a friend, which Craig said made it possible to complete the project.

Look at that felt!

This baby is going to the mechanic on Monday to solve our unsolvable problems (meaning things we’ve tried to resolve and are tired of trying to do). Shifting is sloppy, steering is loose, clutch is wonky, and electrical gremlins plague us (see, that’s what happens when you let me wire a bus).

2010-12-03T11:29:00.000-08:00

I got pretty burned out on both blogging and working on the bus for a while there. Some combination of a recent club meeting, Big Blue’s drivers being back (with baby in tow!), having built up a little money in the VW account (we quite seriously do have a bank account specifically for VW stuff), and having just written a post for our club’s site about our bus has reminded me that—hey, blogging is fun! And hey, VWs are fun! And hey, not ALL of our disposable income is going toward our VWs right now (makes me like them more…knock on wood) and that’s fun!

When last I wrote, we were spending every night in the garage (way too much time) trying to get our bus roadworthy for “Oktoberfest”—a picnic our club has annually the second Sunday in October. We were making great strides and the Friday before the event, we threw in a 1500SP mystery motor. After a substantial amount of cranking, the thing actually started!! It was a satisfactory feeling indeed. I’ll leave portions of this story for another day but, to make a long story short, our friend Bethany helped us out with some troubles we were experiencing with our brakes on Saturday and we were ready to roll (well, kind of—it was a rough ride and we were having some shift rod problems).

Saturday afternoon, we took the bus for a “victory lap”. We took one lap around the block, then decided we were up for a second lap, during which—CRASH PFWAP BUMP SCRRREEEEEECH. My heart jumped into my head and I was confident that the engine had fallen out of the car. In retrospect, that would have been better than what actually happened. At some point during our many brake/e-brake adjustments, someone (we never determined who) left the lug bolts loose on the left rear wheel. Ugh, it still makes me sick. When the fourth bolt popped off, the wheel came crashing down. The sight was absolutely sickening. It was like when you see a squirrel get hit by a car—it is pathetic and nauseating and makes you feel like the world may never be happy again (okay, maybe that’s just me and the members of PETA, but hopefully you catch my drift).

The good news was that a) we were only traveling about 10 mph when the wheel fell, and b) the bus was so low that the wheel couldn’t actually fall all the way off the brake drum. So, basically, the tire hit the top of the wheel well, bending the $#!^ out of the panel and separating the tray from the wheel well, and the drum stayed inside the wheel, causing damage, but probably far less damage than if we had been running stock height with narrow tires.

I ran back to the house and brought the jack back to the bus. We jacked the bus up, pushed it down the alley back to the driveway, closed the garage door, turned around and walked away.

At this point, we’ve recovered enough that I’m actually excited to get out in the garage again. Finally.

2010-09-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

August was a normal August--ridiculously hectic. Now we’re back to the grind (I love September!) and spent Labor Day weekend in one of our favorite ways—sitting on the floor of the garage. Other favorite holiday events in which we participated: sleeping in, visiting pawn shops, and buying a new car.

First topic—the Squareback, which we’ve lovingly (for the time being) dubbed “the squah” (you know, kind of how Cartman would say it). I can’t believe how much attention we have been getting while driving this car. It is a bit ridiculous, really. She is fun, though. Really fun.

Our amazing photographer friend, James took some pictures (more of James’ photography can be found here).

Okay, since we haven't put an ounce of work into this car yet, I don't have to be modest about it. I'm not going to lie--this car totally kicks ass.

Second topic—the bus suspension. We spent about a month being STUCK as far as progress went on the bus rear suspension, rear brakes, transmission mounting, and wiring due to missing bolts. I know this sounds like a simple obstacle to overcome, but it was tricky. We finally took our list of missing bolts/screws to one of our friends who dug a sample of every bolt we needed out of his VW bolt tub. It was actually quite amazing—like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

After overcoming our bolt issues, we were easily able to finish up some little electrical things, finish mounting the transmission, mount the spring plates, and mount the rear brake backing plates.

As I mentioned previously, the rear suspension went together much more easily than did the front suspension, so I’m not going to go into a lengthy explanation like I did with the front suspension, but I will pictures for all the VW super-dummies out there (myself included).

Third topic—E-brake cables. These guys get a topic all to themselves because they were a bit of a nightmare. Here’s what we learned. If you put wide tires on your bus, you DO need e-brake extenders. When lowering a bus, everyone will tell you that you need e-brake extenders. I misplaced ours and after talking with a few of our friends, none of whom had an explanation as to why the extenders were necessary, we moved forward on the project without them. After several hours of clipping spring links, and adjusting the cable tension, and un-doing, and re-doing the cables for several reasons, we finally figured out why we needed the cables. The tires we have on the back of our bus are too wide to mount with the drums mounted—which we knew going into the project. The need for the cable extenders finally became clear when we unhooked the drum/spring plate assembly from the axle tube and we couldn’t lower the assembly low enough to mount the wheel. Aha—2.5 inches of additional cable would make this work. So—off came the drums (again) and out came the cables (again). It was pretty ridiculous, but (somewhat unfortunately), that’s just how we roll.

Parts are taking over...again

2010-08-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

Otto LOVES it when we get shipments of VW parts...

Craig and I do too, but for different reasons than the cat.

Bus Pilots Family Reunion 2010

2010-07-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

To anyone who read my last post and was completely confused by the pictures…

I’m not sure why my brain chose to abandoned me, but I had the pictures entirely out of order on that last post. They’ve been fixed now.

Oh, also, I’ve re-labeled the tie rods—as they were labeled incorrectly before.

Moving on…

The weekend of 7/16 was the annual Bus Pilots Association “Family Reunion”. Here you go: a photo post.

FRIDAY NIGHT CRUISE

We had 50 cars at the end. This means that people didn't get lost--props to the cruise coordinator! (Ahem...what I mean is...you know, if the cruise coordinator wasn't me, I'd give them props.)

Above photo Courtesy of Ethan Page

This bus belongs to Aaron. He has been doing great things with his bus; including having the cut out wheel wells repaired. That's a perfect example of how fashion dictates the awful things we do to our VWs. Ludwig's Driver expressed some concern that we might be making permanent modifications to our bus during the lowering process. I'll take this opportunity to assure anyone else who may be concerned that we have no plans to make any alterations to the frame or body of our bus. Now y'all can rest easy. :-)

SATURDAY MORNING RALLY

This is, admitedly, my favorite part of the weekend where we drive around town, lost, in our VWs in 100 degree heat, following turn by turn directions to an unknown destination.

Rally Photos courtesy of Ethan Page

SUNDAY SHOW

Then there was the show. Lots of cars, lots of people, lots of fun.

Above photo courtesy of David Kvapil Photography

We love our Dremel: and other spectacular tales

2010-07-23T15:54:00.000-07:00

Progress has been a bit slow over the last couple of weeks as we had our annual Bus Pilots Association Family Reunion which has absorbed a lot of our time. Also, Craig has been out of town so now we’re finally getting back into the swing of things.

The front beam is now installed thanks in part to the most excellent observation made by our friend James who pointed out that you can’t install the beam when the shift rod is in position (duh). This meant that we had to find a way to disconnect the very rusted and grimed together front and rear shift rods. Craig was up for the task and went through about 25 Dremel discs cutting through the coupler. Here’s the aftermath.

With the front beam fully assembled and blissfully in place, we moved to the rear setup which (in my opinion) has been far more straightforward so far than was front beam assembly. It basically went like this: insert new axles and axle tubes. Swap out nose cone. Put on new boots. Install new spring plates…and that’s where we’re sitting presently.

Craig has been rather tenacious and resilient with this project thus far. He’s really good at drilling/cutting/hammering very fussy pieces of metal until they give/fall apart/move. Prior to the coupler project, Craig took on the project of drilling out a screw holding one of the cargo doors in place. This literally took 5 hours. Several hardened steel screw removers broke off in the hole, several drill bits litter the garage floor. It was really quite a massacre. The ultimate hero was a carbide Dremel bit which not only drilled through the hardened steel, but stayed sharp, didn’t break and got the job done. Whew. Here’s the aftermath of that project.

The good news—three of the four cargo doors are now installed. The bad news—one of the screw plates fell into the bus frame where the fourth door is supposed to screw in. Those who know splitties understand that this is NOT a good thing to have happened. We’ve ordered some earth metal magnets (or something like that) which we’re hoping will grab the plate and we’ll be able to work it back up to its designated location. That’s the best case scenario. I’ve avoided thinking too much about the alternative scenarios. Time will tell.

Beam Assembly and things Forgotten

2010-06-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

Jasmine is officially gone. Craig called this morning and said this is the worst he’s ever felt about selling a bus. I completely agree with his stance. Jasmine was the bus that taught us that not EVERY bus will immediately require thousands of dollars in maintenance upon initial acquisition. She wanted to run every morning when I got in to start her up. She was amazing in the snow. She started right up the day it was -3 degrees last winter. She really was a great bus…but we’re impatient and are excited about our new project. Really excited.

Thanks Jasmine. It’s been nice knowing you, have fun in Sun Valley—you spoiled rich girl. Party it up with the Kutcher/Willis clan.

Moving on, a couple of things that have excited me about the new bus which I have failed to mention.

1) New ignition switch—which is actually an old ignition switch! Complete with super awesome original VW keys too!

2) Made in West Germany plate. Cool, right?! I love this in the same way that I love my clock which says “Made in the USSR”.

Taking a quick trip back to the wiring harness installation; I actually do have a couple of pictures I want to share. Because we’ve been doing an annoying amount of searching online for pictures that actually show something relevant and tell us what we’re looking at, I’m going to be doing a lot of labeling on pictures moving forward. I hope it helps someone.

I failed to mention earlier that Dawn soap was our savior on the wiring harness project. Also, we had to cut off some of the spades in order to decrease the diameter of the harness (which we had to do anyway since our terminals are old and screw in).

Finally, here’s a glimpse at our work on the front suspension. Our friend Chad has been crucially helpful in getting us started with the correct parts and pieces on our suspension. He came by the other day to walk us through the basic positioning of everything and now we’re actually putting stuff together (which is much more fun than having boxes of VW parts sitting on your kitchen floor…although that is fun too.)

Assembling torsion leaves and control arms:

We started with a 2” narrowed beam and torsion leaves. First, you put the torsion leaves in the beam. There’s a disc in the center of both tubes in the beam. Each is cut to the shape of the torsion leaves when they are lumped together. We found the easiest method of insertion was to start with the widest leave and work our way out to the narrower leaves sliding them in next to those that had already been inserted.

There are three sets of dimples on each set of beams (one at each end and one in the middle. The bolt at the center of the beam screws into the center dimples on each set of leaves to keep them from spinning freely.

Next, install the control arms. You’ll need a rubber bushing for each control arm which slides as far onto the shaft as possible. If there are little pvc/cardboard looking tubes in the ends of your beam, leave those in place and the control arm will push them into the beam as you hammer the arms in (using a rubber mallet).

At the elbow of the control arms, there’s a hole. Hopefully you have four grub screws (they are about 1.5 inches long and are tapered at the ends. They’ve got an allen wrench head. These screw through the holes in the control arm into the dimples at the ends of the torsion leaves. (This all makes perfect sense when you’re looking at it).

Next up—installing spindles. (hopefully tomorrow; wish us luck tonight).

Oh, and we're excited to have a dedicated work space in the garage. We no longer have to move Jasmine in and out whenever we want to work. Look at the bright side, right?

and our hands are dirty

2010-06-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

We started out by sanding like madmen and painted the inside of the front cab. We decided to go with dove blue on this bus—as it was the original color. Dove blue also happens to be my husband’s favorite bus color and I, frankly, don’t like it. It isn’t that I DIS-like it; it just doesn’t do anything for me. Anyway, Craig didn’t have to put up much of a fight on this one because I like to keep history intact when it is feasible.

There was quite a lot of useable paint remaining in the cab so we chose to leave everything we could original VW paint. It looks pretty darn good and I don’t think the transitions are too horribly obvious. It’s a nice mix of clean and patina.

The second project was installation of the new wiring harness. The project took a ridiculous amount of time—three evenings and a Saturday morning. Here’s why: Since the bus is a double door bus, it has a belly pan welded on the bottom, which means that rather than being able to work with the new harness in an open frame channel, we had to string the harness through a big long inaccessible tube that ran the length of the belly pan, accessible only through the frame. That wouldn’t be so hard except for the fact that someone had pulled the old harness without leaving a guide line behind.

First, we had to run a fish puller through this tube. At both ends of the belly pan, there is a plate with a hole in the center through which the fish puller had to go. The problem was, there was no way to see this hole or to know where it was in relation to the fish puller. I say with near certainty that we couldn’t have been successful without my mom’s “SeeSnake” (inspection camera) which allowed us to see the hole and after much labor and frustration, we finally were successful. (I guess we could have cut into the belly pan and frame but I don’t like that idea.) Following this, I started wiring gauges, fuse box, and switches (which was way too much fun by the way). The harness we purchased had matching wire colors to the original harness which was incredibly helpful.

(That's a blurry pic of my mom under the bus. Thanks Mom.)

Now, we’ve begun assembly of the front beam…pictures and info to come!

New Bus in Pictures

2010-06-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

The other day we told my grandparents about the new bus. My grandma inquired “oh, and does it run well?”, to which my mom chortled and responded “they basically bought a chassis”. Okay, so my mom was more or less right.

By popular request, I present to you, in its blogosphere debut—our new chassis.

The new wiring harness is schedule to arrive today. We should have some hopefully not too exciting reports to deliver next week on our wiring adventures.

Oh, and for the record--we aren't missing the other three cargo doors--they just don't happen to be attached to the bus at present.

Out With the Old, In With the Older.

2010-06-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

My father-in-law has grown tired of hearing about VWs on this blog, so today I’m going to start with a different genre of story. :-)

One semester when I was in college, I thought I would major in Statistics. I love numbers and data and thought this would be a perfect field for me. I called my mom (who is a math professor) to report to her my newest choice of path (I went through a lot). Her response to my announcement was: “Statisticians are the whores of mathematics”. Oh…thanks Mom. Her point was that Statisticians sell their skills while REAL mathematicians are poor hermits who go loony and forget to shower and wander the streets in search of answers to numerical quandaries. Something like that anyway. (Back to VWs.)

My real point in telling you this story is that sometimes I worry that readers of this blog will think that Craig and I are the whores of the VW world because we go through so many vehicles. The truth is, that we love to see VWs on the road and we always spend more money on our VWs than we make in selling them. We may be a little anti-frugal at times with our VWs, and we may be a little too passionate about keeping these beasts out of the crushers, but we don’t think we are whores. Hopefully you agree. Also, we have really short attention spans.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

A couple of weeks ago, we started talking about selling BB. Long story short, we listed her just to test the waters and three days later she was gone. Sigh. We’ve got some mixed feelings over here. We’re really disappointed with our timing as we were EXCITED for the Maupin campout in Mid June which now we aren’t going to be able to attend. We’re going to have to wallow in self pity and do some retail therapy buying parts for our new….

’58 double door panel bus! We didn’t think we’d buy another project anytime soon, but one thing led to another and, well, we did. We’re not positive what this baby is going to look like when we’re done (will it be a camper? A 15 window?) but we’re really excited and we should have some serious project blog posts coming up soon. We’re so excited!

In the mean time—does anyone have any friends who would like to buy this beautiful ’65 11 window standard? We love her but kinda need the funds to get the ’58 on the road.

Thanks for reading and for all of your support!

May Day

2010-05-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

Last weekend our club held a swap meet and show and shine. The swap meet was a smash hit and with the exception of the periodic cloud cover and wind, we had a great time at the show and shine too. Oh, and by the way—if you are ever trying to get to Lakeview Park in Nampa, Idaho, don’t Google it. If you do, you’ll wind up in a cul-de-sac in South Nampa and will be late arriving to the real Lakeview Park. Not that I would know from experience or anything.

I didn't much feel like breaking out the ol' camera, so I (again) borrowed pictures from my fellow VW drivers. The photos on the grass were taken by Dustin Wark whose photography skills I greatly admire and who was nice enough to humor me by photographing my dirty bus...who you may notice has a new addition--safari windows!!

Day 4: Kelley Park VW Show

2010-04-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

Kelley Park is a really cool venue for a VW show. I don’t know much about its history but here’s what historysanjose.org has to say about it. “With 27 original and reproduction homes, businesses and landmarks History Park [in Kelley Park] highlights Santa Clara Valley's past. Complete with paved streets, running trolleys and a cafe, this 14-acre site has the charm and ambiance of times gone by.” I would add—is especially spectacular when lined with beautifully restored Volkswagens. For me, it just doesn’t get better than history, Volkswagens, and sunshine (well, my husband too, but I don’t want to get all sappy on ya) all together.

I think this is going to be best described in pictures. Here it is: Kelley Park 2010. (oh, and thanks to my friends for letting me steal about half of these pictures…I don’t usually worry about photo disclaimers on this site but if you are going to use any of these pictures for monetary gain or something like that, then um…ask me first or something like that. Whatever you’re supposed to say.)

After the show ended, we headed home. Again, it was a long drive, but so much fun.

Red Barn: Days 2 and 3

2010-04-22T15:36:00.000-07:00

Friday night, we headed to the Red Barn campout and swap meet. On the way there, we (sadly) spotted our club President’s 21 window bus pulled over on the shoulder of the freeway. This is the 2nd time our President has attempted to take this bus to an out of state show and the 2nd time the bus has broken down before arriving…actually barely after embarking. Sad, yes.

The property where Red Barn takes place is a flea market parking lot which annually fills up with VWs, their owners, their dogs, and swap stuff. This was a seriously old school group. The 1970 bay window that was with us was probably the newest ACVW at the campout. The swap meet was fun and of a pretty decent size. We picked up two hubcaps at $5 each as we had lost two.

Upon leaving Red Barn, our group headed over to Santa Cruz where we walked around for what seemed like hours trying to agree on a satisfactory restaurant for lunch. Eventually the 14 of us got hungry and cranky and ended up at three separate restaurants. (Everyone made up after eating.)

California is beautiful this time of year.

Up next: Kelley Park

Kelley Park trip: days 1 and 2

2010-04-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

We started out bright and early last Thursday morning for our trip to Kelley Park. We were three ACVWs and some other car (I believe it was a Mitsubishi Montero).

Our destination for Thursday night was Sacramento. I’ve made this drive several times in my life but I have to tell you, it is a LONG drive from here in a VW bus. Having said that, it was, of course, a relaxing and wonderfully fun drive.

Friday, morning we spent some time in “Old Sac”. I wish I would have known a little more about its history before visiting, but it was excellent nonetheless. Old Sac is pretty much what you’d guess it is—the buildings and area of town where the modern city of Sacramento began. The buildings date to the mid 1800s and now contain entertaining little candy shops, gift shops, hat shops, and the like. Our favorite was Evangeline’s—an awesome novelty gift shop where we all spent a little cash and time.

Once the money in our parking meters had run out, we headed down to Mark Merrill’s shop party. On the way, a couple of things happened. First, I was navigating in my atlas as I regularly do and could see the shadow of our antenna which I could tell had something on the top of it—unusual. I finally looked out the window…you can see the reflection on this photo.

I’m not going to tell you what it is--or what I yelled into my radio at my friends in the other cars. If you were at Kelley Park, you may have noticed this object on all of the Idaho VWs. So classy.

The second memorable event on the way to Mark Merrill's was as follows. A semi passed our caravan (which happened a lot) and as it did so, it ripped a cooler and small grill off of the top of the luggage rack of the white Westy that was with us and came bouncing down the freeway at our bus. Fortunately, the cooler made its way off of the road just in time and the grill causes minimal damage to our bus' nose. Whew. It was scary. Note to self. Keep only low profile objects in the luggage rack of our Westy.

Back to the shop party. Astonishing. Breathtaking. Indescribable. Sacred. Mark has an amazingly incredible shop/museum where he houses some rare and perfectly restored VWs. I'll let the pictures talk.

Also in attendance was a double cab that was once owned and operated by the California Highway Patrol. Suposedly black is its original color. Sweet, eh?

…and here’s my first look at a Hebmuller. Ooooooo, it was so fantastically beautiful.

Mark also had a room filled to the brim with VW toys, a library full of more VW literature than I’ve ever seen, and a hallway lined with VW ads. Words can’t do this place justice. Seriously, it was astonishing and completely worth the 15 hours of driving it took us to get there.

Up tomorrow: Red Barn.

New Curtains--office geek style

2010-04-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

A while back, I read this post about hanging curtains in your bus "ghetto style" using springs which I thought was a sweet idea and I said to myself--nice. I'm all about rocking ghetto style curtains.

When we were camping at Miracle Hot Springs last month, we needed curtains so we took a bunch of towels (ahem, speaking of ghetto) and hung them up with binder clips which worked fantastically and I've now dubbed this--hanging bus curtains office geek style.

Our bus does not have a headliner which leaves available for our use a couple of really nice ridges all the way around (except on the rear hatch where we've got to use the hatch hinges).

I believe in our mess of a garage we do have the necessary rods for hanging the curtains correctly, but I'm really digging this new method for a few reasons. 1) In theory, the curtains will take longer to get dirty. 2) The curtains won't ever get in the way of the windows while driving (not that this is a huge issue, but it did happen on occassion in our Vanagon). 3) The curtains were beyond easy to make as I didn't have to sew cuffs for the rods to go through or hem them at the bottom. For that matter, I didn't have to be very careful about the size as they won't be hanging all of the time. It was a sweet deal--just surged the edges, made a bag for storage and we were good to go.

The major disadvantage is that fewer people will see these curtains. Okay, come on, they're cute, right? I'm crazy about that fabric.

TOMORROW WE'RE HEADED TO CALIFORNIA!! We're caravaning with some of our ACVW pals and our final destination (please cross your fingers for us) is the Kelley Park show in San Jose on Sunday!! Also, deserving of multiple exclamation points is our plan to visit Mark Merrill's garage on Friday night!!! I've been dreaming about his library for several weeks now.

Adios for now and I'm sure (assuming all goes well) I'll have more VW pictures to share on Tuesday than you'll ever want to see in your life.

Miracle Hot Springs

2010-03-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

We headed out of town Friday night. Destination: Miracle Hot Springs. As I mentioned in my previous post, this was our first road trip in BB and she totally kicked ass. We were very happy with her performance and are feeling slightly more comfortable with the upcoming California trip in 17 days (knock on wood).

We camped in the RV park at Miracle where we’d never stayed before. (On a previous trip, we rented the Queen dome at Miracle which was AWESOME.) Grateful for electricity, our space heater ran all night and we were nice and toasty. I went for a nice moonlit middle of the night walk to the bathroom (stumbling like a zombie as I had left my glasses in the bus) and the campground was quiet and clean and felt safe (which is always nice when camping).

Saturday morning, after a dip in the hot springs (aaahhhhhh) we headed to Craig’s parents house in Twin Falls where we changed BB’s oil (and as a bonus saw Craig’s mom, brother, sister-in-law, cousin Melissa and JAMES our nephew--he’s such a stud.) The good news was that there was only a little metal in the oil which our mechanic warned us would be there as this was our new engine’s 200 mile oil change.

We still can’t believe that she’s actually running.

Here’s our “to do” list before April 15

Install sliding door seal
Install rear hatch seal
Install radio
Fix squeaky speedometer cable (it gets old fast)
Try more solutions for keeping rain from coming in the westy top
Remove tint from passenger window
Remove crappy old foam pieces from the underside of the westy top.
Hope for dry weather in California.

history confusion

2010-03-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the large gap between posts. It is amazing how moving will do that to you. Now that we’re unpacked and de-cluttered and all of that, we’re taking BB camping! It has been way way wwaaaaaayy too long and we are ready to get out of town!

Everyone (please!) cross your fingers for us as we take BB on her first (little 250 mile) road trip. She got new tires today—6 ply, light truck, load range C, 185 R14s for safety and peace of mind.

We picked BB up from the mechanic last night where he said he is very confident that BB was a European bus. Now—I’m confused as I ran the m-code plate through one of the super awesome online m-code decoders which revealed to me that the bus left the VW plant bound for Chicago (with a little stop at Westfalia). I trust my mechanic when he tells us that a) the fuse box is not correct for American buses and was not hacked in. The wiring harness is original to the bus, and b) there is a European license plate bolted into the engine compartment. I had noticed it but hadn’t thought about what it was. Now, having a European license plate in your engine compartment doesn’t exactly mean that a bus was from Europe, but it is just…well, weird. I understand that m-code plate decoders aren’t 100% reliable and I trust my mechanic, but now I’m stuck in royal history limbo. Any words of guidance out there?

She's Alive!

2010-03-04T12:59:00.000-08:00

We picked BB up today and--look!!! Craig actually drove her and she moved down the road willingly with no pushing or pulling or other non-mechanical assistance required! She's got several electrical issues which need to be worked out so I'm going to try my hand at that...again. (Any hints/tips/assistance would be totally appreciated.)

So Much to Say

2010-03-03T13:49:00.000-08:00

Ha! My post title has lured you here under the guise that I have something relevant to say! Well, I don’t (although, do I ever?)

1) We towed BB to the mechanic last week where she sits. Surprisingly this isn’t altogether inconvenient as we are in the process of moving across town and we don’t really need a non-running bus in the garage right now.

2) The Bus Pilots Association had their annual February Freezeout on Sunday, so Jasmine got a nice thorough $8 wash. (Usually we keep it under $5.)

3) Because I have so much to talk about, here are some "run by shootings" (i.e. VWs I passed on my running route a few weeks ago.)

4) Also, we went geo-caching up at Tablerock a few weeks ago and parked next to this bug. It was a really bizarre location to find any, let alone two ACVWs.

FINALLY

2010-02-09T10:13:00.000-08:00

Last night we were feeling unusually energetic and FINALLY completed some small projects that were left undone due to the fact that they’d proven themselves to be pains in the ass on the first and second attempts.

First we FINALLY installed the last remaining window on BB. It was a bugger. As you probably don’t remember, all of the other windows were installed several months ago, but we’d cut one of the vent window seals and had to order a new one (for 49 freaking dollars—stupid seals). The final catalyst to success was breaking out the dish soap and pounding really, really, disturbingly hard and angrily on the window. Sweet victory. Ooooohh yeaaahhhhh.

Next, we FINALLY added transmission fluid to both BB and Jasmine. The functionality of BB’s transmission still remains a mystery, but when we pulled the plug last night there didn’t appear to be any huge metal chunks on it or anything so hopefully that’s a good sign. I had totally unfounded hopes that by some miracle, adding fluid to Jasmine’s transmission would help her stay in 4th gear better, but surprisingly (or not)—no dice.

We FINALLY mounted the “Volkswagen” emblem on Jasmine’s rear hatch. I had received this as a Christmas gift and ultimately, it took three attempts, two people, one step stool, two thimbles and a lot of pressure to get the evil little metal retainers to mount.

Last, we FINALLY screwed on BB’s front and rear turn signals and accompanying lenses. Both of these had been attempted shortly after painting the bus but were forfeited due to the absence of screws that fit (yes, I swear we were using the screws that had come out of the holes to begin with). Now that we are more experienced in the fine art of VW repair (basically—if the original screw doesn’t fit, find one that does), this project was relatively simple.

P.S. Last week we FINALLY took the necessary paperwork to the DMV to get BB's title so when she's ready to roll we'll actually be able to drive her. Minor detail.

2010-02-05T15:18:00.000-08:00

I spent the entire snowy season this winter driving around without a driver’s side wiper praying for good weather. Now that we’re into (mostly) rainy season, I have a couple of tips to share.

1) Rain-Ex. Our friend Alex shared this with us and wow does it work. The only down-side is that watching the raindrops bead up and run off of the windshield is really mesmerizing. Not sure whether driving in a trance is safer or more dangerous than driving without proper visibility.

2) New wiper blades and wiper arm replacements. Okay, I guess that’s not a tip or a trick so much as it is regular auto maintenance. Our driver’s side wiper arm had submitted its letter of resignation, so we bought a pair of new arms from Wolfsburg West (because they only sell them in pairs) and also bought a pair of new blades as ours weren’t blades as much as they were hard, stubby, broken rubber sorry excuses for anything.

One thing I enjoy about the new blades is that they’ve got the WW logo stamped on them—as you can see (or not see due to the crappy quality of the picture) but that makes me smile during my drive home.

Let’s hear it for proper safety precautions!

Craig vs. distributor = distributor wins

2010-01-28T13:18:00.000-08:00

I think I’ll tell this tale from chronological end to beginning.

4. Wednesday night. Finished tearing down BB’s engine—which we'd never done before and was pretty exciting to tell you the truth. We hauled everything to the mechanic where Craig got to take revenge on the case by nailing it with a mallet until the crusty pink bubble gum (grease) holding the case together gave way.

3. Wednesday afternoon. Craig called to say “Hi. I think I need to go to the doctor”. The picture below shows exactly why and what happens if you jam a distributor (with cap) into your face using full force. I believe there was also pressure built up that assisted the distributor in its travels.

2. Tuesday afternoon. Our mechanic informed Craig that the dude who built the engine had used a particular type of grease which is fine unless you let the engine site for three years without starting it (like ours had). The grease had hardened into a weird flaky pasty substance that evidently would have burned up our bearings had we started it. The engine needed to be torn down and cleaned...oh, and put back together too. Grumble…

1. Tuesday morning. We had (more or less) the following conversation: (I should add—for some mysterious reason neither Craig nor I enjoy calling our mechanic. We like him and everything, but we just dread the phone calls.)

Craig: I just really don’t feel good about the engine. Have you thought any more about me taking it to the mechanic?

Maryn: Long sigh. Silence. Okay, FINE.

Craig: Really?! Finally!…but I don’t really want to call the mechanic.

Maryn: Alright, I’ll call him if I can buy Bradford’s cooler.

Craig: Sold.

Pause in conversation.

Craig: You’re an “old stuff whore”! You just sold out for a vintage cooler.

Maryn: Yes, so what’s your point? (okay, actually I just laughed really hard)

In conclusion, while I was super ticked off that our engine had to be torn down, I was glad that Craig convinced me to have it looked at and now hopefully (knock on wood, cross your fingers, no whammies) we’ll have an engine that we can feel confident taking out of cell coverage areas. I got a new/old cooler (isn’t it BEAUTIFUL?) and Craig paid $$ to have his face fixed.

Brakes...

2010-01-25T12:56:00.000-08:00

Craig fighting with the master cylinder. He was ultimately triumphant.

BB’s brakes did not work when we bought her and, having never worked on brakes before, I was terrified that this would permanently debilitate this bus. Our friend Alex came over on Saturday morning to help us install our new master cylinder and bleed the brake lines. He also turned out to be a great photographer.

The end result was that as of 11AM Saturday, our brake pedal will only compress to—oh, I’d say about 5 inches off of the floor. It is SO EXCITING.

As it turns out, bleeding brakes is really fun. Not roller-coaster fun, but definitely more fun than going to a movie—even a movie with popcorn. The operation was pretty seamless and hopefully (knock on wood) the brakes are now functional. We haven’t tried them yet, but one of these days we’ll get up the gumption to push the bus out of the garage and see what happens.

Sweet action shot, eh? See the lovely stream of brake fluid?

Oh yeah, and even though I'm in the driver's seat for both pictures posted here, I'd like to point out that I WAS under the car for the first two wheels--evidenced by the brake fluid stain on my sweatshirt.

Thanks again Alex, you rock!

Alex's super hot bug.

Feels like road tripping.

2010-01-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

I needed Craig’s tough man muscles to help me finish the driver’s seat, so once he got home from Vegas, we knocked that project out. The seats are now installed and the bus feels so much more complete now.

Also, Craig installed the front emblem yesterday (so pretty) and removed the blue sparkly gear shifter and replaced it with a more tasteful wood one.

Lastly, he finished adding new floor panels beneath the passenger and driver’s feet so at lunch today we sat in the bus and went on a fake road trip (one where we sit in the garage).

Craig re-installing the garage door opener.

Our friend Alex is coming over on Saturday to help with the brakes (thank you!!)

The tranny is still a mystery and we’re hoping for the best.

We’re still working on getting a new fan shroud and have decided to go back to a generator rather than an alternator. If you have any really compelling arguments for sticking with the alternator, please share.

The sun has been shining lately which makes me feel like road tripping. Hopefully that time of the year isn’t too far off!

I'd like to boast of progress...but I can't.

2010-01-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

We got the second spacer that we needed for the carb from WW and yesterday got a chance to try AGAIN to install it.

This garage session ended with Craig making violent motions toward the engine with a screwdriver, and a call to our mechanic to beg for help.

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING was lining up quite right which was frustrating to say the least.

BB-sporting her new "Big Blue is a friend of mine" sticker.

We tried to get our chi back by changing Jasmine’s oil. Does anyone have any advice on reducing condensation in your oil in the winter?

Finally, our mechanic called back and the conversation went something like this:

Craig: I’m going to throw this engine in the river—nothing is lining up properly.

Mechanic: Is there anything chrome on it?

Craig: Yeah—the fan shroud.

Mechanic: (Here’s where I have to edit so that nice people will keep reading this blog.) You really need a stock fan shroud.

Craig laughs

Craig: Is that what the problem is?

Mechanic: (editing again.) I hate aftermarket stuff.

We were both incredibly relieved and far less interested in giving the project up all together by the time their conversation ended. Good times.

One down, three to go

2010-01-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

I just finished upholstering the front passenger seat back. Seriously guys, I don't exaggerate. My entire body is shaking from the strain of pulling the bottom of the cover up over the frame. I'm bleeding in two places. My pants are ripped.

The good news is that I was successful. I was planning to finish both seats up today but first, I rather pathetically need a rest. Second, I thought that 8ft of wire would be enough to run through the hems of all four seat covers. (I guarantee you that my husband is laughing at me right now as I'm notoriously bad at estimating distances) 8ft was plenty for one seat cover; not two and definitely not four. Third, I've got to start cooking wontons for the Bus Pilots board meeting tonight. Yum.

TA DA!!

Top End Building

2009-12-31T11:54:00.000-08:00

We’ve been going to town on the top end of the engine (mostly Craig with minimal assistance from me).

We’re a little stuck right now as the alternator is in the way of the carburetor sitting properly in place. The engine in our splitty has about a two inch spacer between the manifold and the carb, but we can’t seem to find another one of those. Any ideas, suggestions, thoughts?

Cool old Boxes

2009-12-16T09:58:00.000-08:00

When we bought Doris (the bus with no rear axle from which we stripped the interior), she came with a whole box of bearings, etc. most of which were rusty and therefore trash, but also most of which were really old and therefore cool. Check ‘em out.

This one is my favorite...

...and here's the one where Otto tried to help...

which ended like this (that's the camera strap he's got):

No snow. Just cold.

2009-12-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of me. Apparently I get crazy eyes when it is negative three degrees outside and I am driving a bus. I was proud of Jasmine yesterday though--she started right up in the morning and only died twice.

We did a lot of trying to accomplish things on the bus last weekend without actually doing much accomplishing of anything. We put forth a serious effort on installation of our final missing window…but didn’t manage to get it in. In better window news, however, Craig installed the front windows—yea!! We had previously had several battles with the window regulators and I was dreading the thought of another fight but Craig worked his magic and they’re in! Apparently Craig is much more efficient when I’m not around…

We also worked on the new seat covers. Somehow I didn’t manage to get an “after” picture. We got the new covers on but haven’t yet fastened them properly as we seem to be missing some integral pieces—ergo the trying without accomplishing much status of the weekend.

We also got a new carburetor and distributor. Craig mocked me in this photo. He said it was obvious I was being a smart ass. I can't blame him for thinking that because I usually am. Truth is that I’m sincerely excited in the photo—it just turns out that my face is not well versed in a variety of facial expressions and my fake excited face is exactly the same as my real excited face. Seriously though, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a carb this pretty.

Engines and pop tops and seat frames, oh my!

2009-11-13T14:59:00.000-08:00

Craig has been working like crazy on our bay window. Last weekend he suspended the pop top from the ceiling of our garage in order to give him room to work on installation.

It was a pretty slick operation if you ask me. The biggest challenge (and we knew it was coming) is our dear old friend Bondo. As mentioned before, BB used to be a camper and then someone started the process of converting her to a transporter, which means that all 75 (I hardly think that’s an exaggeration) of the holes for screws that hold the pop-top and its canvas in place have been bondoed over, which means that as Craig drilled into the roof, bondo pieces chipped away, in turn chipping the paint on BB’s roof. Oh well, we weren’t going for a show vehicle.

As Craig has been cruising through the pop-top project (I’m highly impressed by the excellent work he’s done on this by the way), I’ve been working more slowly on recovering the front seats. So far, no re-covering has happened, but I have successfully removed one of the covers, taking care not to break any of the little metal tabs that hold the upholstery on the frame.

The covers were hashed, but I think that the frames are in pretty nice shape and I’m excited for their future.

After learning that this case was cracked…

We heard about this 1776 longblock which has sat in a box for a few years and was built by Serrano (hopefully before he got tired) and we are really excited. The dorks that we are, we immediately got stuck on our—building of the top end the engine—project when we realized that we didn’t know what size of spark plugs we need. I think we got an answer on this question today and now we’re gonna cruise through this project—I know it. (ha! Yeah right!)

It’s a beauty, eh? We paid extra for the pink Bubble Yumm. (What the heck is that gunk anyway?)

PS I almost forgot to mention that the dude finally showed up to install the windshield and he totally redeemed himself by doing an awesome job and he was really cool to boot.

Eleven Things We've Done.

2009-11-06T14:39:00.000-08:00

1) Sanded down Jasmine’s roof in places that were (I thought) rusty metal. Turns out it was just brown primer—yea!
2) Went on vacation
3) Came home. Lame.
4) Sorted through the miscellaneous parts in our garage (thanks for your help Chad)
5) Took the relevant pieces of the bottom end to the mechanic to build engine for our bay window
6) Did emission testing on Jasmine. She failed (big surprise).
7) Changed Jasmine’s oil
8) Changed Jasmine’s belt
9) Called someone to install our bay window windshield…he hasn’t shown up yet…hopefully tomorrow.
10) Painted the bad spots on Jasmine’s roof (one coat…then it rained).
11) Found out that the case we took to the mechanic is cracked. We’re planning on opening a cracked case museum in our garage.

I do want to point out that Craig did about…90% of all of this stuff. I just hung out at work and interrupted with several phone calls. (Thanks honey!)

Stuff.

2009-10-12T14:24:00.000-07:00

I’m a bit behind here, so I’ll try to keep this interesting enough that you will actually read through the whole thing. Here’s what I will cover (that way if you only are interested in pieces, you can skip ahead): 1) Dubtoberfest, 2) a book I’m reading, 3) new window seals, 4) my best friend—Wolfsburg West 5) working on BB’s camper restoration 6) Oktoberfest.

1) I went to Dubtoberfest on 10/3. A bunch of the local VWs caravanned up to Richland, WA which was a blast. We had a couple of false alarms, but really only one (maybe 1.5) repair required on the trip. One of the guys had an alternator pulley that broke in half. No one had a spare, but fortunately we had one bus on a trailer, so the pulley was robbed from it and we didn’t have to leave anyone on the side of the road to be towed. There were some sweet VWs at the show. I’m working on this art project for my house…long story short—since I already had photos of our local rigs, I didn’t really take any at the show…so I robbed them from Kelly, who takes wonderfully artistic shots. I love them. More can be found here: Also, I picked up a gas cap in the swap meet. (Everyone has their odd obsessions, one of mine happens to be VW gas caps, okay?!)

Cliff's bug won "best of show".

A BPA group shot.

Amazingly original '65 11-window with 28k original miles.

Type 34 Ghia--super sweet.

James' bus. Won a first place award...can't remember exactly what it was, sorry James. :-(

2) This book is so cool. The campers are listed alphabetically and I think I’m up to the letter H—for Hi-Top (those were a real crime!) Craig finally let me order this baby after lusting after it for about a month. (Thank you honey!) It has been quite enlightening.

3) It rained at home while I was at Dubtoberfest and when I got back, I found a big ol’ puddle on Jasmine’s floor thanks to leaks in the windshields (surprise!) I was going to order new seals and Craig suggested that I check to see if I needed any of the others. Turns out that ALL of the windows leaked. So, I’ve been putting in new seals in the pop-outs. I haven’t taken on the rear or front windshields. Hopefully the new seals will help and we won't break the windows.

4) Speaking of ordering window seals, one of my favorite things about Wolfsburg West is that they are SUPER speedy. We received our last order in approximately 48 hours. I love to see their boxes show up.

5) Okay, so I’m not a purist (no surprise here, right?) We’ve been working on BB’s interior. I knew that the camper kits evolved over time, but what I learned this week is that the passenger seat width must have changed at some point as our sink unit is not quite the right size. It must be from a later model. Oops. Also, the drain pipe is in a different location. We’ve decided to do away with plumbing the sink rather than cut a new hole in the floor. Sigh. Maybe someday we’ll get the correct unit. All in all, we are making good progress. We’re going to try to get the engine pieces over to the mechanic this week and I’m ready to start working on the brakes (or at least getting under the bus to look at them).

6) Yesterday was the BPA’s “Oktoberfest” celebration. Lots of VWs, lots of meat, lots of watching people drink beer. A good time was had by all (I assume anyway). This sweet picture was taken of Jasmine and a twin 11-window.

Getting ready for Dubtoberfest

2009-10-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

Craig is preparing for an audit at work, so I'm staying out of his hair this weekend by going to Dubtoberfest up in Washington. I'm not driving a VW, but since everyone else in the club was getting their VWs ready for the drive, we decided to work on ours today too.

We put one of the cabinets and the z-bed in. It was a little depressing at first as we had to remove the seats and the carpet that we had just installed, but I was really excited once we were done. (You'd never guess it, but yellow is my favorite color.)

Pictoral Follow Up

2009-09-29T10:22:00.001-07:00

As promised yesterday--pictures from last week's work.

I didn't want to make a new mattress cover so I washed the original one and it turned out spectacularly.

Yeah, it isn't exactly mounted or anything yet...we needed the garage floor back.

Camper Stuff

2009-09-28T12:38:00.001-07:00

Over the past week, we’ve re-fiberglassed some of the holes in our new pop-top. They’d been done before (really poorly) and hopefully we’ve done a better job this time. I was pleasantly surprised. I did learn that almost nothing takes fiberglass off of your hands once it starts to congeal. Fingernail polish remover seemed to do the trick.

Saturday and Sunday we re-covered the z-bed. After almost settling on some really hotel-ish dirt colored upholstery fabric, we opted for yellow vinyl. I so love it. The seat bottom turned out perfectly. I think the back was a little loose so it looks a little creased after you sit on it, but that’s cool. We also repaired the wardrobe cabinet yesterday so I think that is ready to go in.

For those of you who think we’re being a little backwards by working on all of the cosmetics of the bus before the mechanics, we are ready to have the engine machined, but the machinist is out of town so as soon as he gets back, we are very excited to get that ball rolling. We have yet to totally agree on a size. I’m pretty comfortable with 1776, but Craig wants something manly—1835 or super manly—1915.

I seem to have neglected to upload my pictures to Picasa before leaving this morning, so I’ll do another post later today containing the pictures from our recent activities.

Trip to the Bug Ranch

2009-09-16T09:17:00.000-07:00

We got BB’s interior all put together just in time for us to change our minds and decide to make her a camper. So…I guess we’ll be taking those seats back out after all.

We recently acquired this:

(and all of the other pertinent pieces of the bottom end of a 1600 dual port) and are planning to have it machined and bored and all of the other things of which I only partially understand the definitions that involve making this a happy, smooth, 1776 (or 1835, or 1915 we haven’t totally agreed 100% yet) engine. We’ve also got most of the top end sitting in a very unsightly pile of VW parts in the corner of our garage. Since it will take several weeks to get the engine ready to be put back together, we figured that we might as well get going (again) on the interior in the meantime.

We took yesterday afternoon off and made a trip to the Bug Ranch. After hopping in a truck (which incidentally had a shovel in the bed) in the middle of the desert, not a VW (or anything else) in sight, with a rather, how shall I say this…eccentric gentleman, I was quite relieved when we actually arrived at the junkyard and saw that we were going to be able to take home quite a few useful parts and pieces. Rick--the owner of the Bug Ranch turned out to be very accommodating and helpful and we were glad to have made the trip.

We strapped our new pop top onto the top of Jasmine and filled her up with almost everything we need to get BB camper worthy again.

As you can see, the “clean” side of our garage is taking a hiatus from its traditional function.

Words Fail

2009-09-11T10:21:00.001-07:00

Some people say that a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say--words are great, but when they fail, use pictures. This post has been due for a week, but I just couldn't write it...

Oh, and if you'd like to purchase any of my amazing illustrations, they're available for 25 cents plus shipping.

So, now our plan is to turn BB back to her original Westy form. I don't know much about bay window Westfalia buses other than that they are wicked cool, so I hope to have some dumb questions as we go along. I'm wondering whether it is going to be a) nearly impossible, b) really expensive, or c) relatively easy to find an old Westy top. The Negative Nancy in me is confident that they're going to be impossible and really expensive. I hope to be wrong.

To our faithful readers: please don't turn your backs on us during this interim period during which we have no working VW camper! We'll still have plenty of poor illustrations, silly photos, horribly written stories, and general VW goodness on our blog. Thanks for reading!

The Windows are In

2009-08-25T12:08:00.001-07:00

Saturday, we had some guys come over who are part of the Bus Pilots Association. Chad was our expert--and he taught us all how to install windows. We are so grateful for his help. The installation ended up being much easier than I had anticipated…as long as you have thin nylon rope and four people working on the window.

I’ve heard it said that people have done this job alone. I think that’s a VW urban legend.

We are still missing one window and the windshield. I went to pick up the pizza and when I got back, the guys were working on installation of the windshield. Just as I walked back into the garage, the windshield cracked all the way down the middle. I think I was the least disappointed of anyone there seeing as how I hadn’t put any energy into the installation of said windshield.

As you may recall, we pulled all of the windows out of Doris before having her hauled away, therefore, we had two windshields. We decided that we’d rather not risk breaking a second windshield and left the task for a professional. In light of this, the only advice we have to offer on installation of a bay window windshield is—don’t push hard on the center of the glass.

The other window is missing because someone (not protecting anyone here, I just can’t remember who it was) cut the vent window seal when we removed the windows. Wolfsburg West’s seal kit doesn’t come with replacement vent window seals, so we had planned to just re-use what we had. This worked great for the two seals that we hadn’t cut. The bad news—that one freaking vent window seal is going to set us back $50. Lame.

All setbacks aside, BB looks fantastic with her new windows. The window tinting compliments the yellow paint very nicely—she’s one hot mama!

Oh, and not to overshadow BB's windows or anything, but here's Chad's horribly fantastic '66 21 window.

Interior and Emblems

2009-08-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

We’ve been working on BB’s interior. Craig came home from camping and helped me come up with a solution for the panels and here they are! They aren’t original or anything, but I think they look pretty decent. Same with the carpet. I spent all morning on Saturday scrubbing these carpets on our front lawn and they turned out to be in good shape. I don't want to glue the carpet down, so it is just sitting there right now. I'm not sure what negative impacts this might have, but until I think of any, this situation seems good to me.

I didn’t want to put the panels on the back of the drivers and passenger seats as I thought it looked better without and that area is one of my favorite parts of the paint job. I thought it would be a shame to cover them up. Craig conceded. He must love me. :-)
Also, we purchased both emblems from a guy in Oregon (Oh Oregon, we love you) as BB came with neither and received them last week. Craig was napping when they arrived, so he woke up with a shiny VW on his chest.
We put the rear emblem on last night. When we removed Bluebell's emblem to paint, we had rather flipantly dropped the rubber pieces that hold the emblem on, on the ground as we had broken the little pegs in the process and thought them to be disposable. Last night when we went to put on the new emblem we realized that we had no rubber pieces...but I knew they were on the ground somewhere. After a bit of searching, we were miraculously able to find three black rubber pieces (the fourth peg was broken so three were all that we needed). Yea!We are still trying to figure out how to mount the front emblem. Our best guess is that this bus had a wheel on the front—as it was a camper and then someone put bondo over the holes. In light of this I’m pretty apprehensive about drilling into bondo, and potentially maiming the nose of the bus. I’m half tempted to leave the emblem off, but the nose looks so sad without it. Suggestions anyone?

Introducing Jasmine.

2009-08-14T21:25:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday one of my co-workers sent me a link to an 11 window '65 splitty. It looked to be in solid shape and was decently priced and I sent the link to Craig.

We went to look at the bus--just for fun. We told the seller that we are bus people and he asked whether we had anything for a partial trade. Without having really discussed this previously, I said "well, that one I guess" pointing to Bluebell. You can use your powers of deduction on the rest of the story. It is a bit foggy, but somehow this beauty ended up in our garage. (I'm still kind of laughing about this as it was so unanticipated.)

I'm still not totally clear on the history--I've got the M-code partially decoded, but I've never done a splitty M-code before so I'm having some trouble. As she sits, she has a Z-bed in the back with no middle seat, and a jump seat--very beautifully constructed by the previous owner. Personally, my favorite features are: first--she is charming to drive, second--the headliner--it is original and only has a few holes, and third--the floor. I have a freakish obsession with linoleum. When we went to look at Jasmine, there was a rubber mat on the floor, but I could see linoleum peeking through which I found to be terribly exciting. B-e-a-utiful.

The bad news--I think Craig and I may have to do rock-paper-scissors every morning to see who gets to drive Jasmine.

Craig went camping tonight and his request was that I relax while he was gone. Naturally, when he said "relax" I heard "work on BB". I thought I would take on the tedious task of installing the interior panels. There are a LOT of screws. This was my reaction when I found the bag of screws tonight.
As it turned out the screws are not the right size, which is royally frustrating. I ended up cleaning the garage instead in preparation for "garage night" this coming Saturday. Some folks from the local VW club are going to help us install BB's windows. I'm hoping the result will be that the seals will look more like seals and less like snakes on our living room floor.

"If you're in such a hurry you could lower a rope or a tree branch or find something useful to do."

2009-08-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

Progess has been slow but sure lately on BB. Slow progress tends to be easier on the pocketbook, so I’m not complaining.
We had worked so hard and fast to get BB and Bluebell ready to paint that we were completely burnt out by the time the paint was on the buses and Craig’s brother had left. We took a couple of days off and, as I mentioned earlier, we started putting things back together last week.

Even though we had carefully labeled everything that came off of Doris, I seem to be repeatedly meeting the challenge of screws not quite fitting in holes on BB. I’ve almost got all of the lights in and Craig has been working on removing the wheels so that we can paint the rims. You’d think this would be about a 15 minute project. The problem is that the lug nuts are STUCK. Craig, his dad and his brother combined forces and attempted to remove one of them two weeks ago. They gave up.

My big tough husband is making progress, but it is taking about 16 times longer than anticipated.

I keep getting heat for “forgetting” to put pictures on the blog of myself and only including pics of Craig, so here you go. A picture of me. How lovely. PS. I did a write up last night of our camping/caving weekend at Shoshone, but Blogger was being a *%&$# and I lost the post. If Blogger was an actual physical object, I would have kicked it. Anyway, more to come on that once I’ve regained the energy that I require to tell stories; which, for me is not a small amount.

Sunshine and The Wave

2009-07-31T15:31:00.000-07:00

A neighbor of ours came by yesterday and said “how are Sunshine and The Wave doing?” I found this amusing on several levels. (He was talking about Bluebell and BB.) Makes ‘em sound like a 70’s rock band, don’t you think?

“The Wave” got her missing piece of trim this week. It is amazing what a difference one little piece of chrome makes.

“Sunshine” has headlights again. She looks much more alive now…as long as you ignore the gaping cavity that is the engine compartment.

I took pictures of BB with her eyes intact this morning on my way out of the house. I was excited because I happened to have the camera in my backpack. It wasn’t until I got to work that I realized that while I did have photos, I didn’t have any way to get the photos from my camera to my computer. Go me.

We’re going camping tonight. We still are without a winch (because I just don’t want to pay for it) and our oil temperature gauge is working sporadically. Hopefully it will be a mild and not a major adventure.

Hobo Bus

2009-07-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, I was at the State Historical Library. Why you ask? Uh…Craig was out of town and that was the most exciting place I could think of to go (no really—I’m serious).

Anyway, I found this picture of a bus that I thought I’d share. It was labeled “Hobo Parade Boise State College 1968”. Had to laugh as I’m not sure what a Hobo Parade is, but I thought it was amusing. Maybe it was the fundraiser that paid for our blue football turf.

Wet Paint

2009-07-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

We've been cramming to get everything ready for Craig's brother to come paint the buses and finally, we've got two freshly painted buses in our garage. They turned out beautifully. I'm going to keep things sparse as far as words go here because really the pictures speak for themselves.

...and the kids had their fill of VW action for the day as well.
Whew. Today we rest.

Before and After Part 1

2009-07-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

At long last, here are the before and after photos of BB's interior and top half.

Before: We lost count at 65 wasps nests, 10 mouse nests, a bucket of rocks, a random assortment of sticks, one nail stepped on (and the tetnus shot that followed), and a whole lot of dirt.
The floor before being washed.

The floor after having been washed.

After many hours of rust removal. (Again, the red you see is primer.)

After: Oo-la-la--fresh VW Cream White paint.

Exterior Before: (I guess that's the best picture we took of the outside.)

After:

Bus Pilots Family Reunion 2009

2009-07-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

Another reunion has come and gone. We seem to have progressively more fun every year at the Bus Pilots Family Reunion. This year was filled with the cruise, the rally, the show and some parties. I saw three garages over which I have not stopped drooling, met awesome people, Craig drove what is (in my opinion) the sexiest splitty in Boise (see the photo below--thank you James--that is probably the most sincere excitement I've ever seen in my husband's eyes), and we were filled with visions of Volkswagens dancing in our heads. Also, Craig entered Copper in the show this year and won an award (okay, we might have been uncontested in our category, but whatever, a plaque is a plaque) for best air cooled type 2, 1980 or newer.

Type 2

Type 1 and Type 3

Our friends Sam and Jessica (and Max and Ramona, but you can't see them).

I will post pictures this week of BB's fresh white top and interior. We're painting the yellow this coming weekend. We're also hoping to have BlueBell's body work done by then so we can slap a fresh coat of Diamond Blue on her.

Painting Update #1

2009-07-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

Craig's brother is about 3/4 of the way done with painting the white portion of BB. Craig is acting as the "site manager" meaning he is using his most excellent powers of observation while Chris paints. (Maybe he is doing more than this, I don't know because I'm trying to stay out of the garage as much as possible in order to maintain sobriety long enough to make the kids lunch.) The fumes are horrendous--my poor pregnant sister-in-law is confined to the back yard.

It looks awesome so far!

Ready (as we'll ever be) To Paint

2009-07-09T22:15:00.000-07:00

We're finally ready to paint BB. Craig's brother is coming on Saturday to show off his mad painting skills. It is very exciting! I never cease to be amazed by the beauty of a fresh coat of paint.

One of the obstacles to our painting adventures moving forward has been the red bus (Doris) who has been taking up half of our garage. (Yes, we're painting the car in our garage and we're aware of the inherent dangers of this situation, but thanks for worrying about us.) Doris, as you may recall has only a front axle. Makes for difficulty of transportation. As it turned out, James--the guy who towed Doris to our house to begin with--is a VW guy and wanted to take Doris, so thankfully, he came and picked her up tonight. I didn't manage to find the camera until she was almost on the tow truck, but the video gives you the general idea.

Here's BB primed and ready to go. Well, she's not so much ready to go in the traditional sense--she won't actually go anywhere without an external force. We did have a really good time pushing her out into the street for washing. As Craig sat in the driver's seat and I started to push her down our sloped driveway, we really were not sure just how much it was going to take to stop BB from running up into our neighbor's house. Fortunately she didn't get too much speed built up. Brakes are overrated.

For the record--the areas that look rusted in this photo are actually red primer...yeah, we're wondering how well white paint will cover the red primer too.

Bluebell went to the shop shortly after my last post as Craig and I had attempted to do a little mechanic work and in order to avoid doing serious damage, we towed her to our mechanic. I don't even want to talk about the bill. No, seriously, it was BAD. Long story short--our mechanic did a little rebuild of Bluebell's engine using some of the components from BB's engine. I guess the good news is that since we got her back yesterday, she's been running great. She'd better continue that way for a while because the coffers have run D-R-Y.

One bad engine, one old Subaru and one too many cars in the driveway.

2009-06-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

Good news--we finally have a name for the blue bus. We're calling it BB. The naming process was accelerated out of necessity by the fact that we now have--yes, count them--two blue buses.
Intoducing BlueBell:

Craig sends me a craigslist posting for a car approximately once per every 1.65 days, so it was no surprise to me when the morning after we got the news about BB's engine I got the craigslist link for BlueBell. She is a 1970 deluxe transporter--mostly original, right down to the radio, and gas
cap.

We took BB's engine down to our mechanic to get his opinion on the motor's condition--long story short--he informed us that the engine was completely shot. This was a posibility that we were somewhat expecting, but not fully prepared to deal with. Our greatest hope was that there were simply missing hoses...and our realistic hope was that the case would be solid and everything would be rebuildable, but as it is, the case is cracked, pistons are shrunk, and we're back to square one.

Ultimately we aren't sure what our plans are at this point other than we are still going to fix BB up, but we don't know what to do about the large cavity in the engine compartment. We're painting her on July 11th. We're about ready to get rid of the red bus frame (which my grandma has lovingly named "Doris"). We are having a really good time having four VWs at our house, but I think our neighbors are getting concerned. We've got the Subaru on craigslist, but apparently no one is interested in an old--but not old enough to be cool--Subaru with over 200k miles...should have seen that one coming.

Oh, AND, the extra bonus to buying BlueBell is that her previous owner is a painter and we had been wanting to paint our house. Thank you Lawrence for the beautiful bus and the beautiful paint job--seriously, it is gorgeous.

Foresight Required.

2009-06-13T20:40:00.001-07:00

I had a post typed up in Word but my compy is being a dork and when I try to paste the text I had typed, Explorer shut itself down...repeatedly. So, instead of the post I had planned for tonight, I thought I'd share one of my favorite VW ads. I have this one saved as my desktop wallpaper. Its irony makes me chuckle every time I go to update my VW spending spreadsheet. I always wonder whether, when VW began producing these cars, they had ANY clue as to the kind of insanity they had started.

Bright, Bright Sunshiny Dash.

2009-05-22T14:52:00.000-07:00

On Monday night, Craig started removing the dash from the blue bus in preparation for painting. We had planned to remove it and then replace it with the one from the ’72, which looked much nicer. Craig had suggested using ArmorAll to see if the dash would clean up, but I was confident that we should bail. We were hesitant to use the newer dash because we are trying to maintain originality where it is feasible, but it seemed like the best thing to do. On my way home on Tuesday, I called Craig and he said he had a surprise, so I thought for sure he had finished removal of the dash. When I got home, I was incredibly and pleasantly surprised to find that he had cleaned up the dash in the ’68 and it looks freaking fantastic. I was totally floored. (Okay, we're still missing the radio, but you know, minor detail, right?)

We are headed up to Washington tonight to go to the Sasquatch Music Festival! We are traveling by way of Portland which is completely unnecessary, but we like Portland not to mention that we’ve run out of books to read since our last visit to Powell’s. We haven’t been driving Copper much lately and we are so excited to get back in her and spend some time re-centering ourselves VW style. Farfegnugan baby.

Now that's a little thing we like to call progress.

2009-05-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

RustMort—my new best friend. Do, however, bear in mind that RustMort WILL eat your skin. Quite literally. I have been wearing gloves, but managed to get a few drops on my legs and ignored the mild burning sensation until I looked down and found a number of “little volcanoes of pain” (that was Craig’s description). Basically the Phosphoric acid ate a couple of layers of skin. Also, there’s one on my neck. That one looks like much like a hickey. How fun.

Craig snapped these photos this morning and when I saw this one of the roof, it made me almost giddy. I don’t have a “before” of the roof, but if I did, you’d say “its a miracle! Where’d the rust go”.
We got the engine out via our special mix of: The Idiots Guide, Tom Wilson’s book on rebuilding, a little creativity, four jacks, and Craig’s muscles (oo la la).
Also, we are planning to paint the bus yellow and were pleased to find a little spot of yellow inside the gas door, so in order to make ourselves feel more like purists, we’ve originated a legend about how the bus left the VW factory white, but Westfalia painted it yellow. This would mean that yellow was basically its original color. Yep…that’s how it happened.

Why take the engine when you can have the whole thing?

2009-05-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

Here’s a lesson in overcoming objections.

If you can’t find a VW bus—make one out of a Subaru.

You've got to admit that they're kind of cute.

Photos courtesy of "Michael Hansen's Hikes" on Flickr.

Nature is so patient.

2009-05-04T10:18:00.001-07:00

It isn't huge progress, but the floor is looking slightly better. It is amazing how much time I have spent on this floor. I keep having to remind myself that the rust took years to get there and I'm hoping to make it go away in hours.

Oxidation Apprehension

2009-05-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

First matter of business. Last night was I was looking at my pathetic garden and wanted to blog about it, but it really is not VW site appropriate so I'm going to revive my old blog. http://www.minniemag.blogspot.com/ Come here for VW info, and then if you care to, go there to read about everything else.

Okay, back to VWs.

I swear there was less rust on this floor before I washed it...and no, I didn't create more rust by leaving water on the floor. :-)

I'm currently taking suggestions on what the best rust reversal methods are. Most of what we have here is surface rust. The base of the wall on the passenger side is a bit sketchy. We'll see how that goes. At some point in the past, Craig had used that pink gooey marine gel which, we tried on this project, but in my opinion it didn't do much. We are planning to replace the floor under the driver and front passenger seats, but I think the rest of it is salvageable. Wish me luck.

History.

2009-04-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

Here’s the original user’s manual from the still to be named blue bus. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call it “New VW” This was very exciting as it was the first time we’ve found vintage memorabilia of any sort in our VWs.

How people’s car-esque of VW to include an engine diagram.

Maintenance records for one owner…note the purchase price in the upper right hand corner. This is exactly what we paid for it 24 years later. Therein lies the beauty of owning really old cars.
I was giddy with excitement when I found the M-code. Craig doesn’t find M-codes as enchanting as I do. Am I wrong here people? Aren’t they are freaking fantastic?!

What we discovered from our M-code was that we aren’t going to restore this baby to its original form. Sorry purists, we disappoint yet again. New VW was white, was a Westfalia, and was imported to San Francisco (is that weird?) in 1967. If you want your VW to be white, that's great, but I love color and this car can acceptably painted any color, or all colors simultaneously for that matter. I’m not painting it white.

...and then there were three.

2009-04-28T21:06:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen a tow truck move a car that has one axle and no wheels? I hadn't...until tonight. I rather unfortunately missed the miracle that followed--the tow truck depositing said car into our garage. Hydraulics are amazing.

No, we haven't gone on a bus buying rampage, we just happened to find one containing SEVERAL things we needed for our restoration project.

Thanks to Pam for selling us her bus. Thanks to B&W Wrecking Service for saving the day once again. Thanks to Grandma and Grandpa for driving me home.

Seriously, what's our problem?

2009-04-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

I'll start this one by borrowing a quote from Ludwig's Drivers. "Sometimes I forget that these cars aren't really supposed to be around anymore." Suffering from this same forgetfulness, we purchased a '68 bus this week. It is a '68 bus...with '71 axles (disc brakes)...and '74 seats...a roll of carpet...an engine...a transmission...a disconnected front bumper, and that's pretty much it. Literally. (Oh, and thanks again to everyone who sent us links and gave us advice on what to buy.)

We had been going back and forth about whether to buy a project bus or one that was in comfortable and driveable condition. We found this bus (who we've yet to name), and its absence of cancerous rust and an incredibly straight body charmed us into buying ourselves one big ol' heck of a project. We are very excited (ignorant I'm sure, but excited). Hailey--did I ever even mention that we have a Subaru?--got kicked out of the garage, and we are once again a two VW family--hooray!

The new bus has been parked since 1995--our best estimate--and was insured at that time, so we are guessing that A) it ran then and B) the guy who had it parked had good intentions of restoring it. He obviously did some really well done body work, which we are totally excited to not have to do, so thank you anonymous owner!

Here's what the bus looked like when we got her/him (it is currently experiencing gender identity confusion).

...and here are the post junk toss photos

I'm frankly feeling a bit overwhelmed...mostly due to the fact that I replaced the engine compartment seal on Penny this week. Everything went great until I went to start her the next morning and as I did so, a strong smell of gasoline combined with a poorly running engine took the wind out of my sails. I was so careful not to knock anything out of place! I am mad about it and have not yet figured out exactly what the problem is. As I stared at the engine and flipped back and forth between help manuals, I had to ask myself why I love these blasted cars so much and the answer is that we have no idea...we just do.

Out of balance with a project for Penny

2009-04-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

Following our failed Grand Canyon road trip of 2008, we started asking around about what might be causing our engine to heat up so darned quickly. The one thing we heard repeatedly was to check the engine compartment seal to ensure that it did not having any holes/missing areas—in other words, make sure it truly was acting as a seal. Rather than doing this immediately, we came up with a quick, albeit horribly tacky remedy, which was to bolt a 20 inch fan to the bottom of our Vanagon. It does the trick, but it really is a temporary solution.

Finally, we got around to figuring out what the engine compartment seal was and when we looked at ours, discovered that about half of the seal was missing. The problem with this is that (being an air cooled vehicle) air is pulled into the engine to cool it, but because the seal is broken, hot air is being pulled into the engine, rather than cooler air. Does that make it an “air heated” engine? (Oh, how witty.)

The images below show the gaps in our engine compartment seal…and also the brand spanking new seal we purchased (and quite obviously have yet to install).

One final thought for today…if you happen across a ’71 bus (transporter, not camper) with minimal rust, that runs and has a decent body, we “have a friend” who is in the market for said vehicle... Oh come on, don't act surprised, you knew it was coming. We tried having only one VW, but our garage feels like a yin with no yang.

The Riviera Curse

2009-04-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

We love that Penny is a Riviera—really—we do. When we bought her, we didn’t know a ton about Westys and Rivieras, just that the camper conversions were done by two different companies (Westfalia and Riviera respectively in case that’s not obvious) and we knew that Riviera tops pop straight up and Westys pop up at an angle.

The thing we did not at all anticipate is the near impossibility of finding replacement camper parts for Penny. One of the biggest differences between Westys and Rivieras is that VW contracted with Westfalia to build Westys, while Rivieras were shipped from the factory to distributors as standard (non-camper) busses/vans and the distributor contracted with Riviera to do the camper conversion.

This has caused the following complications.

1) Historically, I’ve found that a lot of the really solid information about VW history comes from the UK. I’ll bet that a lot would come from Germany too, but my ability to read the German language is impaired (okay, nonexistant). The point being that since Riviera conversions were done in the US, there isn’t much information coming from Europe on the subject.

2) Also, there isn’t much information in the US. I searched for info about Rivieras on Wikipedia. I realize that Wiki is not a reliable source of information, but this further reinforces my point. Even Wikipedia, where you can find information about EVERYTHING, only has this to say about Riviera.
“Riviera Motors was the Beaverton, Oregon based regional distributor of Volkswagens. Westfalia Campmobiles were selling too quickly for the distributorship to meet demand at the time, so beginning in 1965, Riviera Motors contracted with ASI (Automotive Services, Inc.), based in the Vancouver, Washington area, for Type 2 camper conversions. ASI/Riviera campers were converted to Westfalia-styled Campmobiles from panel and passenger vans during the split windscreen era, with conversions predominantly based on passenger van models after the 1968 introduction of the bay window Type 2. Production continued until sometime in the mid 1980's, with conversions built on the Vanagon (T25) platform after 1979.”

That is ALL that Wiki has on the subject!

3) There just aren’t that many Rivieras. This means that not that many people need parts, which means that no one has found it economically viable to produce replacement parts.

4) ASI has gone out of business. I did find a parts catalog that contained part numbers for all of the parts I need. It was from 1985.

I was able to find the following two very helpful links, but that's about it:
http://www.type2.com/library/camper.htm
http://www.rivieraregistry.com/history.php

All of this makes me very curious and also makes me think that I will be visiting the Beaverton and Vancouver public libraries in the future. Research project!

If you are reading this and would like to correct me on anything regarding this post, PLEASE do! I would love to be wrong about pretty much anything I’ve said above.

Road Trippin' Utah

2009-04-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

Craig and I wanted to take a road trip during March. We decided on Yellowstone—after which we discovered that there is only one open entrance to Yellowstone in March and that is on the Montana side. This would have added approximately 17 hours of driving time to our three day trip. In the words of Strong Bad “beleted”.

We decided instead to road trip through Utah. Not my most favorite place in the world—that’s where I went to college. They were not the best four years of my life. All of this aside, the mountains in Utah are absolutely breathtaking, astonishing, enchanting, and other similar adjectives.

Friday night we drove as far as we could without falling asleep at the wheel which turned out to be right near the Great Salt Lake. Considering the number of times we’ve been to Utah, it seemed a bit pathetic that neither Craig nor I had seen the Great Salt Lake. We decided to make our way to Antelope Island (in said lake). The bad news was that Antelope Island closes at dark (I wish I would have known this before driving several miles off of the freeway). Grrr. In the end, we parked Copper in a church parking lot which was near the entrance to Antelope Island. Free lodging—I’ll take it. The next morning, we looked from a great distance at the Great Salt Lake and called it good. We then were followed through town by a really creepy cop who circled around the Wal-Mart parking lot the entire time we were buying chocolate milk. Saturday morning, we met up with Craig’s friend Joe, and spent a great hour and a half or so at Starbucks catching up. Well, Joe and Craig caught up—there wasn’t much catching up for me to do seeing as how it was my first time meeting Joe. (I know how much you appreciate my irrelevant details.)

Craig and I then screwed around for several hours in Salt Lake and Park City. We tried to take Copper to visit her last owner but she wasn’t home, after which we took the back road from Park City to Provo which was gorgeous. The mountains were, as I said before, incredible.
After trying to find a legitimate campground (they were all closed until April) we found some random place to park our bus in Provo Canyon and camped free for the second night in a row. We hiked through the snow up to a lovely waterfall and got some nice R&R in Copper.
Sunday morning was spent showing Craig around BYU campus—he was surprisingly interested in my tour. His presence also minimized the inevitable self esteem drop that happens when I am in Provo. Sunday afternoon we caught up with Chris and his wife—another one of Craig’s friends which was really fun. Those boys have some hilarious stories.

After getting caught in a nasty ice storm, we found lodging in another church parking lot in Brigham City on Sunday night which made our trip entirely lodging free. Hooray! The nice thing about Utah was that we could be really picky about finding a church parking lot. We rejected three in Brigham City (keep in mind, neither of us had ever been in this city before and we had neither maps nor directions, we just wandered aimlessly) before we found a parking lot we found to be adequate. We also found the most gorgeous tabernacle I've ever seen (the pictures don't do any kind of justice).
Monday we headed to Lava Hot Springs, but before actually arriving, we found Maple Grove Hot Springs which was off of highway 30. It was a few miles off of the road and we’d never been there, but it turned out to be pretty nice and we had the place to ourselves. It also afforded us the opportunity to take a hot shower. (Oh sweet cleanliness!) That’s one thing I love about the mountain west--there are hot springs aplenty.
Next up on the road trip docket: Sasquatch Music Festival in May. (Yippee!)

Arrowrock Dam

2009-03-16T09:32:00.001-07:00

We went camping over the weekend above Arrowrock Dam.
Arrowrock is probably our favorite—get out of the city NOW before we suffocate—camping sites.
The dam itself is one of my favorite parts of driving up there because it looks so ominous. I don’t know that its ominousness is properly conveyed in the picture, but here it is.

Our camping spot—we were very excited to try out our gorilla-pod (thank you REI dividend).

A nice “Road Less Traveled” photo op.

A really crappy picture of a rabbit.

There is always condensation on the windows when we wake up…it was really cold, so this time there was ice.

Thank you Arrowrock—it was another most excellent adventure.

Oregon Coast

2009-02-24T21:44:00.001-08:00

We finally have completed what I would call a successful “road trip” in Penny. We’ve taken here lots of places before, but nowhere more than about 350 miles. Last weekend, we actually made it to the Oregon coast, halfway down the coast, and back. Hooray! This was about 1400 miles (Craig will correct me on the exact mileage later, but he is snoring next to me with a cat on his head and would probably be annoyed if I woke him up to ask for the answer).

We had such a good time that I almost cried when we got home yesterday. We had two reasons for being happy to be home 1) we missed our cat (I mean cats--plural--yeah, we totally missed you too Couch), and 2) you can‘t pump your own gas in Oregon, which we don‘t particularly enjoy.

At the beginning of our trip, we decided to stop at every feasible, Dairy Queen that we passed and get a Dilly Bar because, well, we like doing random things. This proved to be great fun until we saw three Dairy Queens within about an hour. I swear that forth one did not exist. It was a Wendy’s, I’m sure of it.

This trip was awesome because we had NO plans. Well, we had the plan to get to the Oregon coast and we had to be home for work this morning, but other than that, NO plans. We had really good luck with lodging, three nights for $46--not bad, eh? We also learned that with premium gas, a tailwind, and a downhill stretch, Penny will go 80 mph . We also learned that when they say there is dense fog going over Meacham summit, they mean DENSE. We estimated 10 ft visibility…of course, that may have been in part due to our oh so lovely headlights which Craig swears you can’t tell whether they are on or off.

Here's the trip in pictures.

Some beach somewhere. I'm judging by the cleanliness of my hair that it was the beach at Seaside.

Campsite #1

The trip odometer rolling to 1000

Amazing fused glass in the Newport Aquariam

More fused glass. It was breathtaking. (Then again, I do really love fused glass.)

"Welcome to Oddwater--where its okay to be weird" We felt so at home!

Couldn't help myself...

Multanomah

Campsite #2

Craig waking up...and the new curtains.

Some beach somewhere.

Jer Bear bus.

Campsite #3

Sand dollar hunting. Unexpectedly enjoyable.

Modest

2009-02-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

Maryn is too modest to say this, but I am quite proud of her, so here we go: The curtains are done! Yeah, I know, huh! They are so cool. Last night we put snaps (not without any snapfoo's (pun)) on the curtains and hung them up. I did one inside out, and Maryn did, too. If you plan to undertake snapping yourself, I would recommend buying the $20 tool rather than using a hammer. Now that we have the snap tool, I already have plans to put snaps on nearly everything Maryn owns. Anyway, the curtains are done and we are headed to the Oregon Coast in less than two hours. We hope to make it to Portland tonight, but maybe early tomorrow, then drive down the coast and back home by Monday night, if we come home at all! Pictures to come!- CCJ

Do I change our blog's title?

2009-02-13T14:52:00.001-08:00

Well, for the first time since Craig and I have been together we are a one VW family. We’ve always had at least 2 VWs…sometimes three. This does present an interesting obstacle as the title of our blog at least in part suggests that we have more than one Volkswagen. I guess if that’s my biggest concern, then life is really good.

We sold Lady yesterday, which made me really sad…it may be freakish, but I think I get more attached to cars than I do to people. I had to get to the bank ASAP after selling her, not so much because I was uncomfortable having so much cash, but because I knew that paying off the credit card would make me happy. There’s nothing I love more than that $0 balance. (Okay, that’s so not true, I love lots of things more than that, but you get what I’m trying to say.)

Last weekend we were trying to decide whether we should sell Penny or not and decided that we needed to go look at some bay window campers (I mean, what helps the brainstorming juices flow more than car shopping?) We have, of course been in several of these before, but never with the specific goal of determining whether we liked Penny, or our potential bay window camper better. We went and saw a Westy that was about what we could afford. It was a ’75, and while the exterior was totally beat, the interior was really cool. We were digging the idea of getting a bay window—when it occurred to me that the ’75 we had seen was only 6 years older than our Penny. 6 years!

I always think of busses as falling into 3 categories—ancient (splitties), really old (bay windows) and practically fresh off the line (Vanagons). I forget that Penny was made during only the second year in the history of Vanagons. It had never really hit me before that Penny’s body and interior are in incredibly awesome shape for being an ’81 (I’ll do the math for you, that is 28 years old)! Add that to her freshly rebuilt engine and tranny and well, we’d be kind of dumb to sell her (I’m totally confident that I’ll have to eat those words sometime within…three years.)

We cleaned her interior and took her to the car wash, and man, she cleans up good. So now, we’ve got some work cut out for us because, yeah, she looks really good, but let’s face it, 29 years of wear have taken a toll. Our first project is debatable—either work on the engine seal or finish the curtains (yes, the ones I started like a year ago).

Car #9

2009-02-03T10:46:00.000-08:00

Craig and I have been thinking for a while (since it got cold outside) about what it would be like to have a car that had heat. This has been our third winter without a heated car. You get used to being cold and traveling at a max speed of 65 mph, until you drive a car that is warm and goes faster than this. As I mentioned before, we borrowed my mom’s Audi while our cars were out of commission a couple of weeks ago.

The Audi was warm…and we had been looking at Subarus for a while. Last week, we made a casual visit to our local used Subaru dealer. On the way there, Craig asked me—what would have to happen in order for us to buy a car today. I more or less said that it was not possible, but when a clean, inexpensive Legacy, combined with a low pressure salesman came along, I somehow lost my conviction and, well, now we have a heated car that we think will go more than 60 mph (we haven’t tried yet), has two side-view mirrors, auto locks and windows, something which we believe to be called “hill assist”, all-wheel drive, and all of the other standard features that most people who are reading this see nothing special about, but to us are signs of high class luxury. Watch out Paris Hilton, here we come.

We are opposed to owning three cars, so now we have to answer the question: which of our VWs do we sell? I know that selling our VWs makes us invariably less cool, but reduced coolness is the price we are going to pay for warmth. (Plus, I really do like the Subaru.)

We have a few options: 1) sell the bug, 2) sell the vanagon, or 3) sell both and buy a bay window camper.
Option three makes me salivate.
Option three would also probably cost us money.

I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens—in the meantime, anyone want to buy a car?

TGIF

2009-01-16T10:02:00.000-08:00

I’m ready for it to be Friday. The past week has been defined by the following events:

Saturday 1PM lock keys in car while at Sears (after which, Ali wrote Craig a note that said “DONT FERGIT TO PUT QES IN YOUR POCKIT” because, you know, wow, if only we had a note to remind us, we would have remembered. :-)
Saturday 8PM Lady dies in drive through (as described below)
Saturday 9PM we discover that Penny’s clutch is out
Saturday 10PM Our good friend Rob helps us tow Lady to the mechanic
Wednesday 12PM I walk to the mechanic and pick up Lady, pay $177
Wednesday 6PM We use Lady (the bug) to tow Penny (the bus) to the mechanic. I really really wish we had pictures of this. Craig says we got some really funny looks. I did not notice as I was too concerned about not crashing our cars into each other.
Thursday 6PM Lady dies (again) on the way to pick up dinner. We push her onto a side street and decide that there’s no use wasting pizza, so we walk to the pizza place. We walk back to Lady, and proceed to push her half of a mile (no exaggeration here—I looked on google maps) back to our house.
Thursday 9PM we acquire my grandparent’s truck (thanks Mom and Dad!) and tow Lady to the mechanic

It has been an all too eventful week. In the interest of not sounding like a whiner—I do love our cars, and this chaos is just part of the game when your newest car is older than you.

Other significant events during the week: we received a very helpful and generous check in the mail (thank you!); Charlie turned four and we bought chicken nuggets at his request of which he ate none; we almost finished our bedroom floor; and became seasoned experts at administering banana flavored oral medication to our cat.

I’m desperately hoping for an un-eventful weekend...after the Pepper concert.

A little TOO Coincidental

2009-01-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

Last Friday I posted on this blog saying that our cars have been running great and that some shop time should be coming up soon. The following dialogue serves as evidence of my telepathic abilities.

Here’s the scene: Saturday night—Garden City Dairy Queen drive through.

Lady in the speaker: That will be $6.37 at the window

We pull forward—there are two cars in front of us.

Maryn: Doesn’t Lady (the bug) sound weird?
Craig: (revs engine) yeah

Bug Dies
Craig tries to start bug

Maryn: *%&#
Craig: *$&#
Maryn: Do you want me to get out and push?
Craig: yes

Maryn gets out and pushes car

Lady at the window: That will be $6.37
Craig: thank you

Maryn pushes bug past drive through window and into adjacent alley

Onlookers: ha ha ha ha ha

I’ll spare you some unnecessary details here: We sit for about 10 minutes, and after several failed attempts to start Lady, we call my grandparents who pick us up, take us to my parent’s house and we borrow their car (luckily, they’re in Florida). We decide that we don’t want leave Lady in a parking lot over night so, when we get home, we decide to take the bus down and tow Lady to the mechanic. We get in the bus. Resume scene.

Craig: There’s no clutch.
Maryn: What?!
Craig: the clutch is gone—there’s no clutch
Maryn (laughs hysterically): you are joking.
Craig: “no—there’s no clutch ^*&%”
Maryn (still laughing hysterically): “$*%&”
Craig: Let me see if it is the cable. (Craig looks at undercarriage) There’s oil all over the slave cylinder.
Maryn: Hooray.

Again, I’ll spare you the unnecessary details: our friend Rob saved the day by meeting us at Dairy Queen and towing the bug to our mechanic. (Thank you Rob!)

Sigh. All we can really do is 1) laugh, and 2) be grateful for the six months we went without visiting the mechanic (we love you Mike!)

Splitting from the Splitty

2009-01-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

This blog has long been neglected and I became embarrassingly emotional when I visited it this morning and realized that I need to simultaneously update the blog and eulogize Aunt Tranny. Well, maybe eulogize isn’t the right word, but it feels right. A couple of months ago, we sold Tranny. I’ve attempted on several occasions to explain this decision to people, but words don’t exist that make it okay.
We sold her to a man named Dan who was absolutely ecstatic to have her and he plans to return her to original condition. I feel like the mother in India who sells her son to the trader so that he can have opportunities that she can’t provide him. Tranny deserved a lot more care (read—financial investment) than we could give her and for that reason we are really happy that Dan has her. What lessens the sting is what we gained by selling her—financial peace of mind.
Sigh. The good news is that we still have Penny and Lady and they kick ass. I’m sure we are going to have some serious shop time coming up because they haven’t given us an ounce of trouble in…SIX MONTHS! This is an astonishingly long time for us to have not visited our mechanic.
We’ll see how long I can keep Craig from shopping for new a new bus. I’m guessing I’ve got another…three hours.

VW Fun

2008-07-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

The annual Bus Pilots family reunion was a few weeks ago. It was fun as always, but this year we also attended the Saturday morning event which we'd never gone to before but which turned out to be gobs of fun. This was a type of scavenger hunt where we had directions like--turn left at the 17th street you pass, or turn right at the 5th stop sign. I navigated while Craig drove like he was 19 again (I'm so glad we all made it). We had the kids with us and they "helped" us count streets and I think they got a little bored towards the end, but had a good time overall. Here are a few photos of some sweet vee-dubs.

and Heeeerrrrrreeee she is!

2008-06-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

A VW for Everybody...plus one for the cat.

2008-06-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

We are getting a ’72 Bug (if everything goes as planned—I have to add this disclaimer in order to try to prevent the gods of whammies and jinxes from interfering)! It doesn't look quite so shiny as the one in the original VW brochure pictured above, but it is the same color.

Craig and I have looked at a LOT of bugs. We have been talking ourselves in and out and in and out of getting a bug for, well, pretty much as long as we’ve been together and we finally found the right one and we are going to do it (if everything goes as planned).

I’m not going to try to describe it because really, only pictures can do justice, but I just wanted to get my excitement out to anyone who cares! She is currently owned by a really cool guy we met who is a VW enthusiast and quite obviously takes pride of ownership in his vehicles. He’s done a lot of work to this little girl and she is fantastic. We should (if all goes as planned) have her on Wednesday and we should also be rid of Clearwire by then so I will be able to upload some photos!

We will then have a ’64, ’72, and ’81 VW. We are kind of excited to have three decades of VW’s at our house. It is kind of like a museum—we should start charging admission (if all goes as planned).

Panic Ensues

2008-06-08T20:08:00.000-07:00

Craig and I went camping at Kirkham Hot Springs on Friday. We’ve gone there several times and it is different every time. The pools vary a little in size, depth and temperature with regularity, but it is always enjoyable. This time, however, was altogether shocking. We started the little hike down to the springs. I was paying close attention to my footing and little attention to my surroundings when suddenly Craig said “they’re gone!”

For those of you who have never been to Kirkham, there are two tiers of pools and the lower tier (normally) borders the Payette River. Currently, the river is running “120% full” (whatever that means…it wasn’t flooding, so how is it more than full?) and the lower tier was quite literally gone. It was so bizarre—like a building being torn down overnight. There were two pools partially remaining in the upper tier so we took full advantage of those; and Craig tried to make a dam to block the river water.
(FYI—the little hike at Kirkham is fun if you are ever there and are tired of swimming/don’t want to swim/ there are no hot springs in which to swim.)

The next morning, we went to Bonneville Hot Springs because 1) Craig has been wanting to for quite some time and 2) we thought maybe they might be more separated from the river. We found them to be a little disappointing. People have used several tarps over time to try to keep the pools warm and at this point it looks really trashy. Also, the river has taken over this hot spring as well.

We also visited Pine Flats Hot Springs. These pools had a huge nerd filter on them because normally you can walk on the bank of the river to get to the pools. As you’ve probably guessed by now, the river was really high here as well leaving no bank. We “billy goated” it as best we could to get a good view of where the main pool normally is. Nothing but river.

Also, every time we drive the road to Lowman, I try to find Staircase rapids. I have consistently missed them so we made a point of finding them this time. We found them, and it is my non-professional opinion that if you want to run Staircase, but are a little chicken, this is the time to do it. It was really quite flat and nothing like the videos I found on You Tube yesterday.

Long story short—hot springs campsite camping is still great right now…just don’t expect much from the actual hot springs.

Camping with kids

2008-05-31T20:56:00.000-07:00

Last night we took Craig’s kids camping for the first time. We went to Grime’s Creek which is near Idaho City. We had a fantastic time doing several traditional, cheesy camping activities. We threw rocks in the river, made a smoky pine needle fire, roasted marshmallows…and dropped them in the dirt, ate smores, the boys peed in the river, went for a hike, and slept semi well and semi coldly in the beautiful, quiet, peaceful wilderness. It was really fun and about 100 times more pleasant than I thought camping with the kids would be. So fun, in fact, that I’d call the weekend nearly perfect even when taking today’s emergency room trip and stitches into consideration.

2008-05-31T20:42:00.000-07:00

Road Trip!

2008-05-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

Sometime last year in the middle of Craig's toughest semester, we decided to plan a vacation that'd we'd take after his graduation--partially as motivation to get him through the tough moments. Several hot tub sessions, spreadsheets and weeks later, we decided that it would be really fun to take a road trip in Penny.

We planned out this fabulous trip that would take us 2500 miles from Boise, through Utah to the Grand Canyon, to LA, Las Vegas and back to Boise.

Craig spent three nights putting in a subwoofer, after all, you can't spend 49 hours in a car without mind blowing tunes. We packed everything snuggly into Penny's cabinets and drawers which was so exciting since we'd never before fully utilized her built-in storage space. Craig and were so happy with our impecible preparation. Our campsites were reserved, our daily routes were mapped and printed, our neighbor was ready to take care of our garbage, mail, house and cat, and we were stoked to get going.

We headed out on our potentially awesome (albeit ambitious) road trip. Craig--who is always the pilot--was ready for a good 8 hour stretch of driving. We got 5 miles out of town and realized that, while we'd considered the fact that we'd have to take it easy so that Penny wouldn't overheat, we didn't realize just how much hotter Penny would run in the summer (we bought her in October). We got several miles out of town and Penny's engine temperature had reached 245 (warranty is void at 250) so we pulled over into a rest stop to consider our options. We were both upset and frustrated. We pulled the engine cover off to let Penny's engine cool down and amid our frustration, Craig said--wait--just how many miles did we make it? We checked the odometer and discovered that we had made it a whopping 15.6 miles of our grand road trip. At this point, the irony was too much and we both burst out laughing.

To make a long story short, we decided that if we had to make the trip in 15 mile intervals, stopping one hour between each leg to cool down, it would take us approximately 3 weeks to get to SLC (okay, we didn't really do the math). We decided instead to fly to LA and then drive to Las Vegas. Our trip turned out fabulously, and while it was much less secluded and grass-root-esque than our originally scheduled trip, and we were, for a while ready to give Penny away to the highest...or lowest...or really ANY bidder, after talking to our mechanic and getting some new tips, we have renewed faith in her and we are ready to take another trip up to Kirkham next week.

Somewhere in the Lake Mead Recreation Area

Craig's improv version of a road trip...airport video games.

At the Las Vegas temple.

A mine we hiked to in Nevada.

Never too cold to camp...

2008-03-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

I decided a while ago…probably mid-December when it was REALLY cold that Craig and I should go camping for his birthday (March 19th). I had it in my head that March would be so much warmer than mid-December. I was wrong. March may actually be colder than mid-December.
Anyway, we went ahead and took Penny on her maiden camping voyage of 2008 last Friday.
We went up to Kirkham Hot Springs which is, in a way, more pleasant in the cold because it is 1. not crowded and 2. the water temperature makes the trip worth it—otherwise you’d just spend all day frozen in the bus.

So, here’s the photo tour of our trip. We took the Highway 55 route on our way up which was nothing less than heavenly. When we left Boise, it was pouring rain and I was cranky, which made my husband cranky, but we recovered and managed to have a fabulous drive through the country. It is amazing how wonderful the country feels when you’ve spent the winter more or less cooped up in the city. We saw no fewer than 200 elk and deer (including bull deer—I think that is what the boy deer are called—I’m a bit of a wildlife doofus). Here are a couple of photos that we took on the way up.

When we got to the hot springs, we found a place to park and went straight down to the water. It was snowing a little when we got there which turned out to be a very interesting combination of hot and cold. Here’s a picture of the hot springs…someone else’s picture, but it gets the point across.

Here we are upon getting back to Penny after our first trip down to the hot springs.

I always get incredibly nervous about getting CO poisoning. Craig has to spend half of every trip trying to convince me that if we crack the windows we will be fine and that since Penny was built with a propane stove, it isn’t deathly dangerous to use the stove. Despite all of his persuading, he finally caved and bought me a CO detector which we set up in Penny so then I spent the evening trying to convince Craig that the CO detector was broken because it wasn’t detecting dangerously high levels of CO. At this point you can understand why he might have been mildly frustrated with me…
Anyway, we watched some South Park and went to sleep in our 15 degree bags with a comforter on top and slept quite comfortably (aside from my feet which are ALWAYS cold).
When we woke up in the morning, there was 3” of snow on the ground. Here's a couple of photos after the snow on the ground had mostly melted.

We had planned to stay until after dinner on Saturday, but we decided that all of the people who had told us that we were crazy for going camping in March were right and we decided to hop in the hot springs one more time, eat breakfast and head home.

We had a very exciting discovery on the way down to the hot springs. I saw a little creature flit by and Craig said—what was that?! I said—oh, probably just a snow covered chipmunk. He had run under a rock and then as we were passing by, he darted back out a couple of times and we named this adorable animal “merret” because we thought he looked like a tiny white ferret with a mouse head. It turns out that what we had seen was an ermine, which neither of us had ever seen before. It was fun.

When we got down to the hot springs, we found a bunch of garbage had been left by the kids whose headlights we had seen late the night before. The beer cans and glow sticks were tolerable. The empty bottle of Jager was terrifying (knowing that they had probably made the two hour drive to Boise after downing it) but the thing that pisses me off more than everything but the wind are cigarette butts. I don’t care that people smoke, but it drives me nuts that they leave their garbage everywhere and throw burning cigarettes out the window at bikers who get their legs burned by their carelessness. Anyway…dismounting soap box… We felt rewarded by cleaning up the mess because we also found a Mag-lite that was left behind. Score!! You can never have enough Mag-lites.

We made breakfast burritos and then heated some water up for my frozen feet (my husband is so sweet), cleaned up and headed home. We decided to take the Idaho City route back to Boise, which, as it turned out was nothing but snow and ice. Here’s a picture.

All in all, we had a great time and yeah, maybe we were crazy, but at least when my co-workers asked me what I did over the weekend, I didn’t have to say “nothing”.

Dimes Nickels and Quarters...

2008-02-26T14:09:00.000-08:00

It has been brought to my attention that I didn’t do a sufficient job of explaining where Penny got her name. Okay, seriously, it isn’t that hard. What color is Penny? Copper. Copper…Penny…Copper…Penny. PENNYS ARE COPPER COLORED!

Additionally, we became friends with a doe on a backpacking trip last year that Craig named Penny. For some reason the name carried over as being a cute name for a car.

Well, I haven’t made ANY progress on the curtains; as we went snowboarding in Sun Valley last weekend and then we bought a cat (see my blog for additional details). Speaking of our trip to Sun Valley—Penny was a super star. She maxed out at 76 MPH. This was the fastest we’ve ever driven her. So what if it we were going downhill with a tailwind—it still counts!

The curtain fabric will at least be unfolded and measured before Monday! (Somehow saying that on the internet for the world to hear makes it seem like more of a possibility!)

Purists vs. Functionalists

2008-02-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

Most VW enthusiasts know that there are two schools of thought when fixing/repairing your VW. Craig and I fortunately subscribe to the same school of thought; therefore avoiding the arguments that would inevitably ensue if we had opposite VW beliefs. We are functionalists, which means that when we make repairs, replacements or updates to our VWs we don’t care whether the new carpet matches the original carpet. Actually functionalists often prefer that the new carpet doesn’t match the old carpet. We want it to be the most fun, functional, and fresh carpet around which also means that we will never be able to sell one of our VWs with a $20,000 price tag advertising it as “fully refurbished with original parts”. No, ours would only sell as “fun and funky—totally customized beyond recognition”.
My point in sharing with you our views on VW customization is that I’m about to fill you in on our current Vanagon project.

THE FOLLOWING MAY NOT BE ACCEPTABLE FOR VW PURIST EYES.
THE WRITERS OF THIS BLOG HOLD NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR REACTION TO OUR NEW CURTAINS.

Oh, damn, I gave it away. Yes, last night we went out and bought new fabric for replacement curtains.
We finally decided on a dark green microfiber that has a various colored stripes stitched through it at random. It is #1 really cute and #2 entirely opaque—which means I don’t have to line the curtains—making my job of sewing the curtains SO much easier. Yea! I don’t have pictures of the fabric yet, but they will be coming next week. My goal is to get these babies done before mid March so we can go camping!

About our Girls...

2008-02-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

First, a brief history of our VWs.
Tranny is a 1964 Samba. Craig bought her in high school, sold her when he went to college and regretted the sale for 7 years when one day his dad got a new job. Irrelevant to my story—you say? I think not. It just so happened that Craig’s dad’s new secretary pulled up to work in Tranny herself. Finally, after much coercion, the secretary (sorry I don’t know your name) sold Tranny to Craig. Yea! Craig was whole once more. You may ask—why do you call her Tranny? Well, Tranny is fickle. She has a thing for transmission problems…transmission replacements…and transmission leaks. We’ve given her two new transmissions in the last two years. (I should point out that we got royally screwed on the first one, so it hardly counts and is not Tranny’s fault. Shortly thereafter we got a new mechanic and HE ROCKS!)
Last summer we took Tranny camping—I’ll point out here that Tranny is not a Westy, a Riviera, a Campmobile or a camper of any sort. We were on our way to a backpacking site and decided to spend the night at a hot springs, so rather than breaking out the tent, we stayed in Tranny. It was awesome, but by about midnight the kinks in our necks and cramps in our legs started to sink in. By about 2AM we were coming up with plans to build a platform that we could put in Tranny that would allow us a comfortable night’s sleep. By 4 AM we had a cot system with mattress planned out and then by 7 AM we had decided to get a camper.
Enter Penny: We looked, and looked and looked on ebay, samba.com, craigslist for a camper. At first my heart was set on a bay window, but finally decided that it might be nice to have a vehicle that was happy traveling over 50mph. So, we decided a Vanagon would do the trick. We finally found Penny on the internet and decided that she was the one after discovering that our mechanic was the one who had rebuilt Penny’s engine two years prior. So, we flew to Park City and drove Penny home. Penny’s a little hottie. We didn’t realize this when we bought her, but her engine had been severely overheated. The result was that we got to buy her a new engine and our third transmission. (No, I don’t need your advice about how you should always take a car to your mechanic before you buy it. Yes, it is good advice—no, I’m not smart enough to take it!) Anyway, we love Penny and she is very happy at 65 mph.
We love having two buses in our garage. Sometimes we just stand at the door and stare at them. Our kids love them too. They have their own names for them: Big Red and Little Brown…the ironic part of these names being that Penny is much, much bigger than Tranny. If anyone out there is thinking about getting a camper—yes, they do fit in the garage. Craig and I measured our garage prior to getting Penny and determined that—no, she will not fit. We got her home and very nervously drove her right in. Home sweet home.