Beam Assembly and things Forgotten

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?