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.
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.
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. 
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!
