Wet Paint

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.