Top End Building

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.)