Summer in Berlin

The summer has arrived in Berlin and it seems everyone is getting their split-windows out and into the sun – two cool buses seen last week at the Beetle Clinic. The red and white one used to be a fire brigade van. The Samba-like roof windows and the pop-up roof were added later when it was converted to a campervan. Bullet indicators, but not yet the T2 back lid, so should be from between 1960 and 1963. The one in the background was also pretty cool. A T1 microbus with a bit of a rat look going on. No time for more photos as the baby got decidedly unhappy with my lack of attention.

Door Air Channels Added

When we bought Taiga Lily in July 2010 the doors were completely stripped, without any glasses, window frames, handles and inner mechanisms. I put them together again in December 2010 and added the speakers in July 2011. What was still missing were the air channels which direct the warm air from under the dashboard over the doors to the passenger cabin in the back. They also act as arm rests which are pretty nice to have, too. The bus actually came with two sets of door panels, a worn out, dirty and broken one which still had the channels attached and was probably the original set. And a second set of almost new ones without the channels, but with all holes already pre-cut to install them. So some three weeks ago I finally got around to unscrew the channels from the old panels, give them a good scrub to remove the dust of 30+ years and then put them on the new door panels. A little bit of luxury in this minimalistic car!

Late Bay Instrument Wiring

Now this is more something for me when I am not sure anymore how all the wiring looked before I took it apart. Hope it will also be useful for someone out there when they have already started disassembling things and realize too late they did not take photos before. Taking the main instrument block of the late bay out is quite easy – you loose the four screws (counter metal pieces will fall down), pull off the red and blue plastic grips of the hot and cold air, reach under the dashboard and up to the speedo and unscrew the central speedometer shaft. Then you can slowly lift the whole block up and out. I once took off the steering wheel before to have space to maneuver the instrument out more easily. But it also works with the steering wheel left in place. I took the instruments out now several times within the last year because I switched dashboards between my two buses. Interesting: Volkswagen stamped production dates on their instruments. And the one of my Old Lady, stamped 1978, fits to the car while the one from Taiga Lily is from 1979 (speedo) and 1978 (clock), respectively – several years older than the bus itself which is a 1976 model and was produced in Nov. 1975.

Front of Taiga Lily’s instrument unit.

Upper instrument unit (stamped 4.79) is from Taiga Lily, a 1976 microbus, with VDO clock as built in by Volkswagen. Lower instrument, stamped 7.78, is from the Old Lady (1978 panel van), with a clock from Motometer added in 1995.

Detail of the Old Lady’s instrument wiring.

This photo and below: Details of the wiring of Taiga Lily’s instrument block.

Kiwi Kombis – Another NZ Rental Company

When you are a kombi nerd and plan your visit to New Zealand, there is a second rental company that will provide you with a proper Volkswagen campervan: In addition to Classic Campers in Auckland which we rented our 1975 T2b Campervan from in February, there is Kiwi Kombis, also based in Auckland. We met a British couple in Akaroa with a T2b campervan which was Van Nine from Kiwi Kombis. We realized later that we had already bumped into one of their vehicles, a beautiful 1962 T1 campervan which I blogged about in Feb and which later turned out to be their Van Five, called ‘Coffee ‘n’ Cream’. For their fleet of beautiful buses (5 T1s and 4 T2s), check out www.kiwikombis.com. As I understand, with both companies you can also pick up their buses in Christchurch and drive them up to Auckland. If you are still open whether you want tour NZ from Auckland to Christchurch or the other way around, it makes sense to contact these two companies. Most likely there will be better deals where they give you a bus a little cheaper because you transfer it in a direction that fits with their planning.

Volkswagen Enters Bus Restoration Business

Interesting news from Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles (VW Nutzfahrzeuge), the division that builds the kombi: Beginning of April they started offering a restoration service to external customers, focusing solely on the bus (T1 to T4). A new service center has been installed in Hanover already in 2007, called Volskswagen Commercial Vehicles Oldtimers. It opened to external customers on April 1st this year and the first restored bus was delivered to a customer already in mid-April. The buses are taken apart and separate specialized units then overhaul the engine and the other mechanical parts and fix all rust problems of the body. Only original VW spare parts will be used, either from stock (VW Classic Parts) or newly made if not available any more. The completed vehicle comes with a certificate and full documentation. Partial restorations are also on offer. Of course this service does not come cheap, with hour rates of € 80 and the newspapers quoting VW on a Samba restoration costing up to € 100.000. In preparation of this opening  Volkswagen has purchased one hundred kombis of all generations which will or have been restored as well, as demo material for customers and for general PR. Visitors to the center in Hanover can have a tour of these vehicles on 7000 square meters exhibition space. Will add some photos below. Good to see that VW starts to appreciate what a dedicated fan community they have with bus drivers worldwide. All was triggered by the overwhelming number of people and buses that joined the 60-years-of-VW-Bus festival 2007 in Hanover, which at the time had taken the board of Volkswagen quite by surprise. Perhaps there will also be more spare parts available for T2s at Classic Parts, now that they start to make missing parts from scratch again. Last time I checked they did not have much anymore for the pre-T3s.

Photos from the opening of the VW Commercial Vehicles Oldtimer Center in Hanover, April 2012, taken from the N24 and Heise web pages (see links below).

You will find many more beautiful photos of the restoration process and the already restored kombis when you click to these web articles: Heise, N24, both in German. Here is the link to the English press release from VW (you may have to scroll down to 29.03.2012).

Another Cool Unimog Camper Truck

The second diversion from the Volkswagen kombi theme in favor of the Unimog: We spotted this monster on a caravan park in Reefton, on the way to Greymouth on the New Zealand South Island in February 2012. The registration sticker says it’s a 1995 Mercedes Benz Unimog 418/20 Motor Caravan. So it’s about 30 years younger than the amazing Unimog 406 camper truck I had blogged about in January. The stickers on the side say the conversion was done by Hartmann Spezialkarossen (from Alsfeld, Germany) and the engine modified by TSC Tuning (probably also from Germany). I still like the older Unimogs better, but this is an impressive expedition truck. There are some more photos in this  Flickr photo album.

Additional Instruments Installed

In the past air-cooled VW engines often died from overheating, after being driven too fast for too long. So an oil temperature gauge makes a lot of sense. I had installed one when I bought our old bus, the Old Lady, in 1995. For good measure I had also added a battery voltage gauge of the same series of VDO instruments. They both went into the radio slot in the center of the dashboard which was free as the radio had gone overhead, in a self-made shelf above the rear view mirror. I had seen this set-up first in 1989 in a friend’s T2b campervan, Stefan’s Frau Wehbus. And since then I just liked it to switch the radio on “trucker-style” by reaching towards the ceiling. I am now copying this set-up for our second bus, Taiga Lily. And because I really have to stop sinking more and more money into the bus, I decided to take both instruments from the Old Lady, currently in storage and waiting for better times, and transplant them into Taiga Lily. Taiga Lily actually came with a second brand new dashboard which the previous owner had thrown in because the radio slot of the original board had been bent wider in quite an ugly way. Seems the radio slots in the T2 dashboards are half a centimeter too narrow for modern radios, which is why they are usually widened, often in quite unprofessional ways. As the radio slot also had to be widened a little bit to get my extra gauges in, I decided to leave the brand new dashboard untouched and put it into the Old Lady, and instead move her old dashboard over into Taiga Lily. I swapped the boards already last year. Now I finally got around to re-install the gauges. So here we go – this is the cock-pit before the instruments are added, with the empty radio slot in the middle:

Here is a close-up of the radio slot. You see where, in 1995, I had cut out a bit of the metal to get the two round instruments in. I have not yet put the tubes of the heating system back in under the dashboard, so at the moment you can still see through to the wind screen wiper motor.

Next step was to re-install a mask for the two instruments, cut out from plywood, and then to install the two instruments:

Then finally the wiring: Both instruments have light bulbs that need to be connected to earth and a voltage source switched on with the head lights. I connected them to a wiring leading to the equivalent lights of the speedo and the clock in the main instrument block. For earth, there is a convenient little set of sockets on the panel behind the radio slot, a bit below and in front of the windscreen wiper motor. Then the actual instruments needed to be connected to a voltage source which is switched on when the ignition is on. Finally the oil temperature gauge needed to be connected to a temperature-sensitive dip stick that came with the device. The length of the dip stick had to be adjusted to fit the length of the original dip stick of the CJ engine (longer than in the 1600 cc engine of the Old Lady). When the bus was in the garage in autumn 2010, the guys already put a seven-core cable in from the engine compartment to underneath the dashboard – for this oil temperature gauge, for a rear fog light (coming soon) and for five more possible applications. I finally used the first core now to connect the temperature gauge to the dip stick in the back. The last step was then to connect the dip stick to earth.

And here is the completed dashboard, and the instruments in action. Voltage close to 13V when the engine is running, and oil temperature at about 80°C after 30 mins of inner city driving. With the additional oil cooler that was fitted in January 2011, it should be easy to keep engine temperature at or below 100°C. Let’s see over the next couple of weeks how this works.