New Kid On The Block

Some months ago a friendly fellow with a VW T25/T3 campervan moved into our neighborhood. Now I pass by this van once or twice per day when I walk Leon dogwonder, and enjoy the occasional chat when I bump into the owner. The batch on the back lid says Atlantic Vanagon. The exterior parts (side panels, bumpers and front spoiler) look like those of the Bluestar/Whitestar/Redstar special editions built from 1989 to 1990, the last years of the regular T3 production. In addition, the Atlantic comes with a hightop and a complete Westfalia campervan interior. The German Wikipedia entry on the VW T3 describes the Atlantic as a “further upgraded campervan conversion” that followed on the “Camping” model (1980-83), the Joker, Club Joker and California. This one is a daily driver and also on the road in winter, but in quite good shape. My knowledge about T3 campers is not great, but there is a lot of information on the Atlantic campervan conversions on the Westfalia T25 / T3 / Vanagon Buyers Guide. The Atlantic campers were converted by Westfalia in their factory in Germany. You ordered them as factory conversions from Volkswagen. Volkswagen then delivered a certain body type (“253 kombi shell”) to the Westfalia factory where the campervan interior was installed. This particular van here was also the bus that welcomed 2015 in this earlier post. Welcome to the neighborhood!

(German for “utility vehicle” and also VW’s “Commercial Vehicles” division)

Happy New Year from Berlin!

Two days ago the snow arrived in Berlin! Two days later, it’s mostly gone again. But we had two great winter days, with lots of pulling our 3-year-old on a sled around our block and through the nearest park. No winter pictures of our buses, so below is a beautifully snowed in T3/T25 Atlantic Vanagon from our neighborhood. Thanks for coming to my blog and following it over the last year. Wishing you all the best for the New Year!

2014 National VW Club Bug-In

We are back to Australia for a couple of weeks, visiting family and friends in Geelong and Melbourne. From German spring to a still very warm and sunny Australian autumn. There are less and less VW buses on the road each time we come over, but you still see many more than in Germany. And last Saturday all my wishes came true and we found a VW festival with show and shine event right here in Geelong, at the water front. Lots of people from the VW Club of Western Australia. Just learnt from their web site that this was the National VW Club Bug-In, a Volkswagen meeting hosted by a VW club from a different state every year over the Easter weekend. Great buses, great weather, and fantastic to speak to fellow VW fans at the other end of the world! Below is a first set of snapshots, including a beautifully restored VW type 3. Will post on some of the buses in more detail soon!

Early bay window, first registered in 1973 in Geelong

1974 Rat-look bay window

Pre-1970 VW 1500 / type 3

1977 Sopru Campervan

Beetle parade

Awakening

Out of the dark, into the sun! I used yesterday’s public holiday to wake up Taiga Lily from a six-month winter break in the garage. The good old girl started right away after I had reconnected the battery. Had a relaxed fiddling-around-with-the-kombi morning with a friend and his T3 and finally installed a children’s bunk bed I had bought a year ago. And Taiga Lily was hired on the spot for a commercial photo shoot! More soon, stay tuned!

Straight to the Pool Room!

After the kombi collection of our baby-daughter, here comes daddy’s pride and joy. This is what happens when all your friends know you as a kombi fanatic: 17 years of kombi models, some bought, but most received as presents from friends and family. It started in 1996 with the big blue-and-white “Nivea” panel van and the red-and-white T1 microbus, in the lower shelves of the cabinet below. They were birthday presents from Caro and from the colleagues at work (thanks guys!). The series of early bay-window tin toy buses in the fourth shelf from below is also pretty cool. They are produced by the Czech company Kovap, were apparently already on the market pre-1990 when there was still East and West Germany and one could buy them in East Germany as well. I found the first two models during a visit to Prague with DrJ, Emily and Mike in about 2003 and bought some more when I found them again in a shop in Berlin in about 2008.

Porsche B32 – A Porsche VW Bus

Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles each year joins the Berlin VW Bus Festival with a couple of historic buses from their Hannover-based museum. This year they brought the official Porsche VW Bus: A 1985 T3/T25 Caravelle Carat equipped with a 911 boxer engine, a six cylinder air-cooled 3.2 L boxer engine with 231 H.P. It runs with a max speed of 185 km/h, features Porsche Fuchs wheels, extra air inlets on the sides in the back to cool the engine, a Carrera writing on the back lid, and Porsche emblems on the wheels and on the lower A columns. Also the rear bumper seems to have extra air inlets for cooling. The bus is called Porsche B32, seats six people and cost 100.000 Deutsch Marks at the time. It is mentioned on the German Wikipedia page for the T3 VW Bus, but not on the Porsche Wikipedia page. According to the information sheet (in German, photo below), the project originated from the need for a support vehicle when Porsche engineers were out for longer test rides (the Wikipedia page says it was built as Porsche’s support vehicle for the Paris Dakar race). Developed with what you apparently still had in the 1980ies, “free development capacities”, the efforts resulted in a mini series of about 15 buses which “combine a sporty character with elegance”. Apparently only nine of these are still alive, so this special edition has become even more special over time.

„The Bus“ Movie Is Out!

The documentary “The Bus” is finally out and you can buy it! I had ordered the DVD some weeks ago and it arrived a few days ago. Just watched it and really, really liked it. Beautifully catches the spirit of driving a Volkswagen bus. Makes you want to hop on the bus and start the next adventure. Hope we do that more often once our baby-daughter is big enough to make travelling a bit easier. And when she also can enjoy it more herself. Makes me also want to learn more about the mechanics so that I can do more on the car myself. The DVD came with a BUS “country sticker” which went straight to the roof box today, together with the latest trophy, the sticker from the Czech republic. I also like the movie poster & DVD cover: T1, T2 and T3 morphed into one bus. Many wonderful comments from the many people speaking about their lives with VW campervans. “You meet the best people when your car breaks down. The jerks won’t stop…” We actually helped two people with problems on the way to Czech. So bus drivers also seem to be the people to talk to when you look for help on a full Autobahn rest place. In fact we were the only people with a canister of petrol and could help that motorbike driver with a completely empty tank. Anyway, have a look at the movie trailers on their web page (or in my previous post). It is a beautiful movie.

The Czech Kombi Club

I learnt from a car sticker on a pimped red T4 VW bus on the market square in Budweis that there is a Czech kombi club. It is called Transporter Club and can be found under transporterclub.cz. I do not understand any Czech, but there are beautiful bus photos on the web page, amongst them the snapshot below, a screen shot from the site. Beautiful family photo of T1, T2a, T3, and T4! Anyway, there is also a bulletin board where kind Czech bus drivers answer in German (and probably also English) when you cannot speak the language and look for help/information in the Czech Republic. Nice Club logo, too: Silhouettes of a T1 and the “New Microbus” (in Germany at the time called the “New Bulli”) presented around 2001 as a functional T5-based prototype which later never made it to the market.

Type 2 family snapshot! (Photo taken from http://www.transporterclub.cz)

Logo of the Czech VW Bus club (taken from http://www.transporterclub.cz)

A Quite Unique Coffee Van

One of the things to look forward to at the Berlin VW Bus Festival is a good latte macchiato at LeCabu’s coffee bar. Which, true to the occasion, comes in the form of a Volkswagen van, and probably one of a kind: Originally built for a private canteen provider serving the German Army, she was designed to accompany the troops during their yearly maneuvers in the field. The basis was therefore a 1990 four-wheel drive single cabin T3 Syncro. I am not very good with T3s and Syncros, but apparently the Syncros came in two varieties, the more common 14-inch version (41,330 buses produced) and the much rarer 16-inch heavy duty Syncro version for more serious off-road requirements (only about 2138 buses built). And this one is one of the 16-inch buses, so the real thing for the hard core Syncro fan. The current owner bought her some years ago under the promise that he would keep the original food van conversion alive, and that’s what he did. She got this funky looking retro surfer paint job and is now a rolling coffee bar, based in Düsseldorf, but you can meet her on VW meetings all over Germany. The photos are from last weekend’s 5th Berlin VW Bus Festival.

The Biggest T3 – Ever!

So it is out and you can download it from the Festival Web page: The aerial photograph of a T3 front, built last Saturday at the 5th Berlin VW Bus Festival from 335 Volkswagen buses! And we were part of it! Taiga Lily is where the little yellow arrow is in the left indicator, with us on the picnic blanket next to her. Someone did a brilliant job in organiszing those hundereds of buses so precisely!