Child’s Bunk Bed

I finally got around installing the bunk bed above the driver’s and passenger seat. This reproduction from JustKampers is probably pretty close to the original which came with Westfalia campers in the sixties and seventies. The bed arrived with brackets, screws and the required drill bit. The four holding brackets have to be attached to the A and B columns, each with two screws. And voila, there is an extra children’s bed! Yesterday it passed the first critical inspection by its target person, our little wonder girl. In three weeks comes the real thing – the 6th Berlin VW Bus Festival where the little one will hopefully sleep happily and peacefully in the new bed.

End user testing the final product.

Attachment bracket in left A column.

Attachment bracket in right B column.

A Middle Bench!

Look what I found! Officially Taiga Lily is an eight-seater, but the middle bench was missing when we bought her. Some weeks ago I found one on Ebay and last weekend we drove to Hamburg to pick it up. Turns out this one was taken out of a 1976 VW bus in 1986, put into the attic and forgotten. 27 years later I picked it up from the very same attic. The color is not yet right, gray leatherette instead of black as Taiga Lily’s front seats and the back bench. I will have to buy a new black cover and get the bench upholstered. I also still have to think about how I will fix it to the floor, now that I have covered the fixation points thoroughly with my nice floor plate. I guess all this will have to wait for a while, but it is good to have the piece now.

Taiga Lily’s original back bench, black leatherette.

Go, Speed Racer!

We used a family trip from Berlin to Hamburg last weekend to do some official speed measuring: From a standing start (from an Autobahn rest place) to 100 km/h, with a warmed-up 70 h.p. engine and, admittedly, without torturing the old machine too much, Taiga Lily did the job in 40 sec! 100 km/h is probably 60 miles/hour. A similar experiment with our Old Lady (50 h.p.) some many years ago ended up with about 69 secs, and our 50 h.p. camper in New Zealand last year made it in 65 sec. Although at that time we needed several attempts and a particular long stretch of even road to reach 100 km/h at all. Probably all the consequence of trying to push a 2m high wall through the wind. Quite an improvement from the Old Lady to Taiga Lily, but all can safely be summed up under “Zero to sixty… eventually” – the header of a very nice campervan blog. Still makes me chuckle each time.

Accessorising Taiga Lily

„You may pass me but you won’t outlast me.” Saw this brilliant motto for a kombi first on the back window of an unusual late bay campervan, about four years ago in Berlin. Started hunting for it on the web last year and tracked down one version with Slook Designs in the UK. They do have some cool stickers – I also got Taiga Lily an “Air Cooled” one and “Home is where you park it”.

Air Conditioning, Old School

After last summer’s trip to the Czech Republic with very hot temperatures in the back of the van, it was clear we needed windows in the back that can be opened. I now bought a sliding window for the sliding door. Just Kampers offers an original part from Volkswagen (part number J20071, OEM Part Number: 237-845-708/ 4). Turns out it is indeed a new and original Volkswagen part from Volkswagen Brazil. Not as authentic as an original second hand part made in the seventies, but on the plus side it is new and more likely to stay water-proof for a while. Fitting it into the van was quite an effort. A big thanks to my good old kombi mate Jan for his help and advice! Some more details below if you want to learn more.

Sliding door window before…

… and after the operation.

Taiga Lily, upgraded.

We started with cutting the seal of the original window from the outside, then carefully pushed out the old window glass from the inside. The rubber seal that came with the new window and the metal frame on the sliding door were soaked with silicon spray. We then squeezed a 1.5 mm2 electric wire into the inner lip of the new seal (both ends of the wire meeting in the upper center of the window), and pushed the window from the outside upwards into its opening in the sliding door. This became quite messy and frustrating. One of us pushed the window firmly from the outside into its frame while the other one was sitting in the car and, by pulling the wire out of the seal and into the car, tried to let the inner lip of the rubber seal slide to the inside of the car. Sounds easy, but it took us 5 attempts to finally get it in. You need a lot of silicon spray to make sure the seal is slippery enough to slide where it should slide. But that makes both pushing the window from the outside and pulling a slippery wire from the inside rather difficult. When the wire is pulled too strongly or too fast or if the window is pressed too hard from the outside, the rubber lip is cut by the wire instead of being pulled over the edge of the metal frame. In the end we damaged the seal in two places, but from the outside it all looks ok and very tight. So it should be water tight, and we were too tired to start again. I actually had ordered a separate seal on top (Just Kampers part number J19510) because I did not realize the window already came with a seal. If the small damage on the inside will bug me in the future, we can have a second attempt with the extra seal.

Berlin Impression

Coincidental oldie reunion in the streets of Berlin: Freshly renovated 1960ies building with 1970ies kombi van and 1950ies Mercedes W120 ponton limousine, yesterday somewhere in Berlin Mitte. This may have been how it looked in the early seventies when all the players were still young.

Taiga Lily goes Shooting Star!

I had just left the garage waking Taiga Lily up from a 6-month-winter sleep when a lady came over from a photo shoot taking place next door. She asked whether they could hire the bus for the shooting. So on a beautiful sunny Berlin May day Taiga Lily gave the very good looking background for a commercial for a male cosmetic product. Hope the final campaign will use some of shots with the bus. Will keep you updated!

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!

Hamburg Westfalia Camper

We stumbled over this beauty in 2004 when we were going out in Hamburg. Looks like a brand new paint job and slightly lowered body, refined with new Porsche wheels, white indicators and back light covers and modern black leather seats. The color is Taiga lily’s sage green. Windscreen wipers off, so perhaps really just out of restoration and not yet fully assembled. You don’t want to drive without windscreen wipers in Hamburg…

Back to her winter quarter

Autumn is in full swing in Berlin. Time to get Taiga Lily off the streets and into her warm and dry winter quarter. So last weekend I gave her a wash, filled the tank, upped the tire pressure to about 10% above normal and drove her to her garage where she will spend the next couple of months next to the Old Lady, our second bus. I soaked a cloth with WD40 and stuffed it in the exhaust pipe. That way the hot exhaust is meant to suck in some WD40 fumes when cooling down which should help preventing rust from the inside. I finally disconnected the battery and closed the garage. Back next spring when the salt is off the roads again.

Leaves turning orange and yellow in Berlin autumn.

Taiga Lily and the Old Lady parking side by side in their winter quarter.

… see you again in 2013.