Category: VW

Yeah its snowing in April – so thats cool.

I still don’t have the bus back yet, but I decided to try to clean up the slightly rusty VW chrome emblem.  I read that submerging chrome in a bath of oxalic acid will lift and kill any rust.  Went to the local big box hardware store, and searched for this magical solution – couldn’t find it, but I did find this “Metal Rescue”.  It says it’s a “rust remover bath”… mmm thats the best kind of bath!

I left the emblem submerged in the solution for the suggested 2 hours for light rust – checked the progress, but still rusty. Left the emblem submerged for the suggested 8 hours for medium rust – checked the progress, but still rusty. Left the emblem submerged for the suggested 24 hours for heavy rusty – the picture below shows all of the progress – none. (and yes that is a plastic drawer from under the bathroom sink – it fit just perfectly)

So after 24 hours, the thing was as rusty as ever; yet another product that absolutely does not work.  Yeah I knew it was too good to be true, but still I had a sliver of hope that I would buy something and that thing would just do what it was meant to do – how naive!

Maybe someday I’ll actually get the bus back – in the meantime, I’ll need to think of something else for this emblem project – time to go play in the snow!

Another week with no bus… It’s kind of hard to have a blog about restoring a VW bus when said bus is sitting outside a shop for 3 weeks! While I do think that the bus is good hands, I’m hoping that it doesn’t have to sit outside in the elements for much longer.

Since its been hard to get my VW fix lately, I went to a local swap meet – it was pretty fun!  The VW crowd is an interesting bunch of people – down-to-earth, kind of crazy with just a little bit of grubbiness.  Yeah I pretty much fit in perfectly.  I bought a couple t-shirts, and a sweet pair of vintage 40’s safety glasses – I think they are “steampunk” style – cool!

Hopefully it won’t be too much longer, I’ll have the bus back and ready to drive!

The bus is still at the shop – and probably will be for a while more.

They are going to make a few adjustments to the brakes, and have re-greased everything they can.  More importantly, we are working out the details on swapping my current transmission and running gear for another ’67 bus’s gear.  That bus has the stock setup with reduction gear boxes and all – mine is a bug transmission with lowered spring plates and drop spindles.  I’m hoping to take my bus back up to stock height w/ stock gear, and he’s hoping to lower his bus – we might have a deal!

I also got the quote on bodywork – with that number still ringing in my ears, I signed up for a welding class – if I can only do part of the metal work/ sheet metal work, I’ll save a ton!

I also found this old photo:

While its impossible to tell if this is my bus, it has the right features, is in the right place at the right time, and given the fact that it sat neglected in a field for multiple decades, i’m sure it was owned by a bunch of Florida hippies – I’m cool with that!

Not much happening with the bus right now – the shop is working up an estimate for more than a few projects that they might help me out with.

I did get a pretty good deal on this set of pop out window latches from thesamba.com.  They need cleaned up (and one is all rusty and broken – its the runt of the litter), but I only need 4, so I’ll sell back the remaining.  Getting all of the windows cleaned up and functioning is pretty high on my list of spring projects!

While I don’t have $ estimates from the shop yet, they did do a full inspection on the bus.  I was kind of dreading this, but it turned out to be not that bad (again, I haven’t seen any dollar figures yet, so I might live to regret that sentence!).  The brakes need a little adjusting, but are otherwise in good working order.  The steering is ok, a little slop but not too much.  The shifter is missing a bushing, and the coupler is loose (I don’t really know what that means, but it doesn’t sound expensive right??)  The engine runs decent, but is leaking oil – its an air-cooled VW so thats just a given.  Overall, nothing is fatally amiss mechanically!  Body work is another story for another day.

We made a second attempt at getting the bus up to the VW shop – this time, Success! I’m taking the bus to Midwest Autosavers, about 35 miles north, and I’ve been wanting to get it up there to get a thorough mechanical inspection and body work estimate.

We set off around 8am – the bus started up like a charm – and Noelle followed behind.  I made it easily past the spot where we had to turn around last time, made it through the harrowing Rt. 59 / I88 interchange, and trundled on up the road.  After the first couple of red light stops I had pretty much figured out how to get the thing to shift from 1st to 2nd and up to 3rd smoothly without hesitation or backfiring – yay!  Eventually, I got up the nerve to accelerate and shift up to 4th gear – press the gas, get the speedo to read about 40MPH, press the in clutch, lift off the gas, pull the shifter to 4th, let out the clutch while reapplying the gas – yeah I’m that good!  The bus felt most at home running in 4^th gear at what the speedometer said was between 40 and 45mph.  Anything over that and the steering started to feel a little wild, or maybe it was the fact that I was hurtling headfirst down a road in a frickin bouncy tin can.

In fact, the bus kind of felt like it was bouncing all over the place with every bump in the road – and with the Illinois roads in as bad a shape as they are, sometimes I wondered if anything would break!  We did have one (well actually two) mishaps. After hitting one particularly nasty bump in the road, I thought I heard a metal clanging noise – a minute later Noelle called me on the phone: “Do you realize you just lost another hubcap”  I’m like “WTF another one?? Why didn’t you call me after the first one?!”  Turns out the first one fell off early on, Noelle just stopped in the road and picked it up – I kept trundling on in the bus completely clueless (its loud in there ok).  The second hubcap went flying into the trees on the side of the road, so we parked the bus and circled back to retrieve our precious escapees.

With that being the only real problem, I’m calling this trip an extreme success – the bus ran well in all gears, I have learned how to drive it, and the engine performed beautifully.  We’ve got it to the shop, and I’m looking forward to getting a professional opinion on how much this baby is going to cost!

Also check out this sweet action shot; yeah, I’m way too cool for school: