Page 1: Who we are and what we drive

Page 2: Fun with dirt

Page 3: Tech. and custom projects

Page 4: More tech. and custom projects

Page 5: VW events/campouts

Page 6: Random cool/strange photos

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(PAGE-4) More tech. and custom projects)
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THERMOSTAT REPLACEMENT
While replacing the exhaust I discovered that a previous owner remove the thermostat and air flaps entirely. I've come to understand that these engines MUST be equipped with these components ESPECIALLY in colder climates. And not having it will greatly reduce the life of your engine.

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This is what it's supposed to look like, almost . Turns out that the thermostat in this photo (which I pulled from the salvage yard) is bad. Notice that the spring-like tubing of the thermostat is fully extended inside its bracket. When the engine is cold as it is shown here, the tubing should be restricted not expanded. As the engine approaches running temperature the thermostat (spring-like tubing) will expand. I'll post more photos of the new thermostat I ordered when it gets here.
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The new thermostat has arrived. Notice the size difference between the old and the new.

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Well, I couldn't install it right away due to the pouring down rain so I decided to conduct an experiment I found on the net. I measured the length of the new thermostat in its fully constricted position at approx. 1 3/16".

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Then I put it in a plastic baggy, and submerged it in a pot of heated water to simulate the rising temperature of the engine.

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After a few minutes I pulled it out and re-measured it at approx. 1 7/8" That's 11/16" difference.

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I guess this whole experiment proved nothing but the fact that I was really board. But I suppose it could be a method of checking to see if you have an operational thermostat. Man all this experimentation makes me hungry! Might as well do something with this left over water.

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Here it is installed on Lola with a bone cold engine. The next step is to hit the road and really warm her up so I can connect the thermostat cable to the cooling flaps.

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After 15 minutes on the highway the engine is well warmed up and the thermostat is now fully extended and I have fastened it's cable to the flap lever.

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At this point all you have to do to connect the thermostat to the cooling flaps is feed the thermostat cable up through the hole in the engine tins and then through the bolted clip of the lever on the flaps until there's no slack left, and tighten it down. I decided crimped a metal wire connector on the tip of my cable because it started to fray.

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Mission accomplished. As the engine cools, and the thermostat shrinks back down to 1 3/16" or so, the cooling flaps will be drawn closed by the cable. And they all lived happily ever after.

Here are some links to various articles explaining this.
http://www.ratwell.com/technical/Thermostats
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http://www.geneberg.com/article.php?ArticleID=238
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http://images.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/192480.jpg
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PROJECT: MICROWAVE OVEN INSTALL

Here's my new Mini Microwave oven nice and snug in the storage cabinet below the sink. It runs off of a 1500watt Powermate Coleman inverter routed to an auxiliary battery under the drivers seat.

Oops! @#$% That's another trip to the Junk yard. Broke the hose fitting off the sink trip.

Here's a photo of the old set up. The back table was useless this way.

Update:
Wow! Look what I found sitting in the trash last night. I paid $50.00 + shipping for my 1st one on eBay. This one's in better condition, and it was free!

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ECU ground under air plenum
Looky here what I found. The plastic casing on the wire had dry rotted over the years and the wire inside was rusted and oxidized as a result.

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Tracing the wires
Before & after

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Yea this took a while


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Mother nature can be a real mother @#$%er sometimes and unfortunately Lola was no match for a near month of 20 deg. temps. Frozen gas Brought us to a sputtering holt in the middle of a snow storm.

A word to the wise, if you're ever in a jamb and need to use a trailer like this one, check and DOUBLE CHECK that the fold up ramps are a safe distance from the back of the van before you hit the road. Or this is what you get.

Primed and ready for paint.
The worst of the damage was on the tail gate.

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PROJECT: PAINTING THE TOP

There are various products you can use for this project. I used Bathtub paint on my 76 and it came out perfect, and lasted as long as I owned the bus. Its probably still on there. Here's what I used this time around. Its a little more expensive at $20.00 a can, but as far as I'm concerned its the best.

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Dumb ass previous owners strikes again! Someone at some point decided to add roof racks and drilled them striate into the fiberglass. I used a sandable epoxy putty to plug up all the holes.

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The roof took about 1 1/4 cans, But I think I could have done it with 1 can had I used the right paint roller.

When I painted the cargo section of the top, I used only the roller. Unfortunately the roller I used retained more paint than it rolled on. On the back section I painted it on with a brush, and then rolled over it to get the gritty texture I was looking for.

2 coats and 48 hours later the van was ready for camping.

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Just a little safty measure I added this week

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PROJECT: TACHOMETER TRANSPLANT

Unfortunately the good folks at Volkswagen Of America didn't feel it was necessary to include a tachometer in my model/year Vanagon. Apparently someone decided it was more important to know exactly what time it was rather than how hard the engine was working. So I've set out to right their wrong. Here's a photo of my current useless clock

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It started out with a trip to the junk yard in search of a donor car. After about an hour of hunting, I settled on a tach out of a 90s Jetta. Its face looked approximately the same diameter and it had the same cut out for my stock fuel gauge to peek through.

Now comes the hard part. First off, I've never installed a tachometer. Secondly, installing this tach will require some custom wiring and circuitry...also something I'm not to familiar with. This will be a learning experience to say the least.

Here are some photos of the tach mechanism and circuit board.

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I found these simplified wiring instructions on the net:

-Red to 12-volt "switched" power supply
-Black to ground
-Green to trigger (negative side of coil, or tach output terminal if using an aftermarket ignition control)
-White (or yellow) to light circuit

The only problem is that the Jetta tach that I have only has a red and green wire so these instructions were next to useless in my case. I had to follow the circuit as best as I could with a multi meter to figure out what was what.

After studying and numbering and lettering the paths on the circuit board for half a day or so I rubbed a lucky rabbit's foot and started connecting wires to the prongs on the board. After some trial and error I deciphered the wire sequence. Oh yea, if you try the "trial and error" method be sure to run some inline fuses. The last thing you want to do is fry something on the circuit board.

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Ok here are my revised, project specific wiring instructions: There are (x11) prongs coming off the circuit board in total. If you hold the board up right and count from the left:

-Your 12v Power wire goes to the 2nd prong.
-Your trigger wire (neg. terminal on the coil) goes to the 3rd prong.
-Your ground wire goes to the 8th prong.
Who the hell knows what the other prongs do. You just need these (x3).
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So that's the easy part...Now you have to do some cutting, shaving and even a little custom fabrication to get the Jetta tach to fit in the Vanagon gauge cluster. I used a dremmel and a small file to do most of this work.
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The beauty of the Jetta tach is that its face is basically the same as the clock. So I was able to pop my original gas gauge right in behind the tach with no issues.
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Before

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After

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All done

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And installed in the van shortly after at idle speed

Oops...not done yet. My test drive brought to my attention that there is some sort of warning buzzer installed on the circuit board. A very loud and annoying buzzer. It seams to go off just as the van get above 2500rpm. I'll have to find a way to ground it out or something.

Update:
Ok. All I had to do was remove the buzzer coil.

Now to clean up the wiring.
I made a custom harness to suit my needs out of two seperate harnesses that I cut out of the donor car.

So now that I've successfully completed my prototype tach. I'm gona build another that's cleaner and more refined. I'm also gona try and figure out which circuits, diodes etc. are absolutely necessary on the circuit board so I can trim off what I don't need and make it more compact. Here's a Photoshop job of the gauge face I'm gona make. Notice the new redline location. I've been told that the redline should fall between 4700 & 5000rpm

....................Before................................................................................After

I decided to print my new tach face out on transparent plastic. Now I will back this with white paper and double sided tape will hold it to the original tach face.

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Here are some new gauge faces with a bit of humor.
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I went with Achtung

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PHASE II
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I've decided to add an indicator light for my power inverter to remind me to shut the damn thing off before I drive home from the camp ground. After a little poking around I discovered a vacant bulb slot in my gauge cluster that VW decided they didn't need for my model year. This will make a perfect spot for my new indicator (idiot) light.

With some delicate prying with a small screw driver I managed to pull the warning indicator face out from the back of the cluster. Then I scanned it in to Photoshop.

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I will be running a 12v power source from my breaker that separates my auxiliary battery from my inverter. Hence, (breaker on-indicator light on, breaker off-indicator light off). Heres how I will run my wiring.


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Phase III

Oooo yes I'm going indiglow.
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My second tach

PROJECT: ELECTRICAL WORK
Here's my new alternator ready for installation. The old one just wasn't holding its weight and I was sick of trickle charging the battery after every camping trip.

Thats better.

I also decided on a new Odyssey battery.

PROJECT: REMOTE INVERTER SWITCH

After two years of having to reach all the way in the back of my sink cabinet every time I need to turn no and off my power inverter I've come up with a solution.  A remote switch

PROJECT: FUEL LINE REPLACEMENT

There are two major killers of vintage VWs one is rust and the other...FIRE!  That said, CHANGE YOUR FUEL LINES!  NO excuses.  VanCaffe sells a kit that replaces all the lines.  

This is an engine fire in the making.  My lines (looked) fine before I took them off as a precautionary measure.  this is what I found on 90% of them.  Don't be fooled. 

Know I have peace of mind.

PROJECT: DASH REMOVAL
The calm before the storm so to speak.

Going into this project I have to admit I was a bit spooked. But It was not as bad as I had anticipated.

There are a series of bolts and screws that need to come out to remove the dash.
Start off by removing the gauge cluster glove box etc.

Next you'll have to lower the steering column. On the under side of the column there are x2 sheer bolts. (pictured) If you're lucky like I was you may be able to clamp down on the bolt's head with some vice grips and t wist it loose. Other wise you'll have to drill out the center of the bolt.
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Next there are x2 conventional style bolts located further down on the steering column. Once you get these x4 bolts out, you can lower the column and rest it on the seat or what have you.

Next you need to (CAREFULLY) pry off the face plate of the heater controls. Don't forget to pull off the knobs first. Once you get the face off, you'll find x2 screws peeking out at you. These screws hold the heater control bracket to the dash so you'll have to remove them. There is a third screw located at the top of the same bracket. You'll find that one if you peek in through the top of the dash where the gauge cluster mounts.

Next you need to remove the dash screws located in the door jambs. x2 screws per side.

Now remove the screws that run along the bottom of the windshield. I think there were x6 or so up there.

Now reach under and pull the fresh air and heat vent hoses off the vents in the dash.

That's pretty much it! At least if my memory serves.
You should be able to do a little wiggling and pull the dash right out.

There was a few reasons I decided to remove my dash. First and for most I needed to pinpoint a leak that I have dealt with for two years now. Every time it rains the water seams to work its way in and then drips down on my fuses reeking havoc on my electricals.

Found it:

Originally I thought it was one of these grommets.

Second, I wanted to do a little rewiring. I had a series of accessory wires running across the floor under the carpet that were getting pretty beat up and were practically floating in the water caused by the leak. I wanted to run them up through the roof pillars instead where they would be safer. Feeding them up through the pillars and across the ceiling proved to be five times more time consuming than the damn dash removal.

I ran the wires back out of the vertical pillars behind the front seats though rubber grommets.

Third, I wanted to install some sound deadening material on the inside of the frond body panel and the bottom side of the dash to quiet the van a bit. This made a HUGE difference.

Here's the video of the before and after sound deadening.
Before

After

I fixed a few other things along the way.
Broken gauge cluster screw tabs. With a little JBweld and sheet mtl. there good as new.

Well, I'm off to Taiwan for half a year and Lola gets to hibernate. Here's are some shots of her all covered up under my new Just Kampers cover. I'm going to miss her.

It also has these cool zippers so you can get in without taking the cover off.

UPDATE:

I'm back!

No its not what your thinking LOL! Just getting rid of that nasty ass moth ball stench. three boxes of incents should do it...I hope.

First start in 8 months