We went to Big Bend again, this time in our Vanagon. Here’s a video recap of the trip, set to the song “And So They Shall Remain” by Markley and Balmer. We saw them at the Starlight theater on this adventure. Their music is available on Soona Songs.
Category: Vanagon
Gas Can Carrier Mount Improvised
I’ve got a Gary Lee rear hatch rack with bike load bars for Olly. Mainly I use it for carrying bikes, but I wanted to see about mounting a jerry can carrier on the rack. Gary’s got a removable gas can carrier for the multipurpose rack, and it looks like a quality piece of work. Unfortunately, it’s pricey, especially when shipping is added. I was able to find a bracket through Summit Racing, and with the help of a modified mailbox mounting plate from Home Depot, I achieved a similar result.
On Community
One of the more interesting threads on the Vanagon List this past week had very little to do with Vanagons. Ostensibly about beverage holders and Canadians (are they one in the same?), I say “interesting,” not because any reasonable person should care in the slightest about either of these phenomenon. Although a well designed cup-holder is cause for celebration, the discussion is worthy of note because it was in a larger sense about community.
A successful community is an amazing thing because it is a whole greater than its parts. Unfortunately, the calculus which permits such emergence is unclear. It’s not simply about having a mass of qualified members; there is not really a community of toaster owners any more than there is one of brown-haired folks. The success of a community may once have been about location, but the Internet broke that boundary.
Obviously, for acommunity to work, something needs to be shared. Interest in Vanagons, a degree of fluency with English, and a tolerance of email from people we’ve never met are all qualities we have in common. And questions, answers, stories, and rants–in short, information–is the glue that keeps us together. We follow rules (mostly) about things like content and message trimming. But again, those parts don’t equal up to the whole
Kind of like the vans we drive.
I’ll admit my bias here: I grew up with VW campers, and so I own one now. Because I own one, I like hanging out with folks share that lunacy. I know there are other car groups out there, but this one seems more successful than most. I can’t help but wonder if some of that success is due as much to our differences as to our homogeneity. We are composed of folks who can rebuild engines blindfolded and those who believe both ends of a
wrench are dangerous. Daily drivers and weekend(er) warriors, Syncronauts and Westy pilots. Amateurs, vendors, mechanics, engineers, artists, and the odd philosopher swell our ranks. My, but we are diverse.
Kind of like the vans we drive.
On Documentation
I am fortunate to have a workshop attached to my garage. That being said, the space is more conducive to clutter than doing actual work, so this past week I’ve begun remodeling it. As such, building codes have been on my mind, and specifications in general.
Keeping things to spec goes a long way towards making my life easier. If my Vanagon breaks and is then repaired according to the principles in Sir Bentley, when it breaks in the future I won’t have to remember the oddities of the first repair to perform the second one. It’s all written down in the big green book, so if I really need to remind myself of what went on, I just turn to the appropriate chapter and refresh my memory.
If, on the other hand, a repair deviates from scripture, then there’s a good chance that future repairs will have to take into account the previous repair. And the more non-standard repairs I make, the further the van deviates from its original state, the more variables are introduced into the system. This is to say nothing of the outright modifications, and is why troubleshooting through the list can be frustratingly difficult at times. Ultimately, all repairs require peculiar knowledge of the particular vehicle which must be rediscovered or remembered.
I actually have a pretty good memory, but it’s reserved for far more important things like my phone number from 30 years ago or what “TARDIS” stands for. I can’t remember, for example, how I wired my headlight relays into the fuse box, so for efficiency’s sake, I write things down. Well, I try to, anyway. Writing things down can be such a pain.
I have often thought about creating a complete wiring schematic just for Olly.
Ideally, I would have an appendix to my Bentleys documenting my repairs and modifications. Something like an ship’s engineering log, complete with diagrams and pictures. Of course, this takes time, and I seem to have less time than memory.
Some list members give repair reports. I enjoy reading these out of voyeurism, and also because I gain insights into my own van. Online blogs are also good, because they often have photographs. The best part of both of these methods of public documentation is that they share the record with the community, helping us all keep all our peculiar vehicles running just a little longer.
On Fixing Things Right
This past week I finally got around to fixing a couple of sheet fed-scanners we use in the office. They were both making horrible clacking noises, but eventually I got the scanners whirring quietly again, much to the nurses’ joy. The magical fix? A couple pads made from multiple layers of scotch tape, wedged next to one of the axles.
You’re not supposed to mend high tech equipment with a few cents worth of generic office supply. But similar things happen on my Vanagon from time to time. My instrument cluster is held together with a few drywall screws. And wired together with cat-5 cable. Some holes in the body are patched with riveted sheet metal. Some of the paint is rattle-can Rustoleum. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit these things, not because my van isn’t a Go-Westy premium blend, but because these fixes weren’t done right. Some might say I fixed things right when I replaced my zip-tied headlight adjustment screws with a South African Grill. Of course it was expensive. But done right.
On the other hand, those simple home-brew fixes all work. The problems have been solved and I’ve moved on with life, so by that measure they are “right.” But using scotch tape or a found screw seems a bit like cheating or somehow improper. Like maybe I’ll regret it later.
I’ll admit I’m a bit conflicted. When I start a project I sometimes wonder what some of the smart folks out there in List-land would say. Probably something like, “Back away from the JB Weld, sir.” Fortunately I usually have enough confidence (just enough!) to go ahead with my plans. And so Olly keeps trucking along.
On TheSamba forums, the phrase “fix it right” appears over 7000 times. It occurs about 1400 times in relation to Vanagons, and most frequently as an admonishment. As in, “Quit being a cheap bastard and fix it right, you idiot!” For the record, the phrase “fix it right” doesn’t (or didn’t) appear once in the history of the List Archives according to Google. That might say something about the tolerance list community, and possibly indicate why I generally enjoy hanging out here.
On Previous Owners
I am coming up on six years of Vanagon ownership in March of this year. Olly came to me by way of a dealership in Colorado. Before that he lived for a bit in the Pacific Northwest, but he began life in Texas like so many German immigrants. I take some measure of joy in the fact that I’ve brought him back “home.” Vans are rare in these parts.
I know all of this because of a CarFax report and some receipts I found in the van, but otherwise the previous owners are a mystery to me. I don’t know the names of these vanagonauts or the roads they travelled in Olly. I’d like to think that some of the longtime van owners out there passed Olly and exchanged a Vanagon wave during his 145,000 previous-to-me miles, but that’s purely fantasy.
What I do know is that Olly has been both loved and neglected. For the most part he came to me blessedly stock, although less than fully functional. I say “blessedly” not because I believe that a stock van is inherently better, but because it made learning about the ins and outs of Vanagons a lot easier in a place where there are few references other than Bentley and the list. Electrical gremlins are much easier to exorcize when the diagrams approximate reality.
That being said, there are signs-a-plenty that Olly has been captained by others. Patched metal, taped wires, jumped connections, POR-15’d spots, and stripped non-metric bolts point to both care and neglect. Most often I curse the previous owner’s bone-headedness, like when I find that BOTH the front door wiring harnesses were snipped instead of being disconnected properly just a few inches further under the dash.
It’s frustrating to stumble across such examples the PO’s handiwork while I’m in the middle of fixing something else, but lately I’ve been trying to view these scars as talismans. That the repairs were done at all is an indication that someone, somewhere along the way wanted to keep this van on the road a little longer. That those folks cared about this van, even if they lacked expertise or proper tools. Many vans are not so lucky. Mine was, and so it has to come to me.
For that I am grateful.
So I here’s to you, all you previous owners, for your stubbornness that kept the four wheels rolling even when you had no business trying. For your bravery in owning a Vanagon at all. And for your wisdom to pass the van (and the mess you made) on to someone else when the time came. I thank you.
Sliding Door Lighting in the Vanagon
I’ve always thought that one oversight of the Vanagon is a lack of lighting in the passenger cabin. Obviously in Westfalias there’s the galley lighting, but that’s not triggered by opening the door. A closer inspection of the B pillar and the sliding door revealed that clearly it isn’t a complete oversight of VW: there is a cutout for the door switch, indicating it must be an option somewhere.
Adding the light wasn’t overly difficult, but did require a bit of experimentation. First I ran wires, tapping into the existing cabin lighting so that all the lights would be on the same circuit. This was made easier by the fact that I have already installed a light over the front passenger seat. Ultimately I got the wires in place using string and some bailing wire. That done, I had to engineer the trigger for the switch, since the door doesn’t fit flush where the switch mount point is. This I accomplished with a hex bolt and few nuts which allowed a fair amount of precision adjustment.
After that, it was just a matter of cutting the hole for the new light fixture in the right side air duct. I used the standard VW dome light for uniformity of appearance. Now I can see what’s going on when I open the sliding door, and the dome light provides some additional lighting when camping. Easily one of the best mods I’ve made on Olly so far.
Interior Lighting
The single driver-side dome light in the Vanagon tends to leave one in the dark, particularly when camping. I wanted a passenger-side light that retained the style of the original, and which could be controlled by the doors or switched on and off independently of the driver-side light. Fortunately, dome lights are cheap and easily available, and they’re easily installed.
I also wanted to replace the interior lights (both fore and aft) with LED lights which would generate less heat and consume less power when running on the battery. Two drawbacks to using LEDs is that they tend to have less light output (owing largely to their directional nature), and the light they generate tends to be colder than monofilament bulbs. I felt the “cool” nature of the lighting could be offset by having multiple light sources.
This project wasn’t difficult, but it was time consuming. Removing the headliner (Bentley 75.7) isn’t fun, as it requires the removal of both the left (Bentley 76.4) and right (Bentley 76.5)curtain rails on late-model vans. I recommend following the Bentley procedures, as they take the guesswork out of what you need to disconnect. I would have saved myself considerable time had I done so.
After removing the headliner, I had to construct a metal bracket to hold the light, and cut a hole in the headliner. To make the bracket, I salvaged some sheet metal from an old computer CD-ROM case. It was a slightly lighter gauge metal, but was rigid enough to work. Measurements were taken from the existing bracket, easily visible with the headliner removed.
I cut the metal using an angle grinder for the outside and a Dremel tool for the inside. I shaped the bracket using pliers and a ball-peen hammer. When all done, I tested the fit of the dome light fixture before riveting it into the headliner.
…more to come…
