I noticed that quite a few VW bloggers have been absent lately…including me. I guess Spring Fever hit us all at the same time. I did take the opportunity to get quite a bit done on Gus. I’ve got the muffler on, the lights all work, and I’ve been working on my list to try and get Gus on the road for the May 20th VWs on the Green show.

And I had some help recently – unsolicited. My daughter asked if she could help me work on the bus! So I found a few things for her to do.

Here she is scrubbing the front floor mat.

A little help from a little bro.

And a little interior cleaning as well.

Here’s a cleaned and non-cleaned version of the front step mats – they came out great! They look almost brand new.

Here it is installed. I had some good helpers, and we all got a lot of cleaning done! Stay tuned for some posts on the light and muffler installations.

The Micro-Bus Bunk Bed and Playhouse  (click on the link to go to the actual page with instructions)

It’s a child’s bunk bed created to look like a VW bus! And underneath the sleeping area is a playhouse, complete with a steering wheel, and closing side doors. Pretty neat. And I like the fact that the project author painted the bed in Gus’s colors…

Now if I were to make this bed, I would make the front paint a bay window style, without the paint swoop of the early split style, since the window looks like a bay window anyway.

I just might have to make this for my son – he loves playing in Gus!

If you happened to see the new 2012 Beetle commercial on the Super Bowl, you got a glimpse at what is, in my opinion, the best redesign Volkswagen has come up with in years. In 1998, when they brought on the “New Beetle,” I was really excited.  I went to the Chicago Auto Show that year, and waited in line forever for a clear acrylic model of the new Beetle they were handing out.  But for me, the actual car was a little disappointing. It did take cues from the original Beetle, but it was…well…so girly.

My daughter loves these Beetles (as well as the old air-cooled ones) – but she’s eight years old. And we’ll probably own one some day (hopefully I can convince her that we should get an air-cooled one). I don’t think Volkswagen really designed this New Beetle with guys in mind though.  So as excited as I was about a new Beetle design, it wasn’t for me.

Fast forward to last fall when I first saw the photos of the redesigned 2012 Beetle, and I was amazed. They finally nailed it! It looks much more like a car either a guy or a girl would drive, and the fastback looks very reminiscent of a Porsche 911.

To me, this redesign is a lot truer to the essence of the air-cooled Beetle, and is way better looking than the New Beetle redesign.

I went to the VW website and did the “build your own” Beetle, and picked the base model. The base model has one awesome feature that would make me choose it over the other models (besides the fact that it’s the lowest price)…check out the wheels!

I’m not sure exactly how they are constructed, but they look pretty darn close to the original VW hubcaps. I don’t think I’d get any options, other than the $35 first aid kit – it would probably be a rare item someday. If I were in the market for a new car, I’d seriously consider the new Beetle. Other than the four door Jeep Wrangler (and maybe the Toyota FJ and Dodge Challenger) , it’s probably my favorite new car design out there.

Which brings me to the VW Bulli concept – I don’t understand how VW could do such a fantastic job with the Beetle redesign, and then think that this would echo any cues from an old Bus.

I saw the 2001 VW Microbus concept car in person at the Detroit Auto Show, and despite some of it’s ugliness I thought it was much closer to the mark of a revamped Bus than this new Bulli concept.

All VW really needed to do with this concept was to ditch the rectangular headlights, add some round headlights and move them down, and move the VW logo down (and maybe make it bigger). Then you’d have a nice retro-themed modern Bus. To me the Bulli concept looks like any other Kia Soul/Nissan Cube/etc. VWs should have some soul, not look like a Soul.

Speaking of soul, VW still has it availaible, in Brazil (and now being imported to some of Europe I believe)…the Kombi.

I’m not sure what this says, but I’m pretty sure it translates to “This VW Kombi should be available to purchase in the United States, minus the ugly radiator on the nose.” Now if VW had this available to buy in the U.S. as a new car, it would definitely be my next new car purchase, hands down.

In Gus news, I have been doing random projects here and there, when I have time. I touched up some rust spots with some rust converter on the rear corner, did some buffing of the paint, and cleaned the engine hatch lid (but not my workbench, as you can see).

I had an “ah-ha” moment today. Not involving the 80s band, but more like at the end of a Maury Povich show, where the paternity test results came back in, and the Baby Daddy you were expecting to be the father ends up different.

Gus is not who we thought he was.

All of this time (it will be five years of ownership in a few weeks) I assumed Gus was a Sportsmobile conversion, because he looked like one. He has the same poptop and front luggage rack as a Sportsmobile.

This is a VW Sportsmobile.

And this is Gus. Everyone on The Samba said it was a Sportsmobile, so I left it at that.

Somehow last night I stumbled upon Country Homes Campers, which was another camper conversion company of VW’s – mostly Vanagons. I had found their site awhile ago looking for poptop replacement canvas. They were (still are, actually) based in California (which is where Gus is from). The company is still around in some capacity, selling some replacement parts for their conversions.

I had done searches on Country Homes Campers before, but they were always linked to Vanagons…never Bay Windows. But then last night I ran across this picture of a 1982 Vanagon with the Country Homes Conversion:

My jaw nearly hit the floor. Well, not really, but I was intrigued. This interior is almost identical to Gus’s:

I was almost 100% sure Gus was a Country Homes Camper conversion. But I wanted to check on The Samba to see if anyone knew if CHC had done Bay Window conversions. I received some helpful advice, but no one really seemed to know. In the meantime I had sent an email to the Country Homes Campers website to see if they knew, along with links to pics of Gus’s interior.

I received this reply today:

Hello Steve,

You have a Country Homes Camper.  The company started in 1978 and was located in Oakland.  Then moved to Scotts Valley (Near Santa Cruz),then to San Jose.  I purchased the company in 1989 and closed it
in 1997.  The keep my site up for informational purposes, help customers find parts, sell some small parts (rollers,etc.) and I also sell Shady Boy awnings.  I am going to start another company and sell 3.27 R&P sets for the automatic Vanagon.

Do you need any parts for your Camper?

Regards,

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
Salim Miro
Country Homes Campers
FORD&  VW CAMPING VAN EXPERTS
www.countryhomescampers.com
email: info@countryhomescampers.com
Fax: 1 815 346 3337

What the?

Huh?

You mean Sportsmobile is not Gus’s baby daddy, but CHC is???

Actually this was pretty cool news, as the Country Homes Campers website has links to all of the accessories manufacturers (like my battery isolator for example, which had a wiring diagram pdf so I know exactly how to hook up my accessory battery!!), and they sell some replacement parts. And I believe they sell replacement poptop canvasses, which is very cool, and they supposedly have a few of the Country Homes Campers stickers left. The stickers go on the poptop. I definitely want to get a pair.

So of course I started looking up CHC pictures on the Interwebs, and I found the final piece to put Gus’s paternity to rest.

This is the ID plate/sticker from a 1983 Vanagon Country Homes conversion (the silver one). Gus has the exact plate/sticker, but part of it is conveniently gone (the part that says Country Homes Camper, which would have made the ID process a lot easier). Also from Salim’s email, the company started in 1978 (which Gus is) in Oakland, California. Gus (according to his Warranty Card) was sold at Oliver Volkswagen in Vallejo, California…which is 25 miles from Oakland.

Pretty cool…if you are a VW nerd like me.

A few weeks ago, I posted about how I was refreshing Gus’s wavy door panels. I finally got around to installing one of them. This is the backside of the driver’s panel before I soaked it. It was the least wavy of the two panels:

After I unclamped it from the wood, it was very straight.

But some of the vinyl had come unglued over the years, and it was a little wrinkled.

I decided to reglue the vinyl, and stretch it out as much as possible, in order to try and get rid of the wrinkles. I had some of this lying around that I bought for my old 1964.5 Mustang’s headliner (and never used). This is some sticky stuff! I used it to glue down part of Gus’s headliner when I was doing the windshield lip repair/front end repaint.

I applied the adhesive and used binder clamps to hold the vinyl in place around the edges until it dried. Now it was time to install the speaker. I had some never-used Pioneer speakers lying around that I got for free, and they fit the hole perfectly. I then drilled a hole through the back of the panel into the ventilation system so I could run the speaker wires through the ventilation system, which would hide the wires.

Now all I had to do was line up the door panel inserts with the holes in the door, and pop the interior panel back in. Simple. Except…the magnet on the back of the speaker kept pulling the panel over and sticking to the door. I eventually got it lined up, and popped the panel into place.

I then just had to install the remaining door hardware (door pull and surround for the door handle) – thankfully one of Gus’s previous owners had left all of the panel hardware in one of his inside drawers. When I got Gus he didn’t have his door panels installed.

And here’s the finished results! There’s still a little wrinkle in the vinyl, but I got most of them out. I’m pretty happy with the results.

Now I just need to install the passenger door panel, and then I can hook up the new speakers to this sweet Cobra eight track player I bought on eBay a few years ago. It’s never been installed – it was in an old electronics store that went out of business.

I’ve been buying eight tracks when I see them at flea markets, etc….still need to get a Three Dog Night one with Shambala on it, to complete the Lost connection.

Gus received a few gifts for Christmas. One of which was a new VW emblem for his nose. If you remember from a previous post, Gus used to have a spare tire mounted to his front end.

I removed the spare tire mount, welded up the old holes and painted the front. I didn’t quite get the nose totally straight, which is partly due to Gus having received a replacement front end sometime in his life. It’s pretty cheap metal, and pops in and out if you push on it right. Plus I’m guessing the spare tire hanging on the metal didn’t help things.

So when I went to put the new emblem on, I figured it would be an easy job. Three holes, which each take one emblem clip which secures the emblem. Five minute job. Well, nothing on Gus takes five minutes. The aftermarket emblem holders were extremely cheap – they started to collapse as I put them in the holes. But I managed to make them work. But a new problem quickly surfaced. None of the three would keep the emblem flat – meaning because of the bumpy, pops in and out nature of Gus’s nose, the emblem wouldn’t stay attached in all three holes. So now what? I don’t want Gus’s logo to end up on one of the Beastie Boys, so I needed to come up with a more permanent solution.

I decided the best way to get the emblem to lie flat would be to screw it onto the nose. So I drilled three small holes through the emblem and into the nose – one at the top and two at the bottom (they are in different locations than the stock mounting holes). I then took sheet metal screws I had lying around, and ground down the heads so they would fit semi-flush into the emblem.

I used a slotted head rather than a Phillips head screw mainly for aesthetic reasons – I wanted the slot to follow the contour of the emblem.

You can see how it now sits nicely flush with the nose. And no kid is going to steal it, at least not very easily. The screws are not easily seen, which is what I was going for. It’s not totally stock, obviously, but I like the fact that the emblem isn’t going to pop off going down the road.

Gus seems to like it!

I found this Matchbox bus on Amazon the other day. I’ve rarely seen Bay Window toy cars, and had never seen an orange one, so I had to get it! Plus the roof even kind of looks like a Sportsmobile top. The car is actually a 1970, and Gus is a 1978, but it’s pretty close in appearance.

(Gus did get a shiny new chrome VW logo for his nose for Christmas – I’ll be putting that on soon after a wet sand of the front)

And here are a few of Mini Gus’s friends:

And hopefully large Gus’s future stablemate, a 1969 (or thereabouts) Squareback (this is a Hot Wheels one I picked up a few years ago)

Gus’s door panels are wavy like Ruffles potato chips. Wavy is good in a potato chip, but not in a door panel. They sustained some water damage at some point, and part of the back of one of them is falling apart.

A long time ago I found this post from the Itinerant-Air-Cooled website about redoing the bus door panels.  Interesting side note – the blog with the door panels is run by a guy who (we discovered by posting on a Itinerant-Air-Cooled post) lives in the same town as me. Small world! He has since sold the bus though – I did manage to see it one time driving by his house. The cool thing in his post was that he had the same problem with wavy door panels, and solved the problem by soaking them in the bathtub and then clamping wood over the warped areas to straighten them. Genius! I never would have thought of that, so I decided to give it a try.

Now in his blog post he was going to recover the panels, but I am going to keep mine the same, as the vinyl is in good shape – just the cardboard-like material is warped.

So I ran some water in the tub, and soaked the warped areas for a few minutes.

I then took the panels out to the garage and clamped some wood and whatever flat materials I could find (leftover ceramic tiles) to the panels.

The one panel that has the pieces falling out of the back of it I am going to fill in with some bondo I think, just so it stays together. I checked one of the panels this morning (after it has been drying/clamped together for two days), and it’s flat!!! I’m very excited, as I didn’t want to buy new door panels. I’m going to install some door speakers in the holes when I remount the panels.

This past summer we made our yearly trip back home to the midwest. I grew up in the Quad Cities, which are in Iowa and Illinois. Home of the John Deere headquarters, and not much else…until the show American Pickers started on the History Channel. I’ll admit, I’ve really only seen one episode, but apparently one of the guys on the show is really into air-cooled Volkswagens. So since we were in town, and the actual “base” for the show is in LeClaire, Iowa in the Quad Cities, we decided to head on over to check it out.

The first thing we saw when we pulled up was this split window bus. I thought they might have found it on their Picker travels, but it turned out that the guy who worked behind the counter in the American Picker store (which is called Antique Archaeology) owns it, and it’s his daily driver. I think he had recently moved from Oregon, which explains the plates.

Hey, the keys are in it! I kind of like the 8 Ball shifter.

Perhaps he lives in here.

Inside the store I found a few other VW items for sale.

This bus toy was cool, but was priced at $85. In general most of the items I saw in the store seemed to be very overpriced, almost like they didn’t want to sell them.

Matchbox VW bus – very sweet. I don’t know if it had a price on it.

Here’s some of the other things in the store. It was a neat place to explore, until my son had a meltdown and we had to leave.

My son pre-meltdown with a cool old Harley.

I really wanted one of these, as it’s the day I was born – July 20, 1969. But they were something outrageous, like $50 for one. So I settled for a free picture of them.

Cool vintage scooter.

The outside of the store, and the Dodge Sprinter they travel around in on the show. I didn’t see any of the cast members when we were there, but I have friends who have run into them when they’ve been at the store. All in all it was a pretty cool place.

Gus doesn’t (as far as I know) really need a new engine, but I found a great deal on craigslist that I couldn’t pass up.

VW bus motor two liter FI – $125

Motor ran fine when removed except for what I believe is a blown gasket on one of the heads. It’s fuel injected and most everthing is still on it. It’s a builder. I have been waiting for the bus to come along, but now I’m just becoming realistist and don’t forsee having time to work on it. It’s a good one and a good price if you need one and have the time.

I talked to the owner a few times on the phone, and made a trip into Denver to pick it up. I was pleasantly surprised at how clean the engine was. The owner mentioned it was in his dad’s bus, and his dad passed away and he inherited a lot of his VW stuff. Apparently this engine was leaking oil from around one of the cylinders, but his dad just kept adding oil all the way from Tennessee to Michigan. He mentioned that his dad was quite the VW mechanic.

I told him I wanted a spare engine that I could rebuild. He said he didn’t think this one needed much of anything, other than resealing where the leak is. So I’m going to do a compression check to see how it checks out…it’s a GD (I asked the owner “Ted” on the phone if he knew what the engine code was, and he said, “It’s GD, like God Damn.” Nice. ) Gus has a GE engine, so this GD engine is probably from early 1976, as near as I can figure out. I believe they are pretty much the same engine. I think some of the wiring is different from year to year, so if I did switch out engines I would use Gus’s wiring.

Here’s some pics:

I also filled up Gus’s gas tank with Sta-bil this weekend, and ran him for a few minutes. I was tempted to give him another drive, but he is surrounded by crap things after a garage cleaning.

If you happened to visit Gus’s website in the next few days, you might notice a different look. I’m going to try out a new design. The current design was taken from my other blog Eating Peaches, and never really got it’s own look. So I’ve got a more travel-looking theme coming…stay tuned!