Vanagon Blog

[Heinz Francis]

Weve been quiet, for a while, and this blog post is just about one-year-to-the-day overdue. This time last year, we were living out our last days, for the foreseeable future, with Penny, parked on the beach in La Ventana. Since then, we've been attempting to assimilate to life off the road, which doesn't inspire the same spark to write as does traveling, kitesurfing and side-of-the-road repairs.

After a crazy first couple of days battling the elements, the pace turned. Jacqui and I were in our first Caravan; It's a fascinating concept when you think of it. Three groups all huddled together that have one thing in common: They decided to leave all familiarity behind, squeeze themselves into a claustrophobic home on wheels and brave whatever forces stand in their way, for what essentially amounts to an extreme sports version of a road trip.

After 9 weeks in the beautiful Columbia Gorge we were officially setting sail. Our time in the Big Red House was over and I was abandoning my boss at Mark's Auto to deal with the long line of cars needing repair on his own. Sorry el jefe, adventure awaits, and so does a friend in need.

The Bus and Us is a site which documents an Alaskan couple's journey to Argentina and back in a 1975 VW Bus. Whether you believe this is Vanlife or Buslife, Tessa and Dillon will soon call this vehicle home. The 1975 Bay window is currently under construction, getting a Subaru 2.2 swap!

We bought the bus after finding ourselves with no other options. It was December, it was cold, and we knew we wanted to leave in a few months for the trip. The bus was on Craigslist for $500, an hour and a half away in a seaside town called Hope, Alaska. Rusty, not running, and missing parts the bus was a lawn ornament.

There she was, back at my parents house. First thought, we have to move to a house with a garage so we can work on it without freezing. So we did, another month later it was inside our new single car garage, leaving us no room to work on it. Our hearts were set on the trip, but when the ski season is upon us and the mountains are calling, well we were extremely distracted and the last thing we wanted to do was work on this rust bucket.

At this point its mid February. We are deciding what direction we want to go toward with the interior. Neither of us have much mechanical experience, interior experience etc. But Tessa likes arts and crafts and I thought I would be up for whatever mechanical issues were to appear in the not to distant future. Research on buses in general immediately brought us to some realizations. The bus we bought was advertised as a 1976, after loading it up the title was signed over and once in my hands I realized it was a 1975. I knew there were a few differences but a few big ones stood out once I had it back in Anchorage. No passenger seat swivel, different cabinets, lower geared weaker transmission, smaller engine, weaker pop top hinges.

We now had an engine and ECU, a partly dissembled interior and a lot of days in the backcountry under our belt. We sent out the ECU to get wired for the swap and left for Tailgate Alaska. It was now April.

Tailgate brought us near Valdez, where the second Westfalia of the winter was for sale. This one was not so daunting. An Aircooled 1980 Vanagon that ran. We thought, perhaps we are in over our heads and should use this as the expedition mobile.

We brought the vanagon back to Anchorage and had it inspected at Estey's, who happened to have rebuilt the motor not long before. Estey informed us that taking the Vanagon would be a much better idea, and the rusty bus would be an absolute money pit and we wouldn't be leaving for another year at least. What a foolish man we thought, we loved the bus so much more. We would soon be on the road to freedom in our bus, so we sold the Vanagon.

You read that right. This is a 1974 Type 2 microbus from the first generation of production. VW stopped US sales of first-generation campers after the 1967 model year. Meanwhile, production of the split-windshield original bus continued in Brazil until 1975.

This Vanagon Camper is finished in two-tone mint green and white with a matching interior. Restorers sandblasted and repainted it during a painstaking process. They replaced hard-to-find chrome trim, glass, bumpers, emblems, and weatherstripping.

Jim Travers is a lifelong gearhead. A classic car enthusiast and collector, Jim is a regular judge on the car show circuit and is author of the Smithsonian Institutions book, Extreme Cars." His work has appeared in Automobile, Autoblog, BBC Autos, Car and Driver, Cars.com, Car Talk, Consumer Reports, and Hagerty. He lives in Duxbury, Mass., a town known for its beach and its dump. Jim can often be found at one or the other.

I saw an advertisement for it; it was in Portland. So on a whim I called and talked to the woman who owned it. She said she wanted to downsize, as she had been living in the van but now had a place to stay. I told her I had a Peugeot wagon and right away she was interested. I had always wanted a diesel Vanagon as I figured it was bigger than my previous bus and got better fuel mileage. So I took a (leisurely) drive up to Portland in the Peugeot.

The owner was living with another woman on a sort of rural estate. She was of the typical hippie persuasion associated with tall, square VW products. That was cemented in my mind when she showed me her Toyota truck, which had the words Dance Like No One Is Watching and Love Like You Have Never Been Hurt spray painted on the sides in large letters. Yes indeed, she was a perfect candidate for Peugeot ownership!

We test drove our prospective vehicles. She instantly loved the Peugeot like she had never been hurt, which is a bit surprising given how loud and rough the brown and tan Vanagon was. I had been hurt, so my love for the Vanagon came on a bit slower. But it had the big sun roof that actually worked and the interior was pretty decent. Besides, where else could I find a Vanagon diesel? For the less informed, the 48 hp diesel Vanagon was sold in the US only in 1982. There are good reasons for that, although it makes them cult objects to its devotees, who invariable swap in turbo-diesels. At the time, it never really occurred to me that I was trading in a mangy dog for a rabid cat. Some things come the hard way.

Oh and lord forbid that you should happen upon a small slope of any sort. Semi trucks were passing me routinely, angry drivers shook their fists at me as they passed, and I shook my fist at it, too. One time I actually did crack the dash hitting it in frustration. The idea of putting a 1.6 liter diesel engine with four speeds in a nearly three ton vehicle that was shaped like a cupboard was sounding less and less brilliant, and more and more insane.

And then the sliding door handle decided to fall off. Take a look at Vanagons and you will notice that many of them are missing this handle. Next to go was the front sway bar mount, which simply sheered in two. This was a far cry from my rugged old bus! And just to add insult to injury, the transmission went tits-up next. Only Volkswagen could make a transmission so weak that a 48 horsepower diesel motor could break it! I was through with it. But of course to sell it I had to get a transmission.

The door handles, especially pre-85, were weak. Partly a design fault, and partly due to not tightening them up. There are few things like that on these vehicles, and now that the newest one is about 20 years old, finding one in tip top shape is not easy.

Yeesh. I like vans, but I have to wonder what made VW think this could be sold in the US (outside of Iowa, or North Dakota, or other places with dinner-plate topography). Please, can you tell us about your Cornbinder?

In my shady used car days, I was always leery of selling these things. It was a love/hate thing because I always made money on them, no matter how beat and rusty, how out of tune it was, how much smoke it blew, it was an easy sell to some starry-eyed teen, usually girl. I would tell van buyers over and over that said vehicles had a penchant for blowing up, breaking down and catching fire and would retort with tales of how often one needed to swap engines. All to no avail and without fail, a week later the thing would be towed back with some ranting dad accompanying it, screaming how I had sold a piece of crap, which I had, because all VW Vans, are, in my opinion, pieces of crap, even when new. Now that will raise a few hackles here!

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that VW Vans were a sort of S&M with a heavy emphasis on the M part. The S part was trying to flog the beast up Coquihalla and actually succeeding, the M part having it explode climbing the hill out of Revelstoke, which was a common situation twenty years ago in my fair part of Soviet Canuckistan.

My solution was the fit a Seat of Nails for your VW Van, which was retractable and on a timer. In the rare moments that your VW Van actually ran well, the nails would suddenly lodge themselves in your backside to remind what was certainly going to happen sooner rather than later. An even better thing would be to mount said Seat of Nails in a Ford Econoline 6 or Dodge 1500 Slant Six van. This way you could have a reliable, economical van and still experience the regular pain of ownership only a VW could provide.

Any of the short American 6 cyl vans of the same era were infinitely better than the VW. They had more power, went better, stopped better, were more reliable (not hard compared to a VW), had a heater that actually worked and did not use any more fuel than a VW.

And good for them. Anyone who enjoys VW Vans is more than welcome to buy one and have fun with it. I will never understand it, and the VW Van lovers will never understand my disdain for said vehicles.

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