Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 23:32:50 -0700
Reply-To: Ri <staff@EARTHNOW.ORG>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Ri <staff@EARTHNOW.ORG>
Subject: Building a westy
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hi Everyone!
Thanks so much for the great info you have helped us with so far!
We wanted to share our project, so everyone could hear what we have gotten
ourselves into!
We used to have a '65 walkthru westy that we had restored, and just loved
it.. except for a few things. It was old, hard to drive, and since we live
on the Oregon Coast, it wandered around on 101 like a tissue box in a
hurricane. It just so happened some good friends of ours lost their bus due
to a very bad engine problem (and their bus was trashed) so we gave them
our Isabell. She is happy now, staying at Breitenbush Hot Springs and we
get to see her when go visit (instead of renting a cabin!)
Anyhow, after 7 months of trying to find a water cooled westy to replace
her with, we finally gave up. There was no way we were going to finance
another car after buying our Volvo a few years ago, and we weren't able to
find a good westy (even with bad engines) for less than 7k!
Soooo... our friend at 101 Imports in Lincoln City sold us his 87 GL and
the interior and top from an 83 westy, with a big box of bolts and hardware
for $2500 He also gave us the top roof section of the donor westy. It was
such a cute picture hauling two pop-tops and this roof section on a trailer
behind our 67 singlecab! (I should have taken a picture!) The GL runs
really well, and is a very clean bus to start with.
Our GL has a big factory sunroof, and it appears to be 3" smaller on each
side than the westy opening. We plan on slicing the rear roof section off
the westy carcass, and welding it into the rear roof section of the GL. The
neat part is we think we can do this without wasting the headliner of the
GL, cuz it has this metal roof under where the sunroof slid! We are very
excited about being able to possibly save the headliner....
I found that simple green is removing the mold and nasties from the
fiberglass top. We plan on painting it to match the Dove Blue paint on the
GL. We will be ordering all the new canvas, rubber etc from Bus Depot per
everyones recommendations.
Luckily my partner Glen knows how to do serious welding/fabrication to
tackle this project. I seem to just come up with the desire, and hold
things and clean the rest of them. = ) He says he's going to use either a
sawzall or rent a plasma cutter for the operation. I think the sawzall will
be too noisy!
We plan on using a waste water tank from EuroCampers, and will do the
auxillary battery mods with that optima battery. We also have the seat
brackets to weld in to do the swivel seats in the front. Is this as easy as
they said it is?
Is there any wonderful words of wisdom from other westy owners that have
built their own?
Thanks so much for the support and crossed fingers!
Namaste,
Ri
The River Clan
'87 Wannabee Westy
'67 Singlecab
'96 850 Turbo