Date:         Thu, 1 Aug 96 12:27:11 +0200
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         verbeek@the-hague.stbv.slb.com (brian verbeek)
Subject:      Re: Extra long, or Vanalong

And Joel said:

>there was a Dutch company named Klemper or something like that, who used
>to do that with the breadloaf buses. they may have continued the practice
>with the vanagons. what they appeared to do was take a single cab pickup
>and cut the bed off, extend it, and weld a box onto the bed. for a REALLY
>big bread truck. one of the british bus books has a picture of one.
>looks like a really comfortable camper, but loooooooooooong. :)

Yeah, Kemperinck (what Joel means, knows, but couldn't recall straight away)
did this, in fact i had a '73 like that, i bought after it was set on fire.
I have also seen a RHD baywindow crew with English plates, the cab was
stock crew and the bed was stock single cab... It was blue.

I put a note under the wiper and a few days later the guy called me, i
forgot his name,  we chatted for a while and then he said that it was made
in Holland, so i guess that one was converted by Kemperinck as well. I have
also seen two stretched Busses, campers, both were identical, body extension
wise, looked factory. both had the small pop top placed just before the
middle of the roof. The's a stretched Kemperinck for sale here in town,
a single cab with the metal box on the bed, they have two rear doors above
the engine lid and two full lenght/hight doors on the right side but maybe
that's only for the LHD models.

As for the Vanalong, we have that one as well :) it's more a Transportolong,
maybe this one is *also* made by Kemperinck, dono, saw one from the local
civil-servant-gardners (wadeverucalem) a single cab with LOOOOOONG bed maybe
an extra 1 or 1.5 meter it was green with a black band on the bottom/sills,
as the car was fairly new when i saw it, i think that that was done on purpose,
not to camouflage rust or other damage, now i come to think of it, Kemperinck
did quite lot with VWs they also did splitty's i'll see if the still exist.
The stretched/Hitop single cabs are know in Holland as "Bolletje Bus" because
that company had a lot of them. They are big, the guy from which i bought mine
had travelled Europe with it, he told me a story about a broken clutch cable,
from all places, it had to happen in Switzerland, bear in mind that in
Switzerland you MUST use original parts for any car, regardless of its age,
that's regulated by law or something. The guy had to come up with some serious
cash to have his cable fixed, he didn't seem to know a lot about the car, he
had two regular sofa's in there (!) the cheap ones that you can fold into bed.

I recently helped a manager of our company to import his Harley into Holland,
he told me he had a 1950s Mercedes, a 170 or 180, he bought it as a project in
Indonesia and had it shipped to Switzerland, were it is now, he had it
restored by a firm specializing in these things, imagine the price tag
attached to something like that in Switzerland, they can only use NOS parts...

Brian