Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 12:46:32 -0700
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: mholser@Adobe.COM (Malcolm Holser)
Subject: Re: The spirit of the Type II lives!
> I was going out to my Westy Vanagon this morning, and thinking that, the
> Vanagons really don't have the same spirit as the old type II. I mean, they
> seem sanitized and spiffied up almost to the point that you forget their
> origins.
>
> Well, I was brought back to reality when my Westy would not start, and a few
> whacks on the solenoid was all it took to get things going again. Reminded me
> of the many times I would crawl under my '71 van to short the solenoid
> terminals with a screwdriver to start it.
>
> I guess this is one design issue that the German engineers passed on from the
> old type II's. Deep in the soul of the Vanagon, the type II lives.
>
I drove a '57 singlecab for 20 years, and I miss it dearly. Not that it was
a great vehicle -- it really was not, but love of VW busses is not a rational
thing. When I finally wrecked the truck, I already had my '80 Westy, but it
did not seem really like a VW so much. We eventually bought two more VW's,
both '86's with the 2L waterboxer. I finally got back onto familiar ground
when I needed to replace the valve covers on the Syncro, and gave it the
covers from my '57. The spirit not only lives on, even some parts have never
really changed. The transporter may have gone through several evolutions,
but until the T4/EuroVan, the evolutions were really fairly gradual, and the
model has some true continuity. Each of the major body changes was not
accompanied by any major mechaincal change -- a '70 has much more in common
with a late splitty than it does with a '79, and the '79 is mechanically
quite the same as an early T3/Vanagon.
The spirit lives on, although many splitty owners deny it, some of us do not.
Perhaps I've become a bit of a Yuppie, but I doubt that I'd really love a
split as anything other than a collector's item now -- VW made way too many
improvments over time.
malcolm
| 
