20th blog – date: September, 25th 2025
It’s long overdue that we finally show you what other progress we’ve made on the bus. So I’ve scoured our photos since September 2019 and compiled some of them here.
In the last proper post: Update – Summer 2019, you can see in the last few photos that the bus already looks quite like a real T1 again – that is, fully painted, with the VW badge and trim. But there was still a lot to do.
Among other things, we covered the underside of the roof with a 2 cm layer of Armaflex. The Armaflex material insulates against heat and noise and is also flame-resistant. This foam was easy to install because the panels are conveniently already adhesive on the underside, so you only had to peel off the protective film. After that, we temporarily installed the headliner. A nerve-wracking job, almost too few for four hands. We started at the rear of the tailgate and slowly worked our way forward. Two key points here are the areas above the cargo area doors and directly opposite them, as two plastic guides are clamped there – and once they’re in place, they sit quite tightly and are almost impossible to adjust. Of course, we also inserted the tensioning arches and adjusted them into position. Over the next winter months, the headliner continued to hang loosely until we worked on it piece by piece, gradually tightening it with a heat gun.
Attentive observers will also notice that the windows in the previous blog post weren’t installed yet. Therefore, we sanded and repainted the window frames – especially those for the two front doors. These, along with the seals, were then installed as a test. However, without the window panes, because we had to do another job first, specifically for all the remaining windows:
The interior wall-lining
This means, for example, that we couldn’t install the pop-out windows or the windshields, including the corresponding seals, until we had glued the vinyl fabric to the window recesses. We bought our own heat-resistant adhesive for this. By the way: here is a hot tip from us: get some foldback clamps. They were really useful, as the adhesive needed to be applied to both the surface being glued and the back of the vinyl fabric. And because you have to wait five minutes before gluing it together, the clamps were very helpful to hold the fabric in place. I would also recommend eating an ice pop or two, as the wooden sticks were also quite useful for smoothing down some of the edges. I also got a dough scraper/spatula. This has the advantage of offering a larger and more flexible surface than the wooden stick and is also coated with a protective silicone layer. This was often quite useful when fiddling around with the headliner and interior fabrics.
Installing the Side Windows
Even before winter arrived, we felt an urgent need to reinstall the windows, especially because we’d occasionally spotted a mouse or two in the garage.
After reassembling the frames of the vent windows and the glass panes, we placed the seals over the rebate of each window recess and then screwed in the pop-out windows. For the two rearmost side windows (not pop-out windows), we took a different approach: After pulling the window pane into the seal, we wrapped the seal with a string greased with Vaseline. This proved very useful during installation, allowing us to pry the seal over the rebate of the body. On the bus itself, one of us sat inside and placed the seal over the window rebate, while the other stood next to the bus, holding the window from the outside and pushing it into position. The following pictures show the process of installing the windows quite clearly; with two people, it went really well.
For the first time in ages, we installed the seats and benches in the bus again. They were attached quite quickly with the wing nuts.
Won a VW Bulli freezer
Another happy news I can report: I was lucky enough to win a cool-box in the shape of a Volkswagen T1 bus on the Budweiser Budvar Austria Facebook page. The bus was delivered to us at the beginning of December, filled with a generous amount of Budweiser beer. The rolling cooler with a trolley function for towing has been a source of great joy ever since. It’s already seen a lot of things and will accompany our Bulli on many more trips in the future.
AustroSplit 