19th blog – date: November, 9th, 2019
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During the last few months i posted hardly anything on this site. Thats why I want to give you a brief update about what we did on our bus since spring 2019!
At first we took the old pop-out windows and removed the crumbly seals. Beneath the seals we found 4 screws in total, which held the frame together. But sadly almost all of them were stuck and it took a lot of patience to open them for the first time after 52 years.
True beauty comes from within!
With the first few appearances of the sun in March, we took the bus out of the garage. Finally we could continue the work on our VW Bus and thats also when in found this magnet pin. It says „Buses by the bridge 2016 – 10. Anniversary“. Of course i did some research about this annual VW Show in Arizona, USA, immediately but without success. I could not find any pictures that do show our bus „Eve“.
And so we started to work on the inside of our bus which be neglected before, mainly because we focused on welding and outside paint job during summer 2018.
After the removal of the fabrics around the windows we had to remove lots of glue remains and surface rust. Most of the work in March and April was sanding down the walls and removing the old headliner.
Afterwards we also removed the dirt from the underside of the roof by using wet sanding paper and i also began to care about the walkthrough bottom.
It was very laborious to sand down the edges of the windows, especially the part where you have to put the seals on afterwards – as none of our available machines was good enough and i had to do it by hand. On 4 windows on every side. I guess it was the first that I was happy about owning a 13 window bus and not a 23 window samba..
My dad also paid lots of attention to the engine bay – as he sanded all walls down to prepare them for the original paint coat.
Short time later it finally happened – primer first and afterwards seablue paint:
In general it was a again a summer with lots of paint jobs, as this pic of the bumpers proves:
The great thing about old cars like this one is, that there is hardly any electricity. And so we could remove the old cable circle very fast. I don’t have a good photo that proves that, but here you can see some old cables leading to the fuses. And this photo does also show, that the replacement front mask still has its green color on the inside. Remember that when you see some other photos further down on this post..
Mid of summer we decided that our brush paint job on the underfloor and bars was not the best job, so we stripped it down and did it right with air brush, with the following result:
And then – finally – it was time for a new paint job on the inside of the bus, in the cargo area and the driver cabin!
In August we took a little break, which i used for a road trip to the Netherlands and a visit in the awesome garage of Kieft en Klok. Then in September we could finally search for all the parts again and bring them out of storage for assembling. The first thing that we installed was the front bumper, some days later the headlights and indicators followed. It looked very strange to me as i already got used to „the naked look“.
Another good thing was, that the new cable circle was in just as fast as we pulled out the old one. So we continued with mounting the rear lights.
Of course it would not be a Deluxe Bus without the chrome belt line trim. It wasn’t the easiest job as they were not fitting from the start and as we had to bend them by hand to bring them into the correct shape, but somehow we found a way. The deluxe trim at the sills and the ones at the bumpers will follow in the future.
Another highlight thanks to the mild September weather was a game night with a friend – on top of our garage roof. With a projector we played some old games like Mario Kart on GameCube, Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 accompanied by the one or other glas of whiskey.
And then after 1,5 years we finally mounted the VW-Emblem on the front again and used the good weather for taking a few pictures:
What a view! We just can’t stop looking at the bus these days. It’s unbelievable what a bit of bling bling does to the bus!
In this special forum thread you can take a look at some more detailed photos of the mentioned works.
In our next blog post we will show you how we installed the new headliner, and there will also be a new article about how we installed the windows again. Stay tuned!
PS: Now you can also plan your road trips for 2020, as i collected lots of vintage VW meetings throughout entire Europe in a list on my website. This list full of Aircooled VW Shows in 2020 will be updated and expanded regularly! And this year I also thought about creating a better overview in a calendar.
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