She can afford one? Let her pay for your dates!
My former car pool mate spent time in New Guinea where they used the vw buses. He called them death traps. Look but don’t buy.
My son bought a VW Bus back in late '80s and he tried to do an oil change on it and when he tried to remove the filter screen, he broke off 3 of the 6 bolts that held it in place. He put like a whole tube of gasket cement on it but it did no good, it leaked about a quart an hour. When he parked it, he jumped out and put an oil drain pan under it to catch the oil. When he parked it overnight, the entire crankcase emptied into the drain pan. He drove around with a large milk carton full of old 2-liter soda bottles filled with used motor oil he scrounged from local garages…
It was about a week before I had the time to work on it and I could not get those frozen bolts out with a screw/bolt extractor, those aluminum bolts just seemed to expand as the extractor went in and they would not break loose.
I ultimately I had to drill out the bolts and repair them with heli-coils and I did all six bolts, even the ones that did come out…
Then about a week later, he sold the bus for twice what he paid for it and then bought a Chevy G20 Van with more electrical problems than any of the specialty car electrical shops could fix… he had the ignition and lights switches hotwired in… He kept that one for years and drove it into the ground…
Comedian Gabriel Iglesia has a whole collection of them. Plus sponsors a monster truck with microbus body.
If you have a chance to see him in concert, do so. When we saw him, did his set, extremely funny, then stayed an additional hour trying out new material on us.
Gabriel (AKA Fluffy) inside, Jay outside.
My experience, a friend had a Westfalia Camper, we drove it from Utah to Montana on a fishing trip, if the interstate had any incline whatsoever, that VW could not maintain the speed limit.
Gabriel Iglesia or to his followers, “Fluffy,” is one of my favorite comedians, after watching this video, and there is a lot of Fluffy… (it’s almost 4-hours long…), I am sure you will become a follower…
I use the 4K Video Downloader to download his YouTube videos to my tablet for later watching when I do not have WiFi…
PS, the 4K Video Downloader is a FREE App for your Windows PC. (I do not know if there is an Apple version…). If you need a YouTube How-To Video and you do not have WiFi in your driveway, workshop, garage, etc… you can download the video onto your laptop, tablet, phone, etc so you can take it with you…
I thought about the previous posting and I realize that a little Fluffy goes a long ways and almost 4-hours might drive some off the ledge… (see a car Metaphor…).
So here a shorter clip of Fluffy and it all car oriented and how he made a cop laugh when he was pulled over for speeding…
Diver’s Street Rod’s here in Washington built this Subaru WRX/VW Bus mashup a few years ago for a repeat customer. Dash and console out of the Subaru with a bench seat in the back, Started with a early WRX wagon and a 70’s hightop hippie van as the donors. Better brakes and suspension than a stock van to go with the 300+hp
In the 60s there were advertisement for kits to install Corvair engines into VW buses. Hm, why not a 6 cylinder Porsche engine?
How fast to you want to go? How much money do you have?
Fluffy is awesome…
And those crazy little VW Buses, love em or hate em have a cult following…
I saw this video a long time ago and when the VW Bus references came up, I had to find this video about a hand-built, custom, “VW Bus…”
My parents bought a new VW bus in 1974. I learned to drive in it. 4 speed manual.
We lived in upstate NY with the bad Winters. The heater system would rot away in just a few years and you had no cabin heat. They put a little over 100,000 miles on it and traded it in on a car with “Real” heat!
My only real issue with my VW Karmann Ghia was the anemic/close to useless cabin heater. I cut into the driver’s side heater duct under the rear cargo area, installed a blower from a '55 Chevy, and this actually provided a very nice heat flow… on the driver’s side… after I connected it into the wiring harness. I planned to do the same with the duct on the passenger side–until I realized that the electrical system was too weak to be able to run two blower motors simultaneously.
VW offered an optional auxiliary gas fired heater for the Bugs, I would guess that too was available for the Karmann Ghias and buses.
Growing up in Minneapolis, very near the
U of M, VWs were very common, my first job was working at a Mobil gas station, rarely saw a gas heater in a Bug. One customer had two batteries in her Bug connected by jumper cables. When she lifted the back seat (I do not remember why!) and I saw that, I gave her a funny look. She replied “ it always starts”.
The customer probably hooked the batteries up in “Parallel” (Positive to Positive and Negative to Negative), the same way you would hook up jumper cables… This procedure keeps the voltage at same voltage 6V or 12V (VWs went to 12V systems in '66 or '67…) but gives twice the amperage…
My 2001 Dodge Ram, 2500, Diesel, has two 750 Amp batteries factory installed this way…
When I’ve used the Ram to jump start a smaller, one battery vehicle, you should hear that car start, it’s like the “starter” thinks it doing a 1/4 mile drag race… or as a friend one quipped, “Double A Fueler in low gear…”
Obviously.
I had a 59 vw bug. It had the optional gas heater in it. I used it rarely and usually on the road got plenty of heat out of the floor vents. Didn’t have to worry about coolant leaks. Had to worry about a lot of other stuff though.