A Very Volkswagen Christmas

Merry Christmas readers!  I hope that Santa treated you well this year, I know he spoiled us.  All the wonderful things under the tree were definitely just the cream cheese frosting on our decadent holiday red velvet cake this year.  The holidays always serve to remind me just how amazing a family we have and this year was no different.

It's because of our generous family and friends that we have officially become the bus family.  After all the unwrapping was complete it was quite obvious how much Penny has become part of the clan.  I knew I saw her potential!  We found ourselves with a custom bus blanket for camping, a phone cover, an amazing documentary, a restoration guide, a toddler-sized tent and some goWesty cash to get her nice and tuned up! Check out our loot below:

Cold Weather Intermission

Hello again long-lost readers!  I apologize profusely for our hiatus from the saga that is restoring Penny, Wyoming weather and holidays have been getting in the way of our progress!  We have, however, been taking Penny out for the occasional cold weather drive and although she's excited for the other carb rebuild kit to arrive, she's chugging along pretty nicely.

Her yellow is barely peeking out from beneath the freshly fallen inches of snow this morning, while we are waiting eagerly for the thermal cover to arrive that was on backorder. (So many buses that need to stay warm!)  And just as a holiday side-note, a shout out to Bed Bath & Beyond for satiating the needs of us bus enthusiast parents who want to pass along the tradition to our kids by giving this beauty to the masses:

And to the myriad of friends and family who have sent us excited text messages about their discovery in the BB&B store!  Thanks for thinking of us as your go-to VW family :)

Also, one more holiday thank you to Mama Hammock for the great new hand-painted addition to our Christmas tree this year.  Penny is officially a part of the family. 

We hope that everyone has a great holiday season and is as blessed as we are with great friends, family and hobbies to make their every day the best that it can be.  We will catch up with you after the holidays when we start back on our list of Penny improvements!

A First Time for Everything

It's a fact that I like fro-yo...a lot.  Love might even describe my affair with frozen yogurt better.  Me begging Jason to get some of the frozen fabulousness on a random Wednesday night after dinner isn't an unusual occurrence in our house.  Last night was pretty par for the course.

Long story short (minus all the amazing ice cream creation details) we were driving back in Penny from our impromptu fro-yo date and I hear from the drivers seat next to me, Uh oh, she's going to go.  Sure enough, 30 seconds later she sputters to a stop.  Luckily we were able to turn off into a side street to escape the busy main road we were on, but it was unsettling nonetheless.  Jason got out to investigate and I started to dig in my wallet for my trusty AAA card.  He gets back in, turns her on and surprisingly she was good to go.

But only until 5 minutes later when the same thing happened.  We were under the impression that the carburetors (which are due next for a rebuild) were getting flooded because after letting her sit for a minute or two she kept turning back on fine.  Finally, we were about three blocks from our house and she failed for the third and final time with a failed attempt at resuscitation.  We had to abandon ship.


Luckily we were within walking distance, so we unloaded the puppies and set out for the house.  I felt bad leaving her behind!

About an hour later Jason went back to see if he could facilitate a rescue and discovered that the fuse that was connected to the fuel pump wasn't connecting correctly.  He was able to nurse her home and we will be in the market for a new, better fitting fuse in the next few days.

Maybe this will be the worst that we see from old Penny, but I will have my shiny gold AAA handy card just in case!

Our Girl & Her New Kicks!

Penny, along with the new tires, rims, lug nuts, hub caps and beauty rings, had been waiting patiently for Saturday to come.  (I was pretty excited too!)  We loaded the whole family (daughter and dogs included) and all of the new parts into the bus and headed over to Jason's Dad's house for the big install.  We usually try to do all of the sizable restoration projects over there, as a huge shop that houses every tool imaginable tends to come in handy.

Just as a reminder, here is the before shot:

I was assigned the task of cleaning up the rims and making sure all of the old break dust and gunk no more. Ever the tidy child, Sadie was pumped to sit down and help me with this first task..

I got them all shined up and we tested out all the new accessories to make sure they would fit.  It was like Cinderella and her glass slipper...perfect!

Meanwhile, Sadie had lost interest in shining up the tires (par for the course of a 2 year old attention span) and she wandered over to help Jason hoist Penny up in the air.  After a furious arm workout the bus was high enough that she was ready for the tire swap!

Me and my helper then used our new found knowledge of power tools and took all the old wheels off.  (Our combined girly arm strength wasn't quite enough to actually pull the wheels of, but we tried!)  She was a pro at helping Jason wheel them away though, all the while singing "rolling, rolling, rolling!"

You could sense Fat Penny's excitement as she hung there, shoe-less, in anticipation.  Perhaps I'm personifying the bus just a bit too much, but I swear she was excited. 

                        

A few lug nuts, hub caps and beauty rings later she was ready to go to the ball with her Prince Charming!

I Like a Fat Girl...

In this day and age, it should go without saying that your life is not as private as you think. We put a lot of personal information on the internet and all it takes is for someone to Google your name and this information is displayed for all to see. I know this because a salesperson recently Googled my name, found out I am passionate about a fat chick, and used this information to harm my reputation at work. I'll explain...

I received a package at work last week from an address I had never heard of. This is not unusual as the nature of my work makes me a person of interest to salespeople. However, this was not a typical prospecting package containing some cheesy trinket. It contained a book about fat girls. Beautiful fat girls! It contained the history of my favorite kind of fat girls starting from when they were split windows through their transformation to the bay window.  How could someone know I have been spending so much time with Fat Penny? I thought to myself. Then it dawned on me. We have been blogging about Fat Penny and our love for this fat girl is available on Google for everyone to see. This guy must have seen that I like fat girls on Google, I thought. This suspicion was confirmed in the last line of the letter attached to the book. It read "While doing research, I discovered that you are passionate about VW buses. I hope you enjoy the book."

So salesperson, I know you are reading this and I just want to say that it's pretty uncool to out a guy at work for liking a bigger lady. 

Fat Penny on Gilligan's Island

As I've mentioned before, we promised Fat Penny new shiny shoes and break lines upon our safe return from the camping trip.  A myriad of incompetent people, horrible customer service, six visits to a ghetto motel/bus station and a wheel-stealing Greyhound bus made procuring both of these things quite the process.

Pull the Gilligan's Island Theme Song tune out from the back of your head and hum along with our tale...

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, 
A tale of a frustrated pair 
That started from this capitol city 
Aboard this vintage bus. 

The guy was a handsome one, 
The lady blonde and tall. 
They wanted to make Penny shine
But they were the only ones, they were the only ones. 

The brakes were a bit rough, 
Without new ones she was doomed, 
To O'Riley Auto Parts the couple went 
They got three lines but the fourth was lost, the fourth was lost.

They kept returning to the site of this uncharted store 
With Grumpy Pat
The Sad Lady too, 
The Lug Nut Guy and his pal, 
Finally got our fourth break line 
After three weeks and six trips
Here on O'Riley's Isle. 

So this is the tale of the bus restorers, 
They're waiting for a long, long time, 
All they want is some old stock rims, 
It's was an uphill climb. 

They bought the wheels from theSamba.com 
They were put on a big Greyhound, 
The girl was a tid bit nervous, 
But was sure they would make it just fine.

Her first trip to the Rodeway Inn 
there was only one box there, 
Two wheels for a bus of four, 
Where could the other half be? 

They put those two back on the bus,
Denver bound they were. 
Our guy and girl were sad,
Six visits later the wheels were there 
Here on Fat Penny's Isle.

I'm proud you made the the whole way through, and now will have that tune stuck in your head the rest of the day!  You're welcome :)

We were pretty convinced that we were never going to see the second half of the wheels after they had been sent back to wherever they came from by some wonderful motel employees, but bright and early Saturday morning we received the call saying our precious cargo had arrived...again.  I told the lady to watch the box until we arrived and we rushed over to grab them so they didn't disappear again.

They now have a new set of tires on them and we're just patiently waiting for our lug nuts, hub caps and beauty rings to arrive.  Stay tuned for the unveiling of Penny's new shoes in the next week or so!

Damn the Vacuum! (no torpedoes here)

Consider this post the official preface to our camping trip (if only time travel were really possible)...

Working on Fat Penny (she doesn't have a waistline so her name has been amended) is a bit of a hassle at the moment as we currently don't have room in the garage to work on her. Our weekends since we picked her up have consisted of gathering the parts we have accumulated during the week and driving her over to my dads house where Fat Penny can be properly attended to. In addition to this being a pain, we were making the trip illegally. Wyoming state statues clearly state that the bus must have at a minimum working headlights, brake lights, and turn signals (they also state that any vehicle whose maximum speed is 25 mph must have a slow moving vehicle sticker... Fat Penny might meet this requirement). None of those things worked and we were without wipers too.

Aside from illegally operating a motor vehicle, getting the bus to my dads was no easy task. She had to be nursed over because the previous owner thought that screws shoved in the ends of cracked vacuum hoses was a suitable replacement for vacuum plugs. Any vacuum hoses that were lucky enough to survive uncut were too brittle to maintain vacuum. This didn't always make for easy idling at stoplights. 

With a huge list of to-do's, I headed over to my dads house in hopes that it would be my last illegal trip.

First on the agenda was to replace all the vacuum hoses plugged with screws with real vacuum plugs. This wasn't a monumental task which makes it even more confusing why someone would cut corners. I guess sometimes spending $1.59 for vacuum plugs is to much!? The biggest issue causing loss of vacuum was the line that runs from the firewall to the brake booster. It looked as though it was original and nearly turned to dust in my hands. The ends of the hose were frozen to the metal lines but with a carpenters knife and some four-letter words, they came right off.

With all the vacuum hoses replaced it was time to turn my attention to the rats nest wiring. The brake lights and turn signals were an easy fix. There were missing and burned out bulbs to be replaced and a ground wire that needed to be plugged in. 

Tracking down the problem with the headlights was a bit harder. At first it appeared as though it was going to be as simple as changing some fuses. When brand new fuses didn't solve the problem I resorted to shaking the fuse box. This didn't seem to help either so, I tracked down the fuse box layout on ratwell.com and discovered that the headlight wires were not correctly plugged into the fuse box. Problem solved.

Last on the list was the wipers. We had been caught in a rain storm the week before while driving the bus and we had to pull over and wait for the rain to stop. Luckily for us Penny is a camper and we could wait out the storm in relative comfort. Unlucky for us, Penny is a bit disgusting on the inside and we relaxed in filth. OK, back on track now. The wiper motor wouldn't even turn on so I began the process of tracking down the power supply. I didn't even have to climb under the dash thanks to the gaping hole where the stereo is supposed to go (makes for a decent cup holder). The power supply had been unplugged. There are only two reasons I can come up with for why this was the case. 1) the previous owner/s were not that bright (see: plugging vacuum hoses with screws), or 2) there was an undiagnosed wiring problem and by plugging in and turning on the wipers I was going to start a fire. With my fingers crossed that the previous owners were knuckle-draggers, I plugged in the power to the wiper and hit the switch. No fire!

I had a little bit of time left in the day so I decided to take care of one issue that has been bugging me since we got the bus. That issue?...the spare tire on the nose of the bus! WHY!? Yes, I get that its a camper but that doesn't mean it has to look like one. That spare tire completely ruins the lines of the toaster...eh, I mean bus. It consumes valuable real estate that is better suited for the VW logo. It also wreaks havoc on the nose sheet metal. For all those reasons, I cut the mount off and the spare will be moving back to where it belongs.

It doesn't take much time to do things the right way. I guess luckily for us the previous owners didn't realize what they had in Fat Penny otherwise we would have never found her. We have been extremely lucky thus far that the problems with our bus are the result of operator error and not fatal flaws, and for that we are thankful.

Yes, the Curtains Match the Drapes

It goes to say that I'm not much of a whiz in the kitchen or on the sewing machine, for that matter.  The first is irrelevant in this situation but usually seems to go hand in hand with the second.  Penny was in desperate need of curtains, as the old ones were yellowed and could actually be described as crusty. (Yuck!)

Our first trip to the fabric store was only about a week after we had acquired our new charge.  In the midst of perusing tons of fabric bolts the 2 year old had a bit of a meltdown so we had to abandon ship.  We tried a week or two later and after much back and forth about color schemes, texture and durability we finally settled on a white and grey damask.  Eventually we want to paint Penny white with a gunmetal grey pop top, so these curtains would fit in perfectly and will look decent in her current state of school bus yellow.  (I'm sure you've caught on that I have a hard time not making stupid faces in photos...enjoy.)

 We enlisted the help of Jason's mom for her sewing expertise (as well as kitchen expertise, among many other things).  I wasn't of much assistance as the pieces were cut, measured and carefully stitched together... although I was trying to be a great cheerleader and learn a thing or two in the process!  I was a bit short in my fabric measurements so one more trip to the store for the back window curtain is on our agenda, but all-in-all they came out exactly how I imagined!

The family (including the dogs) piled into the bus for the inaugural hanging and now I'm happy to report that no one can peer in at us sleeping during our camping trips anymore!  Nothing to complain about there.

 A very big thank you to Mama Hammock for taking the time to make Penny even more awesome then she already is and for being patient with my lack of cutting and measuring skills!  The curtains came out great!  

Right On Babe, Penny Made It!

We were packed and ready to go...apprehensive but ready.  Should we be taking Penny on a trip so soon?  (it's only 45 minutes, but still!) She had been running so smoothly around town but our faith in the 27 year old tires, aging brake lines and notoriously unreliable engine was not at an all time high.  We both must have had either a good feeling about the trip or a death wish becuase we just smiled at each other and set off on our way.

We were avoiding the interstate for safety reasons, but the highway that we had to take up into the Wyoming mountains still provided us quite a steep grade to climb before we reached our destination.  About 20 minutes into the trip everything was going well, but we decided that it would be a good idea to pull off and double check.  (We weren't nervous at all...okay, maybe a little bit.)  Jason opened the engine compartment door only to be engulfed in smoke.  Oh great.  After a bit of inspection he proclaimed that it was just old oil burning off from the outside of the motor...no biggie.  We climb back in and cross our fingers.  (Come to find out later after a beer or two that he was a bit less optimistic about the smoke as he made it seem. Apparently I'm somewhat of a pessimist who has to be calmed in situations such as that.  Hey, it worked.)

The driver may have been annoyed as I was motivating the bus up the steep hill, chugga chugga, choo choo!  The little vanny that could, but I'm pretty convinced that is what got us up that big hill.  Maybe that and the fact that Penny is pretty awesome.  Whatever the cause, we made it to the turn off safe and sound while breathing a collective sign of relief because that part was over.  Now it was time to test the tires.

The last 20 minutes of the trip was on windy dirt roads that have been made into washboards by the multitudes of summer traffic.  Needless to say it didn't make us overly comfortable to be traversing this terrain on rubber that was as old as we are.   I distracted myself with the gorgeous scenery and before I knew it we reached a spot that was perfect for us to make our camp.  We looked at each other and simultaneously proclaimed, Right on babe, Penny made it!  (a little line that we picked up from a list of 50 things you find yourself saying as a bus owner.)

We got some strange looks, a wave from a fellow Westy owner and even a 4x4 full of rednecks screaming hippie, hippie at us (we retaliated with a peace sign) but all-in-all we were pretty elated about the success of our first outing.  Never could we have imagined that a month and a half after towing her back from Salt Lake City, relatively pessimistic about the condition of the vehicle we just bought, would we be road tripping with her.  See, I know she had potential!

Click here to check out some more Penny pictures from our trip!

Preface to the Maiden Voyage or What's in a Name

It's official.  The bus, Jason and I are going to go camping this weekend!  Our plan was to go on our first outing next summer once she's all spiffed up, but now that the motor is running decently we're itchy. Itchy to feel the wind blowing through our hair as we make our way to Vedauwoo at a snail's pace...all the while listening intently for any sound or bump that would indicate our motor isn't as primed for action as we thought.  Sounds like fun right?!  Personally, I can't wait.  (check out the awe inspiring-ness that is Vedauwoo if you're not familiar here)

With our weekend destination set it was time for me to get this baby camp ready.  Over the winter we will be reupholstering, turning our carpet into hardwood and refinishing the wood wall covering...HGTV here we come!  But in the meantime I needed to transform our mess of a bus into something relatively respectable, clean and most importantly, not gross.

Yes, we already cleaned but that was more like degunking, now it was time for the spring cleaning to commence. As much as we'd been getting plenty of praise for our bus while driving it around town, the inside was nothing to write home about.  Ripped cloth, dirty carpet and an even dirtier dashboard and floor mats were what I was up against.

 My tools of choice were a Shop Vac, paper towels, spray and one brand new set of 600 thread count sheets that will be our temporary cushion covers (of course we have to sleep/sit in style).  Oh, and a can of Armor All which I was instructed not to use because that would be the epitome of polishing a turd.  Oh Jason, every girl deserves a facial now and again...of course she will be Armor All'd.

I turned on my Tom Petty station on Pandora (it's become my bus music)  and went to work ripping out fabric, scrubbing like Cinderella and going vacuum crazy on the carpet.  Things even started to look up just after I managed to get all of the fabric out and the cushions vacuumed.

As I was scrubbing the dirt-caked plastic floor mats in the front I was thinking about what we should name her.  We had been pondering it and had even been told by a few different people that it was time for a name.  Jason and I were pretty adamant that she had to come by her name organically and nothing had sounded just right as of yet.  And then it dawned on me as I was silently praising my bus for shining up so nice and getting excited about actually seeing crud free mats...she shines up like a new penny!  It was perfect, as Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles played softly in the background, Penny fits.  That's it!

Luckily my co-bus owner agrees, although he's still not off the polishing a turd bandwagon just yet.  Below our semi-shiny bus with her after-camp-prep clean and a new moniker!

Rite of Passage

The bus is finally running and street legal. I will go into detail about just how we got the bus running in a later post, but for now there are a couple valuable lessons that we have learned from driving the bus around town that I would like to discuss.

LESSON ONE:  VW buses are not the most reliable vehicles (granted our bus sat in a field for the last three or so years, but the fact that buses are unreliable is confirmed by the next lesson).

LESSON TWO: Everyone has a story about a time their bus or a friend's bus broke down. As you may be assuming from reading lesson one, we now have a story about a time our bus broke down.

I had taken the day off to work on our house and was excited to run some errands in the bus. However, the bus (as it sat at 8 A.M) was not running. I suspected the carburetors were badly out of sync and headed outside to remedy this. If you own a bus, you know that syncing dual carbs is not an easy task. It requires a special tool and a lot of patience. We don't own this special tool, so I relied on patience (kind of) and ratwell.com. After an hour or so of adjusting mixture screws and throwing temper tantrums, I finally got the bus to idle and it was time for a test drive.

I started small by making an attempt around the block and it went surprisingly well. I pulled up in front of the house and the idle had smoothed and the backfiring was at an all-time low. Its ready for the next test, I thought, so the dogs piled in and I turned the bus towards my dad's house. At each stoplight, the bus purred (and sputtered a bit but it didn't die!). Wait till the old man sees this, I gloated to myself. My confidence in my mechanical skills was riding high. Then it happened.

At the last stoplight before my dad's house the bus was sounding better than ever. The light turned green I eased off the clutch and we were on our way. I shifted into second, third, and finally fourth! This was a milestone as the bus hadn't previously been able to go fast enough to make fourth gear a viable option. I think the mental fist pumps I was going distracted me from realizing that motor had died sometime after shifting into forth gear.

It wasn't until the road leveled out and I stepped down on the gas that I realized I had no power. I quickly analyzed the situation and decided that a left turn into the McDonald's parking lot was a good idea. (A left turn on a busy street in a vehicle that wasn't running!? I'm amazed how these thoughts pass into consciousness, are processed by 28 years of acquired logic and reasoning skills, and are finally given the cognitive stamp of approval.) I had to hit the brakes to time the small opening in the oncoming traffic, and with the little momentum left in the bus I made a left turn then died shortly after clearing traffic. With the traffic backing up behind me, I began to panic.

After a several minutes of key-turning, gas-peddle-mashing fury, I realized that I couldn't hear the fuel pump turn on. SHIT, I yelled! In a fit of rage, I pumped the gas peddle as hard and fast as I could determined to force enough gas pass the pump and into the carbs to get the bus started and running long enough to reach the parking lot. Satisfied that I had done enough pumping, I cranked the key and the engine roared to life. I put the gas peddle on the floor, side-stepped the clutch and the bus lurched forward throwing the dogs to the rear of the bus and giving us just enough momentum to get safely to the parking lot. The worst was over. Eventually, I coerced my embarrassed step-brother to tow the bus to dad's house where we found that years of poor wiring choices had left the fuel pump without power. It was a pretty easy fix.

If you have read this far and you own a bus, I'm sure you have a slight grin on your face as you know that breaking down in a bus is a rite of passage. It's something you get used to and eventually plan for when taking trips in a bus. We have been officially initiated into bus ownership and I feel pretty good about that. Our bus has transitioned from the eyesore in front of our house to a part of the family and I'm not sure exactly why yet. What I do know is that many other bus owners feel the same way. I will leave you with a quote I found that best sums up why we will be bus owners for life.      

"Sure, they broke down, ran badly and slowly, but while in a state of disrepair, what other vehicle solicited the milk of human kindness as the did the lowly bus as stranger after stranger stopped to kibitz on what was wrong with it and what the proper prescription for its healing should be? Many a new friend was made alongside the road or at the parts store or junk yard because of the VW Bus."   

A Budding Mechanic

So, I'm a girl.  Most people assume I'm a really girly, girl.  I must admit that I do obsess over my hair, outfits and refuse to leave the house without makeup, but I also have a pretty mean tomboy streak.  I grew up loving cars, sports and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  That being said, I was really excited to get greasy and learn some new manly skills when this bus came into our life.

This weekend I learned things!  We're waiting on a few parts to be delivered, so we figured that it would be a good time to make some small diagnostic efforts and see how the engine is really running.  Before tackling the engine Jason and his dad took a giant pry bar to the tie rods, which were quite bent.  (Never fear...this is a temporary fix, as we are planning on ordering new ones in the very near future).  This served to quiet the squealing of the tires that was present whenever we drove it anywhere...who knew having two front tires that faced in the same direction was so important!  (Hopefully the dumbfounded looks from other drivers that clearly said, what is that god-awful noise coming from that beautiful piece of yellow machinery will cease to exist.)

I was instructed on how to use the ratchet & socket to extract the spark plugs from the engine and after a quick Google search we figured out that our particular plugs needed to be gapped to a measurement of .028".  I ratcheted, gapped, applied some thread lubricant (since they are aluminum heads) and put them back in.

Next, it was time to check the compression on the pistons.  We were shooting for between 85-90 psi on each piston for a ship-shape diagnosis.  I was optimistic (it has potential!) but readings between 75-120 made us less hopeful that the engine was not in need of a complete rebuild. 

On top of needing new spark plugs (we realized that a good set of Bosch plugs instead of the montage of different ones in there might do us some good) there are a few other diagnostic checks that we need to make before tearing the whole thing apart.  Nonetheless, it was fun to get my hands dirty and learn a little bit more about how to make this baby run!