Two Carbs in a Pod

Hooray, we have our first Penny restoration deadline!  We just reserved our camp spot in June for a week of exploring Yellowstone (on foot and in our yellow friend).  We will be putting in a lot of elbow grease over the next few months to get her ready for the 8 hour road trip.  We are pretty excited for our first real outing as bus parents!  Hope you readers are enjoying our journey...

It has seemed like forever that every time we'd start up Penny, Jason would assure me that when we got the second carburetor rebuilt she'd purr like a kitten.  Well, after all that assurance it's finally happened!  We were excited to receive our first box of parts for 2014 last week, complete with a carb rebuild kit, sway bar clamps and a new service manual to guide us through the tricky syncing process (plus a myriad of other future processes, I'm sure).

This weekend it was over to the shop we went, of course puppies and box of goodies in tow.   The right carburetor had been rebuilt in the fall, so lefty was the one on our agenda.  After we unscrewed, detached and got greasy, Penny found herself down one part and we got to work.  Jason, Van and I were clearly pretty excited to be back in the shop...

We busted out the new pieces and carefully disassembled the carburetor, Jason all the while being an amazing teacher and schooling me step-by-step.

After it was all apart and the pieces in what looked like organized chaos, we cleaned the metal parts and replaced the ones that needed replacing.  

After everything was bathed and replaced, Jason championed the effort to put the puzzle back together correctly while I cheered him on from the sidelines.  All the while learning that my virgin auto-shop lungs need a bit of fresh air from time to time to avoid feeling like my head is going to explode.  (I'll toughen up if it's the last thing I do!)

We placed that small, unassuming part back in Penny's hindquarters and sure enough...purred like the beautiful kitten she is.  Unfortunately, we ran out of time for the sway bar clamp installation and the carb syncing, but that will be first up when we return from vacation next week.  It was great to drive her home sans the subtle backfiring that had become her theme song.  After diving into our new manual and some successful syncing she might be ready for her first mini winter road trip!

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.