Peaks

The cylinder heads go on next, these clamp the barrels down to the crankcase and rather than use head gaskets, you have to lap the barrels into the heads using grinding paste. See, told you this engine is weird. That thing sticking up at the top is the oil cooler.

Once the case is together and the crank spins nicely you fit the pistons, rods and cylinder barrels. Although the barrels and pistons look used, they've only covered about 100 miles from new (long story which I won't go into here....)

If you think Triumph (or any other British) engines leak oil, air cooled VW take things to a whole new level. It took many unpleasant hours to clean the gunk of baked on grotty oil from pretty much every external surface. These engines are a bit weird - there's no other way of describing them really. They are not particularly difficult to work on, but you do need techniques which you won't use on more conventional engines, and these techniques took me at least seven or eight dry runs of assembly to get right. Basically the crankcase is split down the middle, clamping the crank, cam and associated bearings in the middle. You have to get everything just right, put the two halves of the case together and torque it all up, hoping that nothing has shifted, and that you put enough sealant around the two crankcase halves to make sure it doesn't leak, but not so much that it will splurge out and block oil ways. Nail biting stuff when you come to the first start I can tell you. Below is a photo before the two halves of the case were put together. You can see that three of the four main bearings are rings that slip onto the crank, with only one of the four being a traditional shell bearing.

So what next? Well, dark cold nights and further lock down meant that moving onto the engine seemed logical. I spent New Years Eve of 2020/2021 removing the engine from my van. I know how to party!! 🥳 Strip down was fairly easy, although I did find that one of the heads was cracked around a plug hole, not uncommon by any means on this engine.

The front wheel tubs were stripped (what a horrible job), primed, stone chipped and brush painted with top coat. It all looks lovely, shame it'll be covered in mud within 50 miles 🙄 Whilst the front beam was down I removed the brake calipers to overhaul them. Following two stripped bleed nipples (there are two per caliper on these) and on finding out that these particular calipers were only fitted to the VW T2 van between July 1971 and May '72, and so seals were nigh on impossible to find, I decided the only really safe way ahead was to convert to later type calipers. This meant buying brand new calipers, discs, pads and fitting kit. What I'd saved by welding up the front beam had been diminished considerably by this purchase 😖

You'd think with the paint done my days of welding were over. Oh no! There was more rust in store. As autumn came around it was time to drop the front axle to enable me to paint the inner arches properly. On air cooled VWs the front axle (refered to as the front beam) contains the torsion springs, steering arms and is what the front shock absorbers bolt to. So it clearly needs to be in good, sound condition. Mine was quite frankly, awful in places. Rust had eaten away most of the top 'ears' which the top of the front shocks bolt to, but luckily the main tubes which house the torsion bars were sound. If they hadn't been it would have been £550 for a new beam and all the hassle of swapping over the torsion bars, suspension and steering components.

It was finally time to paint, and I was extremely lucky as last summer brought with it pretty much perfect weather for spraying outside. The colour of my van is Niagara Blue, and was only offered by VW for 10 months in late 1971 to early 72, so finding a paint supplier who had the correct formula took some doing. I was determined to get the correct shade though, because it did have such a short run. I ended up finding a bit of original paint in good condition under a rear wheel arch which had been protected by layers of underseal, so cut this out and sent it off for a match. It took two goes, but we got there in the end and I could start spraying.

Thanks for the comments🙂. Am I tempted to keep it? No! I'm sick of the sight of the thing!! I am hoping to get good money for it though, as has been stated there are a lot of rot boxes out there, and finding a rust free right hand drive VW is a challenge. Back to the saga..... Whilst prepping for paint I noticed a few more little bits of rust that needed sorting. most of them were fairly unremarkable, but one bit that did cause me a headache was the lip on the A pillars. Here the front panel is folded over a seam made by the A post, making four layers of metal. I scratched my head for a while, then just went for it, carefully unfolding the seam to get to the rust within. Once I'd tapped the seam back down again it didn't look as neat as the factory left it, but at least there was no rust.

Just an update on my original query; I sent my pump for overhaul to EP Services and they had it back to me within a week of receiving it. It's working fine now, and all in all, including postage both ways, cost about £90. Yes you can get pumps for 25 quid plus P&P, but the lifetime warranty, added reliability and longevity have got to be worth the extra cost.

In answer to the original question, I use as little as I can get away with! As all the books/instuctors/YouTube videos will tell you, set your welder up on scrap metal before starting to weld proper. Wind the gas back until the weld starts to splutter. I find it quite surprising how little gas is required for car body panels in a draft free garage; literally a whisper of gas.

What size fan bet do people use on a Vitesse with an alternator fitted? I've currently got a 1075 but that takes the alternator fan uncomfortably close to the top radiator hose. I'm not sure if a 1050 will be short enough to move the alternator out of the way, or whether a 1025 would be better.

A quick preview for you Roger.....

The latest issue of The Courier arrived this morning; I'm just off to ebay to buy some hockey pucks. What a great idea!

Thanks guys, I'll give EP a ring on Tuesday and let you know how I get on.

Yesterday the water pump went on my Vitesse. To be fair it had been weeping for a while, but it has finally given up the ghost. It has lasted about 15k miles, and the one before that 10k. Maybe I should add that the one that was one the car when I bought it in 1991 survived 18 years of use by me, and for all I know was the one that the car left the factory with, which would mean it lasted about 135k miles. Let's assume that I've not over tensioned the fan belt, is this a case of poor quality replacement parts, or am I unlucky? 25 quid for a replacement seems suspiciously cheap to me! 🤔 Are all the pumps from the usual suppliers of the same origin, or are some better than others?

You may have noticed from the last photos that I removed the pop top from the camper. Needless to say when I did so, I found rust 🥺

The next stage was to prepare for paint. At this point I seem to have stopped taking photos, but basically getting all those flat panels, well, flat, was a nightmare that took a very, very long time. My breakthrough moment was when I made up a sanding block which was about a metre long. Once I had that things did finally move along. Like I said, not may photos, but the number of hour spent between beginning to prepare the panels for paint and the first coat of primer was well into three figures.

By now I was thinking that I was coming towards the end of the cutting and welding phase, but the more I looked, the more I found. Mostly, thank goodness, small jobs.

Thanks for the comments. As for VW, I get it's a love hate thing for a lot of people. I have well & truly got VW campers out of my system now, and (spoiler alert!) I haven't even finished restoring this one, but give me a Beetle over a Morris Minor any day of the week. Anyway, once the sills had been done I had to sort out front panel, which although was rust free, had been fitted badly in the past so the door gaps were all over the place, and just looked horrible. Replacing hr front panel was not an appealing idea as it is a really major job, and as I said, the panel was unusually rust free considering the rest of the van, so instead I chose to close up the grand canyon sized gap by running weld up the seam and grinding it back to shape and size. Before, during and after photos below.

By the way, this is how the van looked a few months before the work started. Doesn't look to bad does it? 🙄

That in turn revealed serious rust in the out riggers/jacking points. the front one was particularly crusty.

In a similar manner to the off side, removing panels revealed rust in the sill so.....

I knew what to expect now, so didn't mess around, off came the nearside rear arch.

Removing the rear arch revealed rust in the rear engine bay, where the battery sits, so that came out. It was at this stage hat I realised I was going to go the whole hog and sort all the rust. so I started poking around the nearside of the van with a screw driver.

I started to cut out the small rust hole in the off side rear arch. And kept cutting, and cutting , and cutting. It soon became clear that the whole arch needed to be replaced, along with a good chunk of the inner arch, which had received some weld repair previously. The previously mentioned scrape down the side of the van ran along the top of the arch, so rather than mess about trying to pull the dent out I just cut that section out and replaced it, hence the step in the repair panel.