us Subscribe to the van feed

The Little Can That Could: Checking out the VW Minibus

September 9th, 2007

Elimite For Sale Cipro Generic Buy Stromectol Online Aricept Without Prescription Neurontin For Sale Motilium Generic Buy Motilium Online Hoodia Without Prescription Topamax Online Buy Prozac

Yesterday I checked out the 1971 VW microbus on sale from Craigslist. Here’s my video walkthrough of the little bugga:

The van definitely has character. In this case character = nonfunctioning brakes. It’s the only vehicle I’ve ever driven that makes Flinstone’s brakes seem like advanced technology. I drove it around the neighbodhood and kept forgetting that it took about 100 feet to stop per every 10mph, but thankfully there were no cars or wayward childrens around. Human-power steering was another feature, but it actually made me feel like Sampson, so that was cool.

It had wooden floors, various moccasins strewn about, a sink and fridge (both for show more than anything), and a popdown bed that could sleep up to one full sized elf.

I really did like the van! What it lacked in safety and comfort, it made up for in character. If it weren’t for the prospect of heat stroke and necessitating walls to come to a complete stop, it may have been perfect.

Posted in Trip planning

4 Responses to “The Little Can That Could: Checking out the VW Minibus”

  1. Roger Says:
    September 11th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    Again, sorry about harping on the bus… That bus needs a break job. Depending on the rest of condition, you should be able to pick it up for about 2 – 5 grand, the breaks would cost about 400 to completely replace..

    If the Odyssey’s break were to fail, you’d be looking at at least 1 thousand, and thats before they started ripping you off…

    Buy a chiltons for the bus and you could do the whole break job, on the side of the road, in the rain, take you about a half a day and cost you a couple of hundred bucks…

  2. Roger Says:
    September 11th, 2007 at 4:08 pm

    BTW, looking at that bus and not knowing mileage, rebuilds, etc.. Just the condition of the body and the original items included that bus is worth about 4-5K. Push for 4 and use the extra thousand to fix the breaks and make sure the muffler and heater boxes are at least intact as holes in the heater boxes are bad for heat ;-) .. If you want more VW advice, I would be happy to help you…

  3. Kevin Says:
    September 11th, 2007 at 5:45 pm

    Just a thought…

    How about the largest UPs-style delivery vehicle you can find, that runs diesel, and work out a compact method for a biodiesel processor. Then you just might be able to make a good part of your trip without paying for gas at all, and the delivery vehicle would give WAY more headroom than anything else…

    Stink about it!

  4. Phil Says:
    March 10th, 2009 at 1:02 pm

    I would go for a VW van… We had a couple while we were growing up and they worked great, and they have a nice low door on the side. Prehaps the best reason why I think that they are pretty cool is this little story. Sometime while I was in College, (back in the early 90’s) I saw this black VW van in a grocery store parking lot, what caught my attention is that it had a small deployable satellite dish, plus a number of other antennas on the roof, the windows were all heavy tinted black, and it looked like some kind of spy mobile. Well, I saw this old guy sitting in the side door having a drink, and I went up to him and asked him about the van. When I got up close, it was really cool inside, had a bed, small stove, fridge, plus a bunch of computers and stuff all mounted into the walls (really unusual because this was back in 1991), it looked ultra modern inside, even with the outside being a 20 plus year old van. I talked to the guy and it turned out that he was a retired Air Force Colonel, and he had been driving that Van for several years, and he had really tricked it out with computers and stuff, and he even had a reworked HUD (Heads Up Display) from a F-15 fighter plane, and Infra Red Sensors and other stuff, pretty cool and long before any other cars had anythink like this. After talking with hime for a while, he said that because of his connections with the Air Force, he had brought and driven that Van on “Every” continent on the planet (except Antartica), and that he had been doing this for the last 5 or 7 years. The reason that he chose VW van is because you can get parts for it “everywhere” and they are cheap as well, and that this vehicle gets good gas mileage, and is easy to work on and you could take the whole engine appart with just a limited set of tools, even on the side of the road. He even showed me that he could print out the manual that he had stored on his computer, to assist in any complex repair.
    So if you have any kind of mechanical knowledge, you can basically get yourself fixed and back on the road in few minutes, to a day or so.

Leave a Reply