Lost the Race

Dang. The termination dust is here. I lost the race. The Zetec won't be here for another week and a half and it's snowing to beat the band. It's gonna be hard to install the engine and not be able to try it out nine months. I guess I could drive it down to the highway, give it a go and then tow it back up the hill with the truck. I wouldn't call it vanagonning, but I'm sure I will be desperate enough to try it. Still in the market for a syncro...

Why a Westy?

I'm still waiting for delivery of my Zetec. I'm told it should ship this week and I will hopefully be the first recipient of a shiny stainless one-piece exhaust. I think we are waiting on a catalytic converter. In the meantime I thought I would answer the question 'Why a Westy?".

When I told my buddy Jamie my wife and I bought a 1984 Vanagon Westy he could barely disguise his revulsion. This from a dyed in the wool archetypal, polite, Prairie Home Companion Minnesotan. I think that, unless you have grown up with VW buses, you wouldn't understand. My family had three of the older air-cooled 'breadbox' buses and two Vanagons over the years. I remember being a kid in the back seat with my winter parka on trying to keep warm during the 80 mile drive to visit my grandmother. We'd get a small waft of heat just as we pulled in the driveway. Gotta love those air-cooled engines. Jamie is a big-block V-8 type, and he finally admitted that he hates being held up by an old VW bus smoking and putting up hills. I can't blame him, really.

My Dad later rebuilt the engine on one of our early buses. I remember seeing the parts all over the shop and the green Bentley manual on the bench with oily fingerprints all over it. Apparently I told him that he'd 'never get that thing back together'. I was wrong about that, although the engine didn't last long. I think it burned a valve a few tens of thousand kilometers down the road.

We got a Vanagon brand new off the lot in 1984. I remember always being disappointed that my parents didn't get the Westy camper. Nonetheless that van served us well. My mother put on a lot of miles hauling us around to soccer, baseball and after school sports. It was very reliable until my brother and I bought it and took it off to college. We had the dreaded head gasket problem some time around 1989, but my dad got it fixed under the VW recall. My bro took it out to Seattle in 1991 and it motored around the northwest for a few years. I took a job in Oregon in 1996 and for the next few years my brother and I lived as itinerant forestry biotechs. We earned just enough money to keep our vision catching every trout in the west on a dry fly (casted upstream, of course). A Westy really would have served us well as it did my buddy Mike. Mike had a 1980 air-cooled Westy. It had no starter, so he always had to park facing downhill to kick start it. That bus had hit every species of animal in the west, but somehow still kept rolling. What a machine for a homeless trout bum! I was always envious of Mike's Westy.

A funny thing happens when you get older: you suddenly have a bit more disposable income to spend on things you coveted when you were younger. When you are young you have time and energy, but no money, so you buy junk and spend a lot of time and energy keeping it running. When you are older, you have money, but no time, so you spend the money making sure your junk is in good working order so you can spend your limited time doing things you enjoy. This phenomena is absolutely what led me to Bostig Engineering and the Zetec conversion.

About two years ago my wife saw an ad for a 1984 Vanagon Camper. I told her they were junk and related the endless money my brother and I poured into our 1984 bus. Somehow, we bought the bus anyway. The former owner was well into his eighties, yet still had a youthful vision of touring around in a VW bus. Unfortunately his worn body could not sustain the youthful outlook and he passed on before he could realize his ambition. I salute him to this day. We bought the bus from his son and took it home. It is a beautiful bus in immaculate condition. No rust. The interior was clean, although some of the roof and wall linings are aged and cracked and the sliding door panel was replaced at some point by a piece of masonite. The bus ran really roughly and needed a lot of work. I immediately tuned up the engine the best I could but there wasn't much to work with. It had much less power than even I had imagined it would. I could tell a rebuild or replacement was in order. Nonetheless, I replaced all the ball joints, shocks, brakes and driveaxles and tinkered here and there. I bravely took a couple of trips down the Richardson Highway in Alaska to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and dipnetted for salmon at Chitina. Mostly though, we kept to home because we didn't trust the thing. That is the rub for any Vanagon owner: Great van, crappy engine.

The next year the inevitable happened. I had plans to go tripping around the state with my brother who was visiting when we began to see more and more coolant under the bus. The jig was up. We looked into a rebuild, but I have had three rebuilds done in the past and they never work. Even an engine I bought from ATK, a commercial engine supplier, came with a dead cylinder. For a long time I considered a Subaru 2.2 swap, but the more I read about it on the internet, the more I became convinced that it would be a long path of tears. I wanted a new engine in the van and I didn't want to screw around for months to years, fabricating parts, tracking down electrical problems, buying extra parts and dismantling finicky wiring harnesses. Maybe when I was younger I would have gone for it, but with a wife, a two year old and another one on the way I wanted to repower the van and use it immediately, without worry, no screwing around. And I was willing and able to pay for it. Hence, the Zetec. When I saw the website while looking around for information on the Subie swap, I thought a shaft of light had settled on my monitor. I almost choked when I saw the price, but then I started thinking about what a value it was. A salvaged, low mileage motor. A motor that is in wide production, with no known faults. Not only a motor, but new everything, from fuel injection system, electrical system, exhaust, etc., etc. There wouldn't be anything VW left in the engine compartment, except a coolant bottle. No more shipping parts to Alaska from San Jose. I can now get oil filters at Napa (!). A brand new wiring harness. The whole deal shipped to you in a crate; just bolt it in, connect some wires and hoses and go. Wow, I think, all this for less than the price of a good used car. What a deal.

An engine conversion is like a heart transplant. Get rid of the faulty organ so you can enjoy the whole again. No vehicle will ever appreciate in price, but VW buses retain value well, particularly immaculate ones with a good engine. I figure, if I decided to sell (maybe to get a Syncro) I could recover most of my costs. Another advantage is that we use the bus all summer long. With little kids there is no more adventuring on glaciers, hiking the Appalachian trail or ascending alpine peaks. At least until the little ones are older, let's face it, you are mostly car camping...and little kids LOVE Vanagons! I remember a trip to the Gulkana Glacier with my wife and daughter. I was going to climb a mountain, but the weather was fierce so we ended up staying in the bus for a day and a half. It wasn't great but it wasn't bad either. We read books and drank hot chocolate and played in the pop top, high and dry, until the sun came out.

So why a Westy? I guess for me I want my daughter to have the same memories that I had as a kid. I have no more fonder memories than those of the Vanagon parked at some remote trailhead in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or parked on Cadillac mountain with a canoe strapped to the roof, waiting for the ferry Bluenose to take us to Nova Scotia. To me, such images evoke outdoor adventure, something that has always been a huge part of my life. I hope my daughter recounts in later years many stories of our family zooming around the wilds of Alaska in our bus, having a ton of outdoor fun, spending time together and making lasting memories.

Coolant Bottle

If you've got a 1.9, I'm told that your coolant bottle won't work. You've got to pick up a bottle from the 2.1 engine. I couldn't find one at a junkyard up here so I had to buy a spanking new one at GoWesty for the better part of 50$ (ouch!). Just unscrew the coolant level sensor from your old bottle and pop it into the new one. I didn't bother to replace the O-ring because I don't think it is that critical. I just cleaned it up and popped it in.

(Note: Jerome who has installed a Zetec in a similar older van later told me I should replace the O-ring or the bottle will leak. See comments.)