shooftie

I have all of the Westy interior out of my ’82 Vanagon now, and I am going over the parts in preparation of installing them into my ’86 Syncro. Some of the cabinetry was damaged in the accident I had with the Westy that took it out of commission. I was hit by the front end loader on the driver’s side, just in front of the rear wheel, so the Westy “wardrobe” and the low cabinets just forward of the wardrobe got a bit banged up. I’ve patched them up to be structurally, if not cosmetically, sound. While I have the cabinets in the shop I thought I might do some of those old modifications I never got around to before.

The first one is a modification to the table clamping system that allows the table “leg” to extend up and let you get into those top loading cabinets. This is not my idea, many others have done this. There are 2 ways to go about this, one is to install a rod, fixed to the lower mount of the table leg and the rod extends inside the table leg itself. The other route is to use some tubing, fixed between the upper and lower mounts, which the table leg inserts into. I chose the latter approach as I had scrap aluminium tubing lying around. You can see in the pics that I made a collar to join the tube to the upper mount. The collar is a close fit to both the tube and the upper mount. The table leg is a nice tight fit inside the tubing, actually tighter than I would have liked. Either the table leg or the tubing must have a slight bend for its a tighter fit when installed than I found when I tried the combo with a short bit of scrap tubing. Oh well, at least there will be no rattles.