Bought one of those ubiquitous voltmeter and USB combos from bangood.com. Thought I would modify the vent on the fridge cabinet to install. But the old grill on the rear face of the cabinet had peeling paint and I didn’t like how the install looked. So I made a new grill from some 3/32″ thick aluminum plate. I milled slots, 3/8″ wide, on 1/2″ centres, 7 slots in total. And I milled a hole for the voltmeter/outlet combo.

The grill turned out a bit “gappy”, a bit too open perhaps. But as you don’t really look at it face on too often it’s good enough. The outlet and meter are wired to my auxiliary fuse panel under the driver’s seat. I thought about a switch to turn the thing off when not needed but I didn’t have a switch that would suit. I might add one later, but right now my big assed house battery will take any parasitic drain.

I’ll replace the mounting screws with the ones that will accept a plastic cap when I can find some.

I had the morning free to head up to Malahat Auto Wreckers here on the southern part of Vancouver Island, and I got lucky. There are fewer and fewer Vanagons in the wreckers these days, a big drop from the halcyon days of the turn of the century. But I found a tin top, year of manufacture 1991. Pretty rare here to see a 92 model year T3. The sticker said it was assembled in Austria. You know the story, the Hannover plant switched over to making T4 models and the Graz plant continued for a while to make both syncros and 2wd vans.

The van was in rough shape but it had the heated drivers seat intact, plus all the electrics for same. I had already scored the column mounted controller, housing, and relays some years ago but this time I got another set plus the wiring to the seat and the seat itself. The seat is pretty skanky ( and it’s blue, wouldn’t match my other seat even if it was in good shape) but I think the heating pads are salvageable.

Taking the seat apart I found that the wiring to the seat base  was broken. Almost looks like it was cut. Everything else was intact and looked stock so I wouldn’t be surprised if the break was the result of some pinching and flexing. Nasty stains on the seat pad, ugh.
  
The seat back pad is fine.

  
My plan is to clean up the pads, test for continuity, remake the broken wiring, and install in my current driver’s seat. The other finds at the yard were some plastic trim pieces and the rarest of rare things, the little light above the glove box with an intact switch!

Still haven’t got a production model yet, still trying things out. This one has offset tire position which I thought was a good idea, but looking at it installed I’m thinking it’s awkward.

It’s on Nathan’s van. Pic of Nathan’s van beside my van kinda shows the offset and that the tire is a bit lower on the ladder. Oh and I did away with the curved bottom on this one.

  
  
Yeah, that offset looks a little odd.

Hey, did you know you can just squeeze in a T4 grounding crown in the aft position of the pair of stock crowns just to the left of the fuse panel?

It’s tight, but it gets in there.

I mangled the stock crown a little getting it out. But look, look at the abundance of connections on the T4 crown 🙂

 
Not a great pic, but here is installed.

Addendum April 10, 2016. Drivers seat installed today. Simpler install, four bolts welded to stock swivel plate, 1×2″ steel box section fits onto those bolts, box section bolted to Chrysler seat. Pics at the end of the post. Oh, btw, sitting in the drivers seat is a big improvement over the stock seats. I’m 6-2, I still have a finger width or two head room to ceiling, and for some reason due to the seat adjustment or whatever, I get a much better view of the speedo and tach than I do in my van. This alone makes me want to have the seats in my van.

Addendum April 13, 2016. Some more pics taken by Simon of seats in his van, added at bottom of post.

Addendum June 14, 2016. Added some pics of the aluminum rails I made to mount the passenger side seat.

Quick post, I hope to show more details later. Adapted one of a pair of seats to fit on stock seat slider. There is a samba thread about this seat and the pioneer (link ) only used the Caravan slider mechanism in the install. Good fried Simon liked what he saw in the thread and bought a pair of seats and had the necessity of being able to move the passenger seat more, ie incorporate the stock sliders. With both sliders in action you can get a good range of fore and aft movement.

I just finished making the adapter and doing test fit in my van. The seat is more comfy than the stock seat. And it’s leather,  and has heating elements ( connecting the heaters is a chore yet to be enjoyed).

Here are some shots of the aluminum rails I made to allow stock seat sliders to be used. Note, the aluminum stock was left over scrap, the single holes in the vertical face have nothing to do with the install.

Laying on the stock sliders ( sliders salvaged from a spare seat, a couple of bars laid in the recesses just to show where the Chrysler seat rails will fit. I don’t have any more pics right now of the completed assembly including the slider release mechanism made to allow the stock slider rails to move ( the Chrysler seats have integral slider mechanism. Having the stock one too was really just to secure the stock rails). I’ll try to remember to get pics.

The longitudinal bars sitting in place. They have yet to be drilled to match the Chrysler seat bolts.

I’m declaring it done, well almost. Still fussing with ideas to cover the exposed bolt heads. I’m going to give it an 8/10. It is doing what I wanted it to do, but I really don’t like the end caps very much. I found it hard to enclose the “C” shape of the bumper because I carried the bottom angled section of the bumper right back to the standing seam on the body. It made for a big cross section to enclose at the ends. I added facets to the endcaps that really don’t do much for looks. Also noticed after painting how my casual approach to finish grinding and a little warping due to welding gave the top surface the hint of downturn towards the ends. Mostly this is a visual due to the sloppy finish grinding on the top edge. But now my eye is drawn to it and I get that pang of regret.

Oh well, that’s how it goes, I have to see the thing made then decide what I like and don’t like 🙂

The light bar worked out ok. Places the lights approximately in front of the metal section between the upper and lower grills. One could argue that the lights are too close together, but I’ll leave that conclusion until I aim the lights and do some night driving.

As for the lights, I did manage to shoehorn the 6.5″ H4 lamps into the housings. Right now I have it wired to the fog light switch and only connected to the low beam filaments in the lamps. I plan on connecting (yes, of course relayed) to the hi-lo stalk switch so I can have both high and low beam auxiliaries. The lamps had city light bulb holders in them. I replaced them with 2W led eagle eyes. I wired them to come on with key on, thinking they might make DRLs. Not quite bright enough, but certainly noticeable. The night shot shows them on, appearing more brilliant than they actually are. I’ll see if I can dig out some pics I took months ago showing the eagle eye install. I’ll update this post then.

Wiring to the aux lights runs inside the light bar and out behind the bumper. The nice flat top surface really makes it easy to stand on to get things on the roof. The paint is rubberized rocker guard paint. Yes, not bedliner. I thought it would be be a better choice for touch ups after the inevitable scrapes on rocks. Certainly less expensive than bedliner. About ten bucks a can, took two cans to do the bumper. Aluminum was prepared by scuff sanding and acid based aluminum wash. Then one coat of self etching primer and about three coats of the paint.

I should mention how I mounted them to the sub bumper. The stock mounting holes (M10x1.5 I think) got reworked with helicoils for M11x1.5. I made a stainless steel bracket, like two “C” shaped pieces connected by a straight section out of 1/8″X1.5″ bar stock. The “C” parts fit over the sub bumper and are held onto it by two bolts running vertically down through drilled holes in the sub bumper. The bolts hold the brackets in place and also pinch the sub bumper a bit, pretty solid. On the back of the rackets I welded nuts for the M13x1.75 bolts that go through the centre section of the bumper. Trust me, the bumper is on there solid.

Whoops! Uploaded the wrong diagram, hold on….fixed

I redrew my schematic to show changes made in the last year. I dropped the Doc Watson meter, added solar panel controller, and added large fuse at the big aux battery. And I added a 15A fuse on the small wire that runs from the ACR to neg return. It’s a safety in case of an internal fault in the ACR. Also, I corrected mistake in last diagram where the ACR was connected incorrectly to the aux fuse panel. Now you see it is fused at panel. I should make it clear that I do not have a power feed to the fridge cooling system. I may add that later, but I don’t miss it.

i made a few prototypes, aluminum with quick spray bomb paint. What do you think, silly, sensible, or none of the above?

Update, in a way.

Still fooling with the idea. Made this version to see how a swing away guard would work. The proportions are a bit screwy but I like it enough to to try again.

It took longer than making a baby but I finally have my big battery installed. I got this Northstar 200 AHr battery some time ago, I think I mentioned it in this blog post. The size and shape of the battery made it seem like it would fit easily under the rear seat but it just doesn’t ( without taking up more space than it needs, if that makes sense). I toyed with the idea, and went as far as making brackets, of mounting it  up under the van between the door sill and frame rail but no, that didn’t look right. So I settled upon the admittedly dubious spot of where the spare tire sits. A couple of problems with this placement. Number one is that I now have to find a spot for the spare tire. Ah but what about my much talked about swing away spare tire carrier? More on that at the end of the post. The other dubious characteristic of this battery location is that it places 128 lbs forward of the front wheels. I’m a little worried that it might make a difference in how the van negotiates dips and ditches in logging roads. Skipping a head a bit, I have had the battery installed for a week and I really don’t notice any driving different on paved roads. I made a carrier for the battery quite a while back, crikey, it was a year ago, since then I welded in some locating brackets that the battery fits into, and some tabs on the side tubes for supporting brackets. The brackets are made from 1X1/8″ stainless and I bent them to fit to the van frame rails. They are secured to the frame rails by 5/16″ stainless bolts that I will someday change to 8 mm. The bracket to the tab connection is done with 1/4-20 bolts and instead of nuts I used stainless ring nuts. The rings are to secure nylon straps that cross the battery and hold it very securely to the tray. Ok, some pics of it installed. First pic taken from driver’s side, one stainless bracket not fastened. Gives you the general idea of how the battery lies.  

And on the passenger side. You can probably make out the red nylon hold down straps going up over the battery.

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I had thought of making aluminum side splash plates but I was dissuaded by the changing angles and company curves needed so I used some scavenged treadmill material. I installed 1/4-20 riv nuts in the existing holes in the van frame and bolted the treadmill material. 

It’s not great but it’s not bad. It’s just there to reduce water splashing on the battery. Not shown in the pic are tubes leading from the battery vent up over the battery and on up to behind the front grill. When I did that I was thinking I was clever, I thought that leading the vents up high would prevent water getting into the battery if I happened to go through a deep puddle. But I found out later that the battery vents have a valve in them to prevent water ingress. A note on the wiring. I ran a short length of 4 gauge wire from the negative terminal back to the bolt holding on the transverse member supporting the front differential. On the positive terminal a short length of 4 gauge comes off the terminal and up into a black box (attached by Velcro) on top of the battery. In that box is a Blue Seas Maxi Fuse block, with a 70 A fuse.

Update: in the comments Marius wondered about battery cold weather performance. Here is a graph I found in one of Northstar’s  documents .

     Then out of the box and through some plastic sheathing and a sealed bulkhead fitting into the battery compartment behind/under the driver’s seat. Then it continues on to connect with my Blue Seas ACR. I’ll write more on that when I tidy up the wiring, I’m going to change the auxiliary power distribution layout there. I was surprised and pleased to discover that when all is bolted up tight the stainless straps from the tray to the frame seem to support the entire weight of the battery. The bolts at the rear, where the tray hinges on, have no weight on them. So that pretty well sums up the installs the battery. As mentioned I will post more on the auxiliary power distribution set up when I finally fix the positions of the various components. So… The spare tire, where does it go? It’s time for a confession, I couldn’t get my swing away tire carrier to work the way I wanted to. I’m not going to explain all the things I tried, and I did try a lot of things. But I could not get happy with the rigidity of the set up. The tire vibrated in the carrier when I smacked it with my hand. It bugged me no end. I finally lost my patience and removed it, cut out the hinge from the bumper and welded the bumper back together and painted it. I’m going to make a hatch mounted tire carrier, don’t laugh… Yet. In the meantime I’ve pulled my old Paulchen rack out and I have the tire bolted on that.  

And the bumper…  well its ok, but I’m not ecstatic about how far the end caps stick out, oh well maybe I can say it provides better side protection and its Mk I. And i still have to paint the tow loops and the receiver hitch.

Had a really frustrating week, seemed as though everything I touched went sideways. Most annoying was trying to eliminate vibrations in my swing away tire carrier. The latch pulls the swing away tight to the bumper assembly and I am pleased with how that finally worked out, but I don’t like the small amplitude vibration I get on the holder when the tire is attached. I think I am going to weld on a stiffening gusset to the upright and see if that will stiffen things up.

I bought a cheap rod bender from Princess Auto, this one here. It was on sale for 79 bucks. It works ok for what it is, and I thought instead of just bending random shapes while I try it out I would actually make something “useful”.

Well, I tried making a tail light protector and I soon realized that you REALLY NEED TO MAKE A JIG!

I’m showing you the result as a warning, think things out before you start merrily bending stock 🙂

The the tricky part was locating the little stand-offs accurately on the screw holes in the tail light. It’s obvious that the tail light is thicker at the top, but it also has subtle curves laterally and I was trying to match those curves and that made placing the little hollow studs for the mounting screws maddeningly difficult. You can see the nasty welds at those studs, result of tacking, checking, cutting, tacking, checking, cutting…

You really do need a jig.

And I think the guard would look a whole lot better if the vertical cross wires were not welded on top of the horizontal wire but welded to the middle of the section. I’m not going to try another until I make a jig, but even assuming I pop one off without pulling out my hair, these would be fussy and expensive Vanagon jewellery.

Not quite an unqualified success, but not a complete failure, I’ll settle for that. One of my sway bar drop links broke again and instead of the kind of repair I did previously , I decided to make new ones from stainless and beefier stock. I’ll detail that build when I have them welded up and bent. But I needed new cup washers and rather than buy them ( aren’t they around 13 bucks each?) I thought I’d have a go at making some from 2″ stainless washers. Here are my results.

First I tried pressing a ball bearing into the washer with a socket as a back up. You see on this test washer that it doesn’t make a good profile.

And on the 2″ washer.

So then I tried a different approach. Pretty self explanatory.

Useda friend’s press,applied between 10 and 15 tons of pressure. I also tried both ends of the male die, but the result wasn’t that great.

So I tried again. A quickly made female die with a rough profile of the shape I wanted, and a not very close match on the male.

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Back to the press and…

Well not great either, but I’m going to stop. I’d didnt do any research on how one should make dies for this purpose, i bet I am missing something quite obvious

The end of my unfinished drop link.

And with polyurethane bushings and the new washers. Hey, note that I have ground a rough radius on the inboard side of the bushings. This helps them fit into the recess on the lower control arm. No’ they aren’t quite that same as the stock washers. The stock washers have a larger un curved area and turn up more quickly at the edges. But I figure when the bushings are compressed when installed, the washers will make enough contact and still allow some lateral movement of the drop link.

As I’m now using geological time scale in describing the progress on my rear bumper build, this latest update comes very quickly after the back up light install.

I needed to make a latch that would secure the swing away carrier tightly, but yet be reasonable easy and quick to use. I tried four designs, my designs, conclusively crappy designs. This, my fifth attempt would be my last, next stop would be buying a de staco type draw latch.

I still had the Delrin cone and socket arrangement that was for my first design. The cone and socket does work well to locate the arm to the steel back stop that is welded to the bumper subframe. So I kept that and made a draw latch.

Reinventing the wheel.

But I learned a bit while doing it. It’s interesting how the effective lever arm changes on an offset hole draw mechanism like this. The pivot points, effective distance, changes from about 3/4″ when draw hole ninety degrees from the pivot to zero when draw pivot are inline. This gives great mechanical advantage when closing the latch, and the over centre part helps keep the latch closed.

I occurs to me that describing all this is a bit of a mug’s game. Maybe some of you think that I should have bought a latch and be done with it, a very valid point. Some of you are probably not very interested in some damn latch – just show the finished project, an equally valid point. And some might think I’m boasting about making the darned thing. It’s that last suggestion that bothers me.

You could make the case that writing any kind of blog is a tad egotistical. But believe me, the best thing about writing this kind of blog is finding out that you might have helped or at least nudged someone in the right direction.

Ok, enough blether.

I made the handle from 1″ thick aluminum. Part of some offcuts from the water jet guy. Had a nice curve and I continued the curve ti make the working end. Drilled holes for the pivots, slotted the end for the fixed pIvot ( that attached to a little bracket that was made from some 1/8″ thick stainless, mounted to the carrier with 1/4-20 bolts, helicoil inserts in the carrier).

I turned  and milled a bit of stainless to hold the bail ( the moving pivot) and the bail is a bit of 5/16″ stainless rod that I bent into a U shape and threaded the ends.

I used some 1/8″ stainless plate and 1/4″ rod to make the little catch on the backstop that hooks onto the bail.

I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough give in the mechanism, so I stuck in some hard rubber washers under the nuts on the bail. You can see them in the first two pics. I found that there was enough flex in the backstop latch that the washers weren’t needed.

Ok, the handle and fixed pivot.

And mounted on the bumper.   

See how I have to use some spacers to match the thIckness of the cone and socket bases to give the upright of the carrier a bigger surface to pull against? I’ll try and make a nicer version of the spacers, maybe one piece.

I have to make a plug for that hole. Also a fair bit of grinding and sanding to be done before painting. But hey, I’m making some headway.

Oh, and I have yet to weld on some sort of tab thing on the end of the handle so I can pin it to that curved tube as a safety or even a lock.

Ok, this is not the most astounding modification of a westy, but it is a nice little touch. I was looking at the hole in the cabinet where the rear table leg goes in and I thought that it should have some sort of trim on it. I had the distinct idea that later westies did have trim there, but I found out later that my friend’s ’91 westy doesn’t. So I have no idea how the thought got into my addled brain.

I made a trim ring from some black Delrin.

Ok, that’s all well and good, but fellow Vanagon mailing list member Stuart wondered if I could make a leaking off plug for the hole as he doesn’t use the rear table. I had a little bit of some sort of South American hardwood that I had been hoarding for, I can’t belive it, 30 years, and it seemed like the right stuff to use for the plug. Stuart thinks it’s Cocobolo, and it might well be.

A few years ago i tried re-bushing a spare throttle body using Delrin as the bushing material. I couldn’t get the throttle action smooth, it seemed as if the Delrin had a stiction property that I just couldn’t over come either by sizing the bushing or lubricating. So I laid the project aside and forgot about it.

Then this last summer I noticed some play in the shaft of the throttle body installed in the van. There was enough play to make adjustment of the throttle position switch very fussy. So i though back on my previous experiment and I thought I’d try making bushings again, but this time out of HDPE.

First let’s go back to my spare throttle body, the one I re-bushed with Delrin. I have a blog post here showing it before I started screwing around. I even went as far as cleaning up the wear marks in the bore and making a new butterfly plate to compensate for the now enlarged bore.

See the Delrin bushing?

And on the other side, the throttle position switch side.

My daily driver one on the left, the re-furbed one on the right.

Not the larger cam on the one on the left. This is the newer, revised throttle position switch system.

It appears like a lot of space around the butterfly, but it really isn’t that bad. I can’t recall the gap size (I measure with wire).

It kinda looked ok to me.

The dried up seal on one side.

And the other.

Wear in the bore from the butterfly.

I decided to leave bore and the butterfly untouched. I chucked up a hunk of polyE and turned and reamed a couple of bushings.

Recessed on the throttle position switch side.Why? because the switch plate has little locating tabs that fit into the hole.

Pretty well flush on the other side.

Gosh, i can’t recall for sure the butterfly shaft diameter, maybe it was 8 mm, yeah I think so. I do have an 8mm reamer. Anyhow, I did think about bearings instead of bushings. But the bearings I had on hand had a larger OD and that would have meant taking the throttle body to work to use the milling machine; tedious set up and then a boring head.

Assembled. I have to say the action of the butterfly is smooth as silk, much better than the Delrin. Come to think about, I wonder if I reamed the bushings the last time?

The throttle position switch now is easier to set, there is no wobble in the butterfly shaft.