Pulling together some stuff I have on the differences in the tail light assemblies. As some of you know, European tail lights have the provision for a rear fog light (Nebelschlussleuchte), that is, a brighter red tail light to be used during poor visibility. The light is controlled b a 3 position switch (off, front fogs, front fogs + rear fog) on the dash. I have one of those switches controlling my aux. lights. Part number for this one is 171 941 535A, the VAG says 251 941 535 is the one for the Vanagon – bet ya they are one and the same.  Here are a couple of pics:

And here is a German manual diagram:

And here is an annotated English language diagram

And here is my diagram of the circuit boards (right hand side):

And now some pictures of a pair of right hand side tail light boards, “USA” vs “Europa”:

“USA” lens front:

“Europa” lens front:

“USA” lens back:

“Europa” lens back:

Arcane and nerdy stuff, eh Ben?

This is what I use to pressure bleed the hydraulics. A 4 litre Nalgene polyethylene bottle with a presta valve in shoulder and a bulkhead fitting in cap. Other end of tubing connects to bulkhead fitting attached to an old brake reservoir cap. The 4 litre bottle is pressurized to about 7 psi with bike pump. You do have to top up reservoir every so often when bleeding, but its  not much of a chore. The 1 litre bottle collects the bled fluid.

Jim’s annotated photos.

Jim writes:

This might be of interest to anyone wanting to use an 82 block with a later Model vanagon, or for anyone wanting to get away from the stick-in-the filler tube setup.

A few weeks back I wrote that I had carefully studied and measured the dipstick tube on my vanagon-specific NA diesel and was trying to make another one out of brake line for the 82 vanagon-specific block I was building.

What makes the blocks specific to the years is the treatment of the “dipstick” hole in the side of the block. With the 82 block, the hole is plugged with an aluminum piece, and the dipstick assembly is part of the oil filler tube.

I was going to use the dipstick tube out of the original 83 engine after knocking the aluminum plug out of the 82, but upon careful inspection, it isn’t that simple.

The machining in both holes is different. The 83 has a larger top part—the holes are step- drilled so that the bulge in the dipstick tube will seat at the step, assuring that the marks on the dipstick itself are the correct distance from the bottom of the pan and thereforeread accurately.

The bulge in the dipstick tube on the 83 will not even fit into the 82 hole at all without grinding it down, which would thin the tube walls, making it weak and ruining for further use in an 83.

So here’s what I did:

Start with a 7.5 mm steel brake line 36 inches long, and while you’re buying it get a brass compression fitting that just barely fits over it. They make one  that’s perfect, you just have to try a couple of sizes to find it.

Cut off the flanges on both ends of the tube. slide the compression fitting over one end and touch a grinder with the fitting so that it grinds concentrically as the fitting is spinning on the tube. It doesn’t take much, you want a nice fit so be careful

Push the fitting up from what will be the bottom of the tube so that the bottom of the ferrule is 30mm (7 and 5/8 inches) from the bottom. This has to be exact. Now mark the top and bottom position of the fitting and use a small file to clean the metal of the tube where it will sit. Now solder it in place.

Slip a coil spring type pipe bender over the tube and bend it to shape by hand (I think I’ve already posted a picture of the proper bend photographed against a 1 inch grid for reference). The curve should be smooth, but it doesn’t have to be particularly faithful to the original for the setup to work. What DOES have to be accurate is the distance of the compression fitting from the bottom of the tube, and the length of the tube overall.

Go to a junkyard and get any VW gas or diesel dipstick where the orange plastic piece snaps over the end of the tube. Unsnap it and throw away the tube, you are going to put the plastic piece on the end of the tube after bending the pipe, and cut the tube several times until the dipstick (dealer item if you don’t have one) protrudes from the end of the tube exactly two millimeters.

Once done, drop this into the dipstick hole in your block and seal with black permatex. Behind the alternator, under the nut, drill and trim a hadware store angle bracket to fit under the nut. I bent the top, flat part of this to conform to the roundness of the tube and secured the tube to the bracket with a hose clamp.

After putting 3.5 quarts of oil in the car, the dipstick shows the level exactly halfway between the marks.

Jim writes:

How to install middle seat rails in a westy

You’ll need a way to get under the car, a circular saw, the usual hand tools, a set of seat tracks and the fasteners for those tracks, a marker, a tape measure and a straight edge and some 2″ wide painter’s tape. The tape will allow you to mark accurately for the cuts, and will help the carpet cut cleanly. You will need a very long 3/16th (approximately, it just has to fit through the center of a 13mm bolt hole–that’s a head size of 13mm, not shaft diameter) drill bit, about a foot long I believe. You will use the bit to drill up through the bolt holes in the bottom of the van to locate the center of the pieces you are going to remove. It’s tight up against body crossrails, and the drill body will interfere with these if you don’t have a really long bit.

When the instructions refer to bolt holes in the floor, realize that every vanagon ever made, as far as I know, has the bolts for this welded into the metal of the floor. The trick is to remove two sections of wood that cover the holes in such a way that when the sliding seat trays are dropped in, their holes align exactly with the fastener holes. It isn’t difficult if you can mark and measure carefully.

First pull out the fridge unit so you have access to the whole width of the floor board. Take off the front (door side) trim.

Go underneath with the long drill and locate the fitting welded into the floor where the floor track will be. This will be obvious as there will be two rows of them across the car in about the middle of the rear area. Once you have drilled up through the two fasteners near the door, measure over the width of the floorboards and then go below to locate the corresponding pair. You don’t want to go all the way to the driver’s wall because there’s no point in removing the plugs. You are not going to use them because the seat rail won’t reach them.Start at the ones just inside the door and drill up through the floorboard. You are drilling through a plastic plug. After you get the floorboard strips removed, you can remove all of the plastic plugs from the top with with a phillips head screwdriver. But, until you can remove the wood flooring, you must very carefully mark where you are going to cut, and for now must be content with drilling as small a hole through them as is feasible. You don’t want to break the drill bit off, but you don’t want to big a drill either. Just something large enough to find the hole in the carpet to use as a point of measurement. If you drill too large a hole in the plastic plug, you will just spin the plastic plug and it will not want to come out. You will also have drilled out the molded phillips head pattern in the top. So, use as small a drill as you can.

Lay down a strip of tape over all four holes, running fore and aft, each about ten inches long. Punch down over the hole to locate it in the tape. This will create your four reference points. Now run masking tape across the floor of the van between the marks. Now measure the width of the seat rail tray where it drops into the slot (not at the edges of the flanges). Look at the end and you will see this for yourself. The flanges down both edges of each piece are meant to cover the edge of the channel and embed in the carpet.

Measure this distance, divide it by two, and mark this distance out from your reference holes. Connect the marks across the width of the floor with a line from the straight edge. The material between these lines is what you will saw away.

Use the open area between the floorboard and the wall to set the depth of the circular saw to saw through the bottom of the wood without touching the metal and ruining the blade. It can be done. If you are worried about this, leave yourself a 64th or so and get the last with a knife blade. Lift the strips out and you will see all the plastic plugs that can now be removed.

Simply screw in all the track pieces–they will only go in one way–and replace the stove and fridge. Slide the seat in for reference before you do final tightening on the rails.

Hot day today, for Lower Vancouver Island, in the low 30’s. All I felt like doing after the overhead cabinet install was installing the fresh water tank. It sits against the angled back wall on the drivers side, and the drain pokes through hole in the  floor. I measured where that hole is in my ’82 Westy , but crikey, there was a dimple on the Syncro’s floor right where the hole is supposed to be. And same thing further forward for the sink drain hole.

Water tank area:

And sink drain area:

Drilled on the dimple and went under van to realise hole was right where the old Webasto heater fuel pump is. The heater is not working, and wont be anytime soon, so I removed the pump.

Using that hole as pilot, I punched out bigger hole with Greenlee punch.

And then a bigger Greenlee punch.

So much nicer than using a hole saw. At this point I wondered why the heck was I working with the cabinet in place? Out it comes and a trial fit of tank.

I stuck some closed cell foam on bottom and back of tank for cushioning and maybe reduce any sweating. Westfalia jams in fibreglass insulation on the back, against the angled wall. Then caulk the opening (I had painted cut surface) and the tank goes into the cabinet and the cabinet lowered into place.

Tomorrow I’ll fit up some sort of gasket plate or just caulk the area on the underside of van where drain emerges.

With the way I am camperising my Syncro, ie just cutting sunroof sized hole, it means that there is no flat ceiling where the rear overhead cabinet goes. In the regular Westy, the flat ceiling is the plywood upped bunk surface, and the rear overhead cabinet bolts securely up to it as well as being bolted at the side to the wardrobe.

Having a headliner covered curved steel roof back there makes it a little harder for me to install the cabinet, and because the ceiling is not flat, my cabinet will have a space between it and ceiling. The Westfali Mosaik kit solved this problem by having a curved front face on the cabinet to match the curve of the ceiling, and uses rod like hangers to mount the cabinet to the van. Here  is a diagram.

But, like and idiot, I couldn’t find the diagram above when I went to install the cabinet. I fussed over how to mount it securely – it was held on the wardrobe side by two bolts into top of wardrobe, but the other end was unsupported. I solved that partially by making a rather feeble bracket at the rear, right hand side. Its made from a ratty scrap bit of aluminium which had a tight bend in it, close enough to the angle needed. It was very awkward to fit and did not fully support that end of the cabinet.

Later I found the diagram and made a hanger from a 3/8″ stainless bolt, and one of the brackets used in the rear AC electronics. The hanger hooks up and onto the box section reinforcing part of where the wall meets the roof. I may have to adjust things a little, I detect a slight misalignment, but all in all this worked well, the cabinet its fully supported.

The rear overhead cabinet or AC unit in the Westfalia reduces your rear view (huh? you know what I mean) and that bugs a lot of folk, including me. There was a Samba thread on this subject with some good solutions. One was to use a baywindow van mirror stalk, there were some that had extended stalks and this is the hot ticket. I have a ’72 westy gathering moss with regular sized stalk, so I removed the rear view mirror – clockwise twist on stalk – and tried it our with the Vanagon mirror (why on earth had I not bothered to do this before you ask? I guess I’m slow).

The ball joint between the mirror and the stalk are the same on both, and the mirror comes off with a little bit of twisting.

The baywindow stalk is perhaps a tad longer than the vanagon’s, but the attachment angle is different. The upshot is it may provide a bit better rear view. Pictures to prove this assertion to come, but for now some pics of the stalks. The baywindow stalk in off white, the Vanagon in brown.

Update: took pictures of both stalks (same mirror) in van. The shots from drivers point of view, showing rear visibility are crap, sorry. Don’t know if you can tell that there is improved viewing angle, but I think there is. The side views show clearly the different angles of the stalks. If you have a spare baywindow stalk lying around its worth trying it out.

I couldn’t help myself, this evening I put the floor tracks and the old floor I made for my ’82 Westy (original “82 Westy floor, cut into 3 strips, faced with luan door skin plywood, and shellacked) into the Syncro. The floor has weathered pretty well, mind you it has been covered by foam and carpet, but still its 10 years old.

I need to do some minor fitting to get it just right but now the camperisation is really coming together.

Here’s what I wrote in my old web site about the floor in the old “82 Westy:

“Back in ’00, when I reno’ed the interior of my van, I replaced the foor.

Early Westies (like my ’82) had a floor made from carpet covered plywood. Later vanagons had a “floor track system” that I thought was useful as it allowed the installation of a stand-alone seat, or a second bench seat.

So I got the tracks from a wrecker (they are bolted to the steel floor of the van) I ripped the original (awful quality) plywood into three sections, faced them with luan plywood (3mm doorskins) and installed the whole shebang. The luan ply is finished with shellac and wax. I trimmed the original carpet to lay on top of the new floor.

The shellac and wax finish has held up surprisingly well but is quite slippery, doh! The carpet would slip around on it until I installed a foam flooring material discovered at the local Home Depot (I had originally wanted to face the ply with some cork flooring – still will someday).

The foam is about 3/4″ thick and the edges interlock together. I don’t know what kind of plastic it is made from, but it is like a beefed up version of those foam jigsaw puzzles for kids.

One package (around Ca$19) makes a square about 4 feet by 4 feet, not quite large enough to do the Westy floor perfectly, but it works fine.

The foam just lays on the ply, trimmed a little to fit the cabinet projections and stops the carpet from slipping as well as providng a very nice feel to the floor. Also, it comes right out with no fuss and can be used as a seating/lying/playing pad when camping.”

Every Westy owner knows that the stove top rattles when you’re driving on bumpy roads. The rattling can be reduced by:

– making sure latch on top adjusted properly

– installing new rubber/foam bumpers under lid front edge

– laying a tea towel or sponge on stove grate before closing top

– making sure that drain tray in held firmly by bullet catches in lid (not applicable to Canadian market versions)

The rattling comes mostly, I think, from the stove grill and drain tray. But looking at the kitchen unit on the bench, I could see that the groove that the stove top sits in the cabinet is wide enough to allow the rear of the stove top to move up and down a couple of millimeters or so. The front fo the stove top is held firmly by the metal front panel (or should be if all the screws are in place tight), but the rear is only held by one screw to the back grill that runs the full length of kitchen unit. I tightened up the fit of the stove top in the groove with some thin plastic shims, silicon caulked in place. Pics show left and right sides, the gaps and the fix. The rear grill was removed.

A few years ago I recorded the temperatures inside and outside the fridge just to see how well it works. Data shown below. Unfortunately I did not record what I meant by “back fan on”. Was it the fan on the cooling fins on back of fridge? I think so.  But was it cycling and what was the cycle period? It might have been the fan I added to the external water supply port on van, but I doubt it.  Nothing worse than half assed experiments eh?

Oh, almost forgot to add, this is with fridge on propane power.

Spent some time cleaning up the fridge, sink, and cabinet. I added another muffin fan to fridge cooling coils. I’ve had a muffin fan installed for a few years since the original fan crapped out. These muffin fans do not move as much air as the original, but they were free, and as an experiment I decided to add another in parallel. It is cable tied to the second row of cooling fins, with some foam to isolate noise. I am sure the foam will degrade pretty quickly, but we’ll see before that if 2 fans arranged thus is better than one.

Over the years, I’ve done a fair bit of dicking around trying to get more air over the coils of the old fridge, and now I am back to pretty well stock. Best modification I ever did was to use the westy external mains water connection port as a vent. I took out the plumbing and put in a small fan. This really did get the hot air out from back of the fridge. But I don’t plan on cutting a hole in the syncro to do this mod when I install the cabinets though.

Other notes, water line to faucet fixed down to cabinet, and I never did find a good colour match for the brown on the metal bits… exasperated, I sprayed with satin black wheel paint. If I ever find a good brown paint match I’ll re-spray. The black looks a bit funny.

One pic shows propane tank and reg. connected to fridge, and small battery pack powering the electrical system. The fridge lit up easily and started to cool down nicely. Its amazing for such an old unit (1982) which has had a pretty well used life (you can tell by the tatty state of the cabinets) that it still works as well as it does.

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.