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.

Saw this on the samba, i think it was syncroghia that posted in his thread about adding high top to his 16″ syncro. I thought it was a good idea so i gave it a go on the rear hatch.

It is just water pipe insulation, I think its foam polyethylene, cut to length and wedged into the cavity. Now that summer’s over one might find pool noodles going cheap and I think they would do too.

I like this because it is cheap and fast to install. No gluing and I don’t think it will trap moisture against the metal.

I stuck on a bit of peel and stick roofing stuff to dampen panel noise. My van had some factory applied bits already there. Remember this is a converted 7 passenger tin top. I don’t think we sties have the factory sound proofing in the back hatch, but they do have the dreaded fiberglass batting.

And just because i had some, i pushed in some 3/8″ thick closed cell foam. Left over pipe insulation stuck on lip of cut out.

I liked how it went in, I think I’ll do more of it.

About 2 months and no blog posts, sheesh, the next few posts will be playing catch up.

The 85 model year and newer vanagons have a much improved sliding door. Easier operating and a bit quieter than the old style but I thought it could be even better. I had tried UHMW polyethylene tape on the surfaces that the rollers ran on would be the ticket, blog post about that here. But the tape wore out after a year and a bit.

So i thought about a plastic version of the steel rollers. I made a quick and dirty prototype from some Delrin to try on the middle track (the track under the cover on the side of the van).

Not quite an exact copy and a bit out of focus. Here it is installed.

Verdict? Well it is quieter than the steel roller and it rolls just as easily. But with that track silenced a little, now I could hear the lower track roller noise. So some time later I set about making another middle slider roller and seeing what I could do about the lower track roller.

Middle roller, more care taken. Oh, I should mention that the bearing used in the roller is a 607RS. Dimensions are 19mm OD, 7mm ID, 6 mm thick, and rubber shield.

I took the sliding door right off as I was working on the lower roller at the same time. Here is the stock steel roller.

And my Delrin version installed. See the 2 other bearing above the plastic roller? They run in a vertical channel above the rail the main roller runs on. I didn’t do anything with them, but i probably should have thought about it.

I was going to make a lower track roller from scratch but I found a plastic roller in my junk pile. I think it was from a hanging door, but I can’t remember anything more about it. I wish I did because it is very close to the stock roller dimensions. I just had to reduce the OD by a few millimetres and replace the bearing with a 607RS. It originally had a 6mm ID bearing. The circlip retaining the bearing was a real bear to remove and I accidentally broke a little of the plastic.

here is the stock steel roller. The roller is on a post on the lower assembly , secured by a circlip. The plastic shield can be pried off and the clip removed and the roller pulled from the shaft.

This is not a roller with a pressed in bearing, the bearing and the roller are all one piece.

Has a rubber shield on the inside, the bracket side, face.

Comparison of the stock roller and the hanging door roller. Both have somewhat similar profiles. Close enough for me anyway. But as I mentioned before, I had to turn down the OD of the plastic roller.

Plastic roller with new bearing installed

And showing where I broke the darned thing.

And there it is installed on the door bracket.

So did it make a difference? Yes, it did. Again quieter and smoother. The door still is not as quiet as I would like and I think some of the noise is coming from those vertical bearings on the middle slider, the pair I should have paid more attention to.

You know, this is the kind of project that 99.9% of people would look at and shake their heads, mutter “get a life” and then wander off to chat with someone else. It is only when i sit down and write this post does that realization sink in.

Crikey, forgot to add an important thing… to thank “ZsZ” for posting measured drawings on this Samba thread. I’ll be cheeky and link directly to the drawing.

This is the result of Felder Enterprises announcing a lantern holder made using a Bus Depot awning gutter clamp. I can’t let FE get ahead so before I got down to paying work I made my own version. It is based on a design I’ve seen on the web that uses PVC tubing and a PVC “T”. But I had some aluminum stock so I used that.

I milled a slot at one end to hold the lantern bail.

And a slot to go over the rain gutter.

And a bit of paint protection.

On the van.

And surprise, it clears the sliding door.

I have no pressing need for a lantern holder, I guess i was just in one of those moods this morning.

Addendum, 28/03/2014

Well it seems that i didn’t get the itch scratched, i made another hanger. This time from some scrap thin walled stainless tubing. Part of it was the end of a roll, so it had a little bend to it. I thought that might be interesting. I ground the welds out just to make it look a little sleeker. I don’t think it works as well as the aluminum version, the tubing is so thin that the slot that goes over the gutter spreads a little when weight applied to the hanger. But it might be strong enough, we’ll see.

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Ok, I know this conical latch idea of mine is flakey but bear with me. I got some things tacked up today to see what was what. First is the upright that will hold the spare tire. In my last post I said how I had to make an adjustment to get the upright close, but not too close, to the back of the van.  My solution was to cut and bend the upright to mirror the profile of the rear of the van. Here are some pics with the upright (not fully welded out yet) roughly in place. My swing away arm is just clamped to the stock bumper.

I think this might work.

Ok, on to the latch. I tacked welded a bit of U channel onto the upright and I also bored a hole for and tacked in the short section on alluvium tube that you saw in the previous post and that houses the female Delrin part of this cockamamy set up. Here is the latch assembly more or less assembled. But some notes of explanation needed. Of course the threaded rod has not been cut down to size yet, and that metal but you see right against the left most flange represents the back stop I have yet to weld to the bumper. the two flanges meeting (and I think I might slim them down a tad) are the male and female parts in tight congress.. on the right hand side of the box section upright you can just see a trimmed down nut on the threaded rod, the thread rod, then the hand wheel. See the collar in place inside the “cage”? I need to make a set screw for it. The collar does two things, keeps the hand wheel from falling out of the cage when it is unscrewed from the rod, and when the hand wheel is turned to unscrew from the rod the collar pressed against the cage and pushes the upright away from the back stop.

I really am not doing a good job of explaining this. You’ll have to wait for a video or something.

Face on view. Aren’t I a clever fellow making 5 holes in the hand wheel reflecting the five holes in the vanagon wheel? It’s this attention to useless details that distinguishes my crazy ideas from other crazy ideas. 🙂

(Here’s something educational.  Click on the pic to bring it up in a new tab, then zoom in on the tack weld on the left side of the fully visible seam.  You can just make out a hairline crack on the tack. This happens because the heat sink of the thick walled box section tubing draws heat away very quickly from the cooling puddle of the tack weld. To reduce the chance of this happening I should have warmed up the tubing, it was pretty well dead cold. )

Male and female separated. Time for a smoke.

I think I can weld out everything now, and trim down a few of the moving parts.

Update: 21/02/2014.

Dirk over on the IG16 syncro forum expressed some concern that the upright being made of aluminum would waggle back and forth like one of my dog’s tails. Any time a German engineer gives advice it behoves one to listen 🙂 . So today I welded up (not very well, i was rushing) the upright and tacked it to the swing arm, and I cut out a reinforcing piece to weld in (3/8″ thick 6061 stock).  I am almost positive now that things will be wedding night stiff  when finished.

I’ve been amusing myself (!) by attempting to make a latch for the swing away tire carrier that’s going on my aluminum bumper. I have this almost unreasonable desire to make sure the horizontal arm of the carrier is fixed hard against a back stop on the bumper. I know other designs use an over the centre draw latch mechanism, and I am sure they work well. But I got in my head that I wanted to try another approach.

The back stop mentioned will be a sturdy bit of aluminum plate welded vertically to the forward top edge of the bumper. Something like a 4″ X 6″ bit of 3/8″ plate. It will be positioned at a point on the bumper were the end of the swing arm end up when the arm is “closed”. Now imagine a truncated cone projecting horizontally back from that plate that fits into it’s female mate that is in the swing arm. The cone arrangement will, I think, locate and secure the arm to the back stop.

Instead of a draw latch I decided to have a captured screw handle on the swing arm. This screw handle will engage a threaded rod projecting out from the male cone.

Yeah, it doesn’t seem very clear and I don’t have a sketch of my idea. But here are the parts I have made so far.

From left to right: hand wheel/screw handle, male cone (will be attached to back stop), female cone partially inserted into bit of tubing that will be welded into the swing arm.

The cone couple. 10 degree included angle, made from Delrin. It is a tight fit into the aluminum tube that will house the female cone. A bit of glue and a couple of countersunk screws on the flange will hold the Delrin in the aluminum.

The hand wheel (going to call it that from now on) is made from scrap aluminum with a centre section of stainless steel pressed in. I mean really pressed in, a shrink fit. I heated the aluminum and drove the stainless into, the somewhat enlarged by heat, hole. Then I fancied it up with a turned recess and some holes. The stainless centre is threaded for 1/2″ NC.

The other side. The narrow section will be inside the “cage” that I have yet to make that will hold the hand wheel to the swing arm.

Arranged in order.

I had to make a collar to put on the narrow portion of the hand wheel to stop it falling out of the cage when unscrewed from the threaded rod. Of course I broke the damned tap when i was threading a set screw hole.

Grr.

I didn’t want to make another collar so i ground down the stuck tap (carbide burr on die grinder) and drilled for another set screw.

I was so pissed that i broke a tap I didn’t get the new hole exactly centred on the collar. Too bad, thats the way it is.

Enough of this for today.