Lots of Progress

Last night the engine got put back together. New pistons, jugs, and heads are on. Also had new rocker shafts and new push rod tubes. All that stuff is on the engine now. Just need to connect up the last half of the new alternator and then the cooling tin and it goes back into the bus. That’s what’s going on today. Hopefully another 2 hours and it’ll be up and running.

The steering is almost done. All the old stuff got taken off two days ago and the new stuff has been going on last night and will be finished today. The swing lever got rebuilt, drag link put on, and the tie rods need to be bolted down now. I haven’t completed the ball joints and I’m dreading doing that today because they need to be pressed in and I think the whole front beam needs to come off. I’m not really sure. I hope it doesn’t.

The top got completed last night. The top is frigging sweet as hell. Gotta give it to Jason who I just said… finish the top after I had put in most of the buttons and he got it done really well.  A lot better than what I would have done.

Yesterday my GPS Speedo came in. It’s a Heads Up Display, HUD, and projects on the windshield. It just projects your speed in km/h or m/h and your direction you are going. The update speed of the thing is insanely fast. Totally awesome and accurate. Gotta love a global satellite positioning system telling a piece of crap rusted out 1971 Bus what speed it’s doing.

GPS!

Today the final parts came in.  I, Caleb, got back from picking my dad up from the airport and found a nice box on the door step with the rest of the engine parts and things we need to complete the engine and get it running.  Hopefully onight the beast will be up and running.  The wiring harness that I ordered hasn’t come in yet so I don’t even know if I’m going to put that in for the BABE Rally.  So far we’ve replaced both tie rods, drag link, swing arm, and four ball joints in the front.  The engine got new jugs, pistons, heads, plugs, plug wires, and a petronix electronic ignition.  The top was torn off and replaced with a piece of marine grade vinyl from Jo-Annes.  Most girly store ever BTW.

My friend Ben I told about the BABE Rally and he has put together his own team.  He’s a fellow VW head that I met up at a VW show in New Jersey.  His team is “Team Born From Jets” and here is his website.  http://teambornfromjets.com/

I will post more pictures as they come up from tonights work.    Until then, enjoy my little Nut/Screw man picture to the right.

On The Way We Go

The Rickety Van is on the bench and getting new parts.  Like many groups I suspect have left their preperations till the end.  During the past three days we have finally started to work on the good ole 1971 VW Bus to get it going again and running on all cylinders.

After doing a compression check a few months back we found out that we did the whole ‘07 BABE Rally on two cylinders.  The right bank of cylinders came in with a compression of 50 and 20.  Hawt numbers if ya ask me when they should be around 140-150.  So…… we ordered up some new jugs, pistons, and heads and we are on the way to getting better gas mileage.  We semi-caluclated it out and we got about 10-14mpg last year.  It depended where we were, flat road or the NC mountains.  This year we are hoping for a whopping 20-25 or so.  Twice what we had last year.  We took off the top that was serving as a good air brake and now the engine will be running in tip top shape…. if it is running at all by the time we are supposed to leave on the 19th.  Right now the engine is sitting outside of the car behind it in pieces but that all happened yesterday and if everything goes nicely it should be running tonight.

Pictures are now being put up on Flickr of our repair adventures.  This year we should have more updating from the road as he hit certain adventures instead of a lot of posts at night when we finally get to the hotels.  We have a few iPhones to use this year for posting and data usage.  We are working out a way to carry a few party enhancements for when we arrive at the check in points.  More will be posted on those as we go, maybe.

We not have a Rickety Van group on Twitter found at this link. http://twitter.com/ricketyvan

The Little Bus That Could

What is to become of the bus in the future?  What are we doing for the next BABE Rally?  Well.  For one thing we are going to restore our little bus back to it’s prime condition, at least we are going to try.  With it’s memories stored in it’s body we want to try and keep it to remember and maybe to bring back to other BABE Rallies in the distant future.

As for the next BABE Rally.  As of now we are still trying to decide on what vehicle to do it in.  We have a pretty set vehicle that we are looking at but it’s gunna be a challenge to find one in bad enough condition to get for 250 dollars.  I think we’ll be alright though.

Last Leg – 04 : After the Border and Beyond

Like usual thing can’t go smoothly for us.  Just like it says in Murphy’s Law, if something can go wrong it will.  In this case the muffler cracked open and was removed because it might have fallen off.  Now the bus backfires like nobodies business and is really loud.  Louder than Greg’s mustang which is very suprising.  The most scary thing that happened on the way back was that the throttle got stuck at full throttle while Tim was driving and didn’t come up till we pulled over and killed the engine.  That was pretty scary until we thought about it for ten or so seconds and realise we still weren’t going over the speed limit.

We just got in at about 6am roughly and I think we are all going to be asleep for a very long time.   Pictures will be posted soon as will a few posts from Greg, I hope.  We also thought up some ideas for next years vehicle which we are going to try and narrow down in the near future.  I must depart now.  If you are reading this go two posts down and read Tim’s post.  It’s very good. 

-Caleb