1970 Bay (Outlaw-ish)

[Darren65]

Such a cool looking bus....one of my favourite projects for sure

Congrats Richard, I think you did a great job

[210bhp]

Yes, really nice. I like all your bespoke touches.
Congrats on a nice job Richard.

Regards
Mike

[murph2309]

I guess looking at the vent you’ve fitted an Eberspacher or Webasto. The typical type of either does around 2000w of heat - that will heat a truck cab fine so you should be ok even with the extra glass. If the pump’s bolted to the floorpan the ticking might get annoying (move it to a chassis rail).

Looking good!

Hi - yes, we've put an Espar B4 in it - good for 4000w of heat - so I think we'll be OK, it's located just under the locker next to the R&R bed and seems to work well. Although when we were in UK & Spain, the temp of the bus never got below 25 C - and was sometimes up near 40 so I might have to see if we can get some a/c in there too

[murph2309]

Thanks everyone - I've really enjoyed doing this project - and I can't say enough good things about Johnson's - they worked their a55es off to get this sorted by the deadline and didn't skimp anywhere - you should see the wiring, it's properly OCD in the way it's been put together.

The engine by Sateside is just fantastic - I have't pushed it too much yet, because we've been slowly breaking it in over the first couple of thousand miles, but it's so torquey - exactly what I was looking for. And the Gearbox by Cogbox is seriously good - coupled with the Gene Berg Shifter, it's absolutely fantastic - slick, precise and quick...! It's better than any other bus I've driven in that respect and is even better than my 911s (esp the 915 box - that's hard work!)

Brakes are epic - and the bus is quite heavy now, so having modern stopping-power is brilliant.

As a camper, the layout works really well, all four of us stayed in it for a few nights and its great - beds are (relatively) comfy and there was enough room for all of us. Cooking was great - although if I had to do it again, I'd probably put the burner on the left hand side, away from the driver's seat (bacon spatters on my fat biscuit!! but easily solved with the application of a spatter guard and a tea towel over the seat )

And it attracts so much attention! In Spain, people were asking for photos in it, by it, smiling, waving, filming us on the motorway - it was all a bit overwhelming really - It gets even more attention than the Targa - I think perhaps people think a bus is 'approachable' and happy and lovely or something, but it was quite something to experience.

And we had a lovely holiday -

Joel was impressed we had to go on the boat with the other 'low riders' so we didn't have to go up those ramps....



Camping was good....





Beaches and sunsets lovely....









And the kids seem to be getting into the swing of van life....





So - lots of lovely memories already - and it was an epic trip..... you see, when you take a fresh out of the box resto with a couple of hundred miles on it on a 2,500 km tour of Northern Spain.....things can go wrong....

And what was the biggest issue? Yep. The suspension.....

[Tosh]

That's awesome - only found the thread this morning and have gone through it all
Go make some memories

[911hillclimber]

Looks like your daughter has ownership already in hand....

My son-in-law has lost his Bus Mojo, so going to sent this thread to him to help encourage some luv and affection for them again.

[murph2309]

So. While it's quiet over the break, I thought I'd bring you up to speed on the latest with the bus. You see whilst we had a fantastic trip in Spain, it was not without issues. I've learned some (expensive) but valuable lessons, which I thought you might like to hear about.

Basically, the bus was really, really difficult to drive - the steering wasn't easy - particularly the no return to centre and the dead but sticky spot in the centre.

The weight distribution was wrong (too much on the LHS)

The tyres weren't up to it (not commercial sidewall tyres)

The suspension was too low (hitting your sump-plate is not fun....), too weak (we'd put quite a bit of extra weight in the bus) and too bouncy.

The result of all this was some frankly terrifying moments going around trucks, or sweeping motorway curves. I had to drive with two hands on the wheel at all times. But the really tough stuff was 600km in to the trip, in the middle of effing no-where in northern Spain, one of the adjustable spring-plates broke....

It should look like this, with all the adjustable bits firmly attached to the plate....



However, after leaving the beach on only our second full day, we were going up a typically steep hill and then did a right turn up an even steeper bit. Couldn't have been doing more than about 15 mph and there was a massive bang, like a gunshot going off, or a huge backfire. Kept on going up the hill, engine seemed fine. Crested it, found a bit of level and though best go and see if anything was on fire or anything.

What I wasn't expecting was that the left hand side spring plate had just broken....safety bolts sheared off, adjuster bolt sheared off, top-stop sheared off and everything was hanging on that little piece of metal at the bottom.... yipes...



So. To calm myself down and have a think, I walked back down the hill to see if there was anything that I could find that might help understand what had happened and found these in the road. Very luckily as it turned out....

[murph2309]

Luckily, we were only about 10km from our intended stop for the night, a B&B, that turned out to be great and with some super-helpful owners. And a plan needed to be hatched. Either I would get a new spring plate sent out to me and I'd fit it (!) or we would use the 'local guy who does some welding' that our host offered us.

The plate was going to take 2 days to get to us and we really didn't want to hang where we were for that long. So the next day, the owner took me into the village to meet the guy - who turned out to be an absolute gem. And with copious use of google translate (technology is amazing) and his pretty good English, we hatched a plan to weld the sh!t out of the bits I had left, replace the bolts, and at my insistence, make the spring plates (on both sides) never-adjustable-again with a thick bead of safety-weld.

I wanted safety and I wanted back on the road. We could sort it all properly when we got back to the UK, and no way were we going back on a truck....

Jacked it up so we could get rid of the sheared stuff



Then he noticed the crappy welding on the lower piece too.....check out that rust OMG.... my whole bus was on that...



And then he set to, grinding, welding, painting, sorting.... What a total superstar. Took about 2 hours to do and he charged me the princely sum of Eu78..... So I gave him a bottle of champagne too. He was well chuffed, but not as much as I was. I totally lucked out with this guy, and he could weld too....







Note the safety weld....



And on the other side, some precautionary safety-welding

]

And then we were back on the ground.... phew!



So not perfect, but definitely safe, and well executed - it meant that we could do another 1500 miles in safety and only delayed our plans for 24 hours..... which meant more of this...



And this

[KS]

I've heard so many tales of adjustable spring plates failing over the years (even on Beetles) that I have to admit I would never, ever use them - especially on a heavyweight camper. You had a lucky escape! Scary...

[murph2309]

You're not kidding Keith. No more adjustable spring plates for me....next installment is what we did next.

Prepare yourselves for a 'Dad Overlander' bus stance - and much beefed up suspension...

[KS]

You're not kidding Keith. No more adjustable spring plates for me....next installment is what we did next.

Prepare yourselves for a 'Dad Overlander' bus stance - and much beefed up suspension...

Extreme, but I like it. Well done...

[inaglasshouse]

Great stuff Richard, thanks for posting. Bus looks fabulous (except the spring plates).

[Black Betty]

What a brilliant and astonishing lookin' bus!

About 25 years ago when we wanted to start camping with a camper van I (being an 'aircooled guy' ) also wanted a VW bus. We started looking for one, but soon found out that they were a bit too small for us. Then we -actually pretty accidentally- found a Peugeot J7 camper van and we have that one ever since...




Perhaps it's an idea to have a 'DDK camper van lovers gathering'

[murph2309]

Cool bus BB - I also think it would be a great idea for a weekend of beers and campfires - I'd be up for that...

You're not kidding Keith. No more adjustable spring plates for me....next installment is what we did next.

Prepare yourselves for a 'Dad Overlander' bus stance - and much beefed up suspension...

Extreme, but I like it. Well done...

That's funny Keith - it's not quite like that..... so let me tell you the story of suspension redemption...

[murph2309]

Right - as I tell you this, you have to remember that I had specced everything so far on the bus - lowered, narrowed front beam, lower-profile tyres, deeper sump, and all the living stuff and especially the leisure batteries on the left-hand side. The other thing to remember is that this build was really pushing some laws of physics and it just didn't work in the spec I'd imagined.

But it was all wrong. To be honest, I knew within the first 100 yards of street-driving that something was amiss. Well plenty actually, but I thought I could 'drive around' most of it. Which I did, but jeez it was stressful - and that's not what I wanted.

It looked cool as fk, but was really impractical. No ground clearance, difficult steering, a sense that the bus was 'listing' to the left, and that during a right hand turn at anything over 30mph you got the sense that the front-wheel was tucking under. 'Kin terrifying going past trucks (anticipating the suck inwards and then the blow outwards - and the same in reverse if a fast truck came past you....). Bad wandering and tramlining & a horrible way with any road imperfections (not that there are any in the UK of course....). And with a sticky centre to the steering, this meant that if you weren't really careful, you'd over correct and set up the most horrible 'weave' across the road as the momentum slopped from one side to the other.

I knew there were a load of things that weren't right, but we needed to isolate, diagnose and fix the problems. Then we needed a plan of action.

So after we got back, I took the bus to Center Gravity - to Chris. The Genius of suspension. He's set up both my 911s and had transformed them completely. And he has a T3, so he knows his way around a bus. He immediately confirmed all I'd noticed and said that it was not an easy drive.

And we started by weighing the bus, & corner-weighting the bus.

A standard bus should come in at around 1,495 kg, with a payload of 755 kg & thus a total of 2,250 kg. Mine came in at 1,767 kg and we projected a 4 adult and luggage payload of 340 kg - totaling at 2,170 kg. So heavy, but not stupid heavy. However, the L/R distribution was not so good, with a 54 / 46 split, and a similar corner-weight split. It should be pretty much 50/50.

So first up was to see if we could shift some weight over to the RHS. The difference we were looking to move was around 50 kg, and as it happens, the 2 leisure batteries are 27 kg each (!) so moving them over to the RHS & the starter battery to the LHS meant that we would get pretty much spot on where we needed to be.

However, this meant some metal-work to be done, so Johnson's cut out some of the RHS, fitted a new 'sunk' battery tray in there and we shifted the weight over.







A really quality job, and that pretty much immediately sorted the weight distribution, and was a major contributor to getting the corner weights at 50:50 - Nice one Johnson's.

Lesson learned from this bit, is if you're doing this - make sure someone has some way of looking at the weight on your bus. It makes a massive difference and needs to be considered during the build - otherwise it can be a bit pricey to fix afterwards.....