BLAUHAUS: 1984 Adventurewagen refresh

[SnowDaySyncro]

I became aware of, and fascinated with, Adventurewagen campers circa 1994. I mailed something of an inquiry/fan letter to AW at their California mailing address and received a packet of literature and a note from founder/designer Ed Anderson. I had only recently purchased my first camper, a '72 Westy SO-80/Sportsmobile, but the seed of a long-term dream was already planted and growing.

In autumn of 2021, I saw an ad for a solid-looking '84 AW in Michigan. Original paint, originally from California, stored every winter, lots of maintenance receipts, at a reasonable asking price. I had never purchased a vehicle from afar, and logistics didn't favor a 900 mile trek to Michigan, but my friend Jason lived an hour or so away and was able to inspect and test drive it. A fellow longtime Vanagon owner, he was pretty much the best man for the task.

Jason made arrangements to meet with the seller and called me from the test drive. With a healthy-sounding waterboxer idling in the background, he gave it a clean bill of health and predicted (correctly) that I would be very happy with the general condition of the camper if I decided to buy it. I made a deal with the seller. By the time everything was sorted and the sale completed, it was December. Had it been anything through October, I would have been up for a fly & drive retrieval, but December brought too many bad variables into the picture. I didn't want to risk losing the AW's snow and salt virginity and I also didn't like the possibility of an unfamiliar vehicle breaking down on a cold night so far from home. Thus began another first for me: arranging for transportation.

[SnowDaySyncro]

The world of auto transport brokers was dizzying. Prices ranged widely, demeanors ranged from maybe-too-chill to obnoxiously high-pressure, and I had the added stress of trying to either luck into a transport date window with good weather from western Michigan to central Connecticut or find enclosed transport for an 83 inch tall camper. Several brokers said there was no way get anything that tall into a trailer.

I finally went with Mercury Auto Transport. After a couple of false starts, their man Jay found me a hot-shotter with an extra-tall trailer that was JUUUST tall enough, for a price that was cheaper than some of the quotes I got for an open trailer.
How tight was it? They had to mostly-deflate the tires and the burly driver sat on the rear bumper while the seller drove it in. If it fits, it ships! This all happened to coincide with snowstorms in both Michigan and Connecticut, so I felt validated for holding out for the protected ride.

[dhaavers]

Wow, that last pic snugs my sphincter…

Looks good though, welcome!

- Dave
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86 White Wolfsburg Westy Weekender
"The WonderVan"
<EDITED TO PROTECT INNOCENT PIXELS>

[SnowDaySyncro]

It arrived safe and sound, and I backed it out of the trailer the same way it was loaded: with mostly-flat tires and the truck driver providing human ballast out back. The seller was nice enough to keep the Vermont registration (it was still the glory days of VT being America's DMV) valid so that I could drive the 3 mile round trip to an inspection station to get the VIN verified. That saved me an extra trip to the DMV, so I was grateful.

With that done, I pulled it up on ramps and pressure-washed the hell out of the undercarriage and topside before pulling it into the garage to wait until spring, with some repairs and maintenance to do in the meantime.

[dobryan]

Sweet!
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Dave O
'87 Westy w/ 2002 Subaru EJ25 and Peloquin TBD

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." Robert Louis Stevenson

MD>Canada>AK>WA>OR>CA>AZ>UT>WY>SD
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=620646

Building a bus for travel in Europe (euroBus)
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=695371

The Western Syncro build
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=746794

[Zac]

Wew, that transport photo is SNUG. Glad she made it home safely, that is a beautiful rig!
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1985 Vanagon Westfalia - Acquired all original, now a work-in-progress

[Atadloco]

Awesome rig!! Love the AW's.

[SnowDaySyncro]

A few things needed attention before hitting the road in spring. The elderly tires needed replacement, and I've never been a fan of the style of replica Mercedes wheels it came with.

I had a 20 year old set of NOS Mefro 6 x 16 wheels from an aborted Syncro project in the basement that fit the bill. I'm not into lower profile tires on a camper like this and I like a narrower tire on anything with manual steering, so I went with a General Grabber LT195/75R16 and was really happy with the results. The 195 width fit nicely on the 6 inch wide wheel, and this size is original equipment on late model Ford Transit dually chassis, so the load range is more than adequate and the size should have better than average resistance to obsolescence. Time will tell how dramatic the power loss is with taller tires, but there are further plans afoot to address that in the future.

[Vanuber]

You had me at "Blauhaus."
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'85 Westfalia 1.9L
'72 BMW R75/5
'71 BMW R75/5
'02 Subaru Forester 2.5L

[SnowDaySyncro]

I set aside some time to check, clean, and paint the brakes before installing the new wheels. I also added screw-in studs from T3 Technique up front. The flex hoses were braided stainless and appeared to be in excellent condition, so that was good.

With the wheels off, I discovered that both front calipers were sticking and dragging badly, surely from disuse. I want to upgrade the front brakes soonish, so I got a cheap pair of calipers from Rock Auto to get it back on the road for the time being. Upon assembly, I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to discover that they interfered with the flared outermost end of the rotor hats.

Some quality time with an angle grinder knocked the parts down enough to play nice. I didn't bother touching up the now-bare section of the rotors. Not visible, not important, and didn't want to risk losing any of that precious tight clearance I had worked so hard for. With all that sorted, a full brake fluid flush and bleed had things up to snuff in the friction sector.

[SnowDaySyncro]

Time to install the wheels!

Oh yes, that will do nicely!

[SnowDaySyncro]

Spring was spent tooling around locally, fine-tuning this and that. June of 2022 saw the AW make its first significant day trip, to the Concours d'Lemons in Greenwich. It ran flawlessly, but the tall tires were very noticeable on the uphill sections along the way. The Concours was loads of fun. That's my friend's velvet-lined Chevy boogie van in the background.

Later that month was our first overnight and VW show, at the annual Terryville Bug-a-Fair. It was fun and cozy, but I was also finding some of the tight ergonomics, a bit challenging. The biggest issue was that I kept bumping my head above the elevated AW bed.

We had a delicious late lunch just west of Terryville, a great reminder of how great these are for dining out when traveling with a dog.

[SnowDaySyncro]

Window/cabinet hacks! The driver side came with a tall cabinet that was 1) water damaged, and 2) blocked the opening portion of the sliding window, and 3) didn't offer up a ton of storage to offset the other two things. My treatment for all of the above was to cut down the cabinet, initially for better window access, but ultimately for a more involved cabinet renovation.

Two things I like are a bit of privacy and coziness in the "bedroom" and the all-weather ventilation of a jalousie window. To this end, I got a sheet of 3mm "Dibond"-style sign substrate, which is two thin sheets of black-painted aluminum sandwiched around a plastic core. I removed the left rear window, pausing to marvel at how delightfully rust-free the pinchweld area was. Wow!

Tracing the glass, I cut a matching panel. I covered the inside with Peel & Seal flashing tape for some sound deadening and to match the thickness of the original glass. I forgot to weigh the panel versus the original glass on a scale, but it definitely felt much lighter. With a new WCM seal, it pressed in place and looked pretty good in my biased opinion.

[SnowDaySyncro]

Buoyed by that success, I set about making another blanking panel for the middle window on the same side. The process was identical, but with a hole cut out for a single-pane jalousie window.

I got the CR Lawrence AW1033 from Van Windows Direct and was satisfied with the quality and the look. I do wish it cranked out a bit further, but it has made for very nice ventilation and kept water out while open through some heavy downpours. I'll eventually add some XPS foam insulation and an interior panel to this side, but this will suffice for now.

[SnowDaySyncro]

I enjoyed the Adventurewagen through the summer and autumn of 2022, with a few lovely regional New England and New York state getaways, gearing up for an autumn trip to Michigan. My friend Jason, who had inspected and test driven the camper for me out there had been diagnosed with cancer, so a mutual friend and I were planning to go visit, hang out, and spend a few days bonding and working on Jason's Syncro project, for which he had severely limited strength. I'd been chatting with him regularly about the AW project, always bouncing ideas off of one another for our respective gluts of VW and bicycle projects.

As the sliding scale of luck had it, November 2022 found me with my first (and to date, only) case of COVID-19. This coincided with a house situation that made indoor conditions temporarily inhospitable beginning late in the summer. The dog and I temporarily relocated to the AW, where an extension cord and a recently-acquired composting toilet made living, and now convalescing, as comfortable as possible. The blessing of this less-than ideal state of affairs was that I suddenly had a lot of time to sit inside the camper and really assess what worked well and what didn't. I had a lot of ideas, but the number one thing that I most wanted to change was, without question, the bed.

[SnowDaySyncro]

For the unfamiliar, the Adventurewagen bed differs from most rear seat-bed combos in that the rear seat does not turn into a bed. Instead, they usually came with the full-width rear seat that had armrests and folded forward. Once folded, the bed platform could be unfolded from the rear cargo area to hang over the folded bench seat, suspended by an adjustable sling of seatbelt webbing that attached with hooks to rings above the middle window and sliding door.

It's a pretty clunky arrangement, in my opinion. It does come with one benefit that I saw some value in: the elevated height of the bed makes for hidden storage space between the bed and the rear deck as well as two (somewhat awkwardly deep) storage wells on either side of the bed. Unfortunately, it also takes up a lot of space in a vehicle with very limited interior volume.

Faint praise aside, the raised height of the bed, combined with the lower flat ceiling created by the upper platform of the AW top, meant that my tallish torso had to contort to get in and out of bed without bonking my head on the ceiling. I sustained enough annoying head strikes to resolve to change the seat-bed, but fortunately not quite so many as to damage my brain too much to find a solution.

I listed the original AW bed for sale for cheap and sold it to a really nice man in NJ. The dark wood and brown vinyl were better matches for his brown and tan tintop, which also had better overhead clearance with the unmodified roof. Everybody was happy.

[jimf909]

[SnowDaySyncro]

Roughly concurrent with divesting myself of a clunky Adventurewagen bed, I acquired another Vanagon project in the form of a solid-but-tired tintop Syncro. This is going to be a much more elaborate project, worthy of its own thread, but the relevant part of this is that the tintop came with a full-width rear seat-bed and two rear-facing jump seats.

My plans for the Syncro call for a narrower bed and a single jump seat on the passenger side, freeing up the bed and the other jump seat, now slated for installation on the passenger side of the '84 AW.

The bare minimum tasks required to install these are as follows:
SEAT-BED:
-relocate backrest latch pins forward to match location in the 1990 van.

JUMP SEAT:
-Obtain right side seat bracket or modify left side bracket from the 1990 to become a right side bracket
-Weld in mounting points to seat pedestal and floor sockets to accept the aforementioned bracket.

Here's the thing: I suck at doing the minimum. Why do the bare minimum when there's a world of possibilities that can turn a seat swap into a months-long, highly-involved labor-intensive project with built-in scavenger hunts and side quests? YEAAH, THAT'S THE STUFF!

[SnowDaySyncro]

In addition to its well-preserved original two tone blue paint, the Adventurewagen has a well-preserved original interior with several shades of blue going on as well, hence the linguistically-technically-incorrect-but-fun moniker "Blauhaus"

I appreciate the originality of this camper, so I want to do my best to make any modifications look like they were original equipment. For the seats, that means reupholstering them to match the front seats and interior panels. I worked in an auto upholstery shop in the mid-late 1990s, so I both know how to do this and also have some idea of what a spiralling project this sort of thing can be. First things first, I needed to get some material.

The blue and black houndstooth velour in my 1983-built 1984 model was used from 1982-84, so this will be a narrow search. The good news is that the original fold-down back seat was in decent shape, just needing a deep cleaning, and the houndstooth panels happened to be the same width as their counterparts in the 1990 seat, meaning they will work perfectly in a pattern made from the newer seat. I removed the factory seat to prepare for salvaging every bit of original velour and blue vinyl I could.

[AZ Landshaper]

Must be a good time of year to roll that into the garage and turn wrenches. Stay warm. I spent nearly two decades in Various parts of New England. Cold long nights this time of year. Hope u got a heater, good tunes, and some doobage. wicked nice van you got there.
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85 Weekender w/ EJ22
Previously
64, 71, 72, 73, 76, 81, 84, 85 & 87 Campmobiles and Westfalias
and a 67 bug.