My 1986 2.1 L Vanagon GL - Complete Overhaul Project

[DanielStainkamp]

Hi ya'll, this is my first post and I'm new to The Samba, but it seems like an amazing community full of resources and I wanted to show a big project I'm undertaking.

I just bought my first car, a 1986 2.1L Vanagon GL Waterboxer. My Dad has been a huge Volkswagen enthusiast for the better part of the last 40 years, and has owned and repaired a lot of VWs, all air-cooled models from before the 1980s. He put me in touch with his friend Mark Dearing at Salem Imports in Virginia, and that's where I bought my Van.

We want to do a pretty thorough overhaul of the vehicle, from paint job and body work to interior reupholstering to a diagnostic and replacement of most components in the engine. It needs just about everything done to it, but the frame has almost no rust, which my Dad says is the single most important thing, and makes the project worth the time.

We've got the Bentley bible, a space to work on it, and some time on the weekends. I'm excited because I'll have a chance to learn my car inside and out, and hopefully eventually gain enough hands-on knowledge and experience to do all the repairs myself when problems arise.

We expect the project to take a few months and a few thousand dollars (hopefully not more).

Anyways, if you're interested, I created a Google Doc that anyone can see or edit as they like that has a comprehensive list of all the repairs and changes we plan to make. Welcoming all advice, criticisms, suggestions, etc.!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Py4GJokbqVz66vCsI5GK8xxh9oYZ_EvAv6hQ5mrI4A8/edit?usp=sharing

Also! I've been advised to seek replacement OEM German parts from other members here; it seems like I might be able to find better parts at a lower price by talking person-to-person with people on The Samba. Also planning to check swap meets and will buy from GoWesty, BusDepot, etc., as necessary. But please feel free to message me if you check the google doc and have any of the missing items and would like to arrange to sell them to me!

The amount of expertise and information on this site is humbling, really excited to try to be a part of it. Thanks!

Daniel

[dobryan]

Welcome!

Have fun on the project. Cool your dad is involved. 😀👍
_________________
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

[Robw_z]

Does it run as is? Take it slow, don't bite off more than you can chew. My first car was dismantled into too many pieces and never found it's way back together.

-Rob

[Stephan Schmidt]

All the best and keep the updates and pics coming!

[DanielStainkamp]

Thanks for the warm welcome! It does run as is but the goal is to have it in good enough shape to take longer trips without worry, hence the substantial overhaul. Good advice about recognizing limits, we're gonna take our time and try to do it right even if it ends up taking a lot longer than we expected. In two weekends we should be back at it, and I'll be sure to post pics of progress!

[MsTaboo]

Hi, welcome to the madness. A couple quick points. Start by giving the van a good bath, at which point you can evaluate how sound the paint is. It may be that a good rub down will bring it back to serviceable level.
You're much better off spending your time and money getting the mechanical systems back into good working order than worrying about a paint job. Put paint last on your list. A complete paint job on a Vanagon is a very big and expensive task.
Give the van a through look over for rust, take care of any that may spread or be structurally unsound and leave it at that.

Get the fuel system, brakes , steering, and then the engine working properly. After that you can work on the interior and making it look good.
Best of luck!
_________________
Currently:
'90 Syncro Westy 3 knob w/Zetec

The information age has morphed into the age of disinformation and willful ignorance. Agnotology!
Help the fight against Truth Decay.
Defend democracy, support Ukraine.

[DanielStainkamp]

Thanks for the tips! Figuring out which tasks should be top priority has been a struggle so far because of all the different things to do. Working on the guts of the engine first definitely makes good sense.

[DanielStainkamp]

Getting back to work today! Had trouble finding a 1986 Vanagon GL Owner's Manual anywhere online for free (PM me if you have a pdf or pictures of all the pages), but I did find the 1985 one posted on TheSamba in the archives

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/archives/manuals/1985vanagon.php

and took it upon myself to make a PDF of all the photos for easy scrolling and quicker reference. The file is too big to upload to the gallery but I'll happily email it to anyone interested.

More pictures and updates to come soon.

[DanielStainkamp]

So I've been super busy managing the grim void of reality that is life under POTUS Trump, and haven't had the time to make an update post until now, but the good news is we're making a lot of progress on the Van!

First up: new problems we noticed. Being 6'5" (the same height of the van) I happened to glance at the roof and notice some problems up there. Evidently the owners in 1986 weren't careful with their newborn's fontanelle: several dents, large enough for water to pool therein, adorn my van's champagne crown.

My dad resourcefully employed a floor jack, a 2x4, and a few shop rags to gently pop out the biggest oilcan roof dent successfully, although a few of the smaller ones would pop out and then back in. Some more sedulous rooftop bodywork is in order and has been added to the exterior to-do list.

The next step was to do some light neurosurgery to get the Van's dendrites firing again. I bought a battery from Autozone, and after scrubbing the metal under the passenger's seat clean and cutting a fresh slice of thin rubber to size to cover, we scrubbed all the terminals clean and made a successful transplant.

Thereafter we encountered a new mystery: two toggle switches, both on the sides of the bottoms of the area where the passenger and driver seat sit. Would love to know if any of you out there could identify the purpose of these strange things.

I was curious if maybe it had something to do with these little floor lights down here:

The important part though: It cranks! But of course, it was out of gas, as many of us are. Simply refill gas tank? No, naturally, the gas cap key was mysteriously absent, so I took my mechanic's advice and, with surgical dexterity and exactitude, jammed a screwdriver in there and popped it out. Managed to find a fitting aftermarket gas cap (without a lock, ensuring that sugar will be poured after I inevitably wrong someone), and we gassed it up.

It cranked, it even idled briefly, although to keep it from dying I had to rev it to around 4k consistently, which is obviously a problem, one of which I'm not sure the source. Again, any insight from TheSamba denizens would be appreciated! We thought we might take the van for a spin around the block to see how the steering, brakes, and shifter feel, and listen to the engine. However, even gassed, electrified, and in gear, and my adroit feet's delicate attenuation of the pedals, we were able to find no purchase. Olfactory indicators quickly diagnosed our van with osteoperosis of the clutch. It's completely burnt out and shot; removing the transmission and replacing the clutch entirely became another task added to the list.

Being the unskilled, humble and dutiful journeyman under my expert father's tutelage, I volunteered to do some literal gritty, grunt work: cleaning out the track along the bottom of the bus where the side door slides. It took me about 2 dozen passes with a shop towel, water, and spray cleaner, but I managed to remove a couple decades worth of dust, pebbles, clay, peat, spider's nests, one complete human skeleton, abandoned mud dobber homesteads, and untold thousands of chloroplasts that once flourished in the rich loam of the van's cool underbelly. And so, much like the mother of a burgeoning young professional Ice Skater, I stood back to proudly spectate how he slides and shines:

I had a similar endeavor in agronomy scooping and vacuuming out the area under the back bench seat, with equal effort and results:

The next romp in light drudgery was to the interior; I took a bottle of lysol to every non-porous surface inside the vehicle, and then took a shop vac to all the seats, and every square centimeter of the van's awful, awful carpets. The goal eventually is to tear them up, replace with some Dynamat or equivalently durable and weatherproof material. But for now, it cleaned up pretty decent:

Cosmetically, I had done as much as I could do—a feeling I often have viewing myself in the mirror in the morning—and so it was time to move on to some of the more utilitarian tasks.

Like a well-connected enemy of the state dissatisfied with his custody in a correctional facility, the driver's side taillight was busted out. I was excited about this repair because we already had the replacement taillight, and the requisite skill list was: 1. be able to turn a thing clockwise, or counterclockwise, as necessary 2. if you see a lightbulb, don't immediately smash it. Historically I had always met the first criteria, and with a little motivation and self-control I was able to get a handle on the second. Here's how it went:

Great success! In between those steps we, electrical gardeners, tested all the bulbs and replaced the ones that wouldn't bloom, on both driver's and passenger's side for good measure. Then I hopped in the driver's seat and tried all the lights: brake, turn, driving, head, emergency. Only one out of eight of the bulbs lit up at all during this process, and it seemed the prognosis was grim: at worst we had some faulty wiring, but maybe it was just a few blown fuses. Also at issue was the fact that the front turn indicators were disconnected.

Luckily, my Ouija board had informed me to purchase replacement bulbs and sockets from RockAuto, and so we had those on hand to do some troubleshooting.

We spent about an hour poring over the Bentley manual and several hundred nearly relevant google images of wiring and fuse diagrams, and eventually managed to correctly assess which fuses of which amperage belonged where in the fuse console. Indeed, many of the fuses were shot! Also some seemed just randomly inserted in the wrong spot (30s in 10 spots, etc.). So we arranged everything correctly there, plugged in the front indicators and gave it a re-test. Almost everything worked! The turn signals blinked too fast, which may indicate some wiring being incorrect or a burnt bulb elsewhere I think, the emergency blinker did not work at all, and the LEDs on the driver's console did not light up correctly in correspondence with which lights were lighting up. So new LEDs are on the to-do list now as well.

We popped the lid off above the console and assessed the level of transcranial direct current stimulation therapy that would be necessary to work against our comatose patient, and perhaps someday allow him to return to a stable, regular standard of living (with a consistent psychiatric regimen of oil, brake, transmission, and steering fluid of course). We came to find that the oil reservoir behind the dash was cracked and completely empty, so we refilled it and the van Idled much better.

A new prosthesis will be ordered to replace the cracked reservoir, with the hope that in concert with our comprehensive plan of care, our patient may no longer suffer from the catatonia he endured so long. But, with the implants ordered but unarrived, the rehabilitation would have to wait. Some palliative moments hugging the Van's broad side as it was warmed by the bright high-noon january sun took place, but photos of that incident were excluded due to patient confidentiality issues.

I returned to matters of the exterior in the mean time: the old sliding door handle was broken, the way any man's spirit will break when handled without care, so I hopped inside the van, unscrewed the paneling and popped it out, and replaced the handle with one we had lying around. This was a super easy fix for a novice like me and made me feel like I was starting to get a HANDLE on this whole auto repair thing. Unfortunately the part I used to replace the previous handle was just a hair too large for the indentation that allows for it to be pulled down, and so without pulling out and down, scratches to the paint are unavoidable. We decided to keep it on for the time being because it's much easier to open and close now, but finding the exact right part is another addition to the to-do list. Here's how it looks:

Also, again using the delicacy and calm of a ship-bottle modeler, I replaced the rearview mirror by jamming it in there and twisting it for about 15 minutes in every direction until it seemed to stay. I also removed the disintegrating wiper blades in much the same manner, and then I took some WD-40 and a razor blade to the garish bumper and window stickers aesthetically polluting the van's rear hatch. Here's how all that came out:

Can you tell there were ever stickers? If not I've done my job. I wish all jobs worked that way, where you are applauded praised and well-paid for the accomplishment of people not being able to tell whether or not you did anything. This though, in all fairness, coming from someone who's been gainfully unemployed for several years and harbors dubious antipathy toward waged labor in general. Why get paid when you can spend hours working on a Van which may never run or whose fuel lines might cause you to self immolate without even being able to make a political statement about it? Anyways, I digress. And yes, I bought the replacement fuel line hoses, those go on next week.

To wrap up: a heartwarming touch. As I assisted my Dad install his new garage doors and clean up his garage in general, he remembered an old dusty toolbox he had hidden behind several old Type 2 engine blocks, and offered it to me as a gift to keep the parts I need to do on-the-go repairs. I hosed it off, vacuumed out the many many tiny pouches of spider eggs, cut some rubber to floor the drawers, and placed it inside my van, eager to learn which tools I'll need and how to properly use them in order to keep my van healthy and running for a long time. It's been a meaningful bonding experience to spend time with my Dad and learn from him, and now coming home for the weekends to do the next repair on the van is something I look forward to. More posts to come; until next time!

[joetiger]

Nice work man! Keep it up!


_________________
Joe T.

'86 NAHT Vanagon GL Syncro/ supercharged ABA 2.0 "Pigpen"
'04 GTI 1.8T
'04 Golf R32

"get metaphysical with it. if it's simply a means to get to and from places, it will let you down. if it becomes your zen, it can't fail you." -dabaron

"Still, it's good to be afield."--VWagabond

Available Now! Vanagon to Louisiana--A Two-Lane Reckoning Through Past and Present

www.josephtrussell.com

[chimivee]

Keep at it.

[dobryan]

What a monumental task you have undertaken. Glad you get to share it with your dad. Love the prose too.
_________________
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

[DanielStainkamp]

It was brake fluid (dot 4) not oil! Typo on my part. Thanks for the encouragement all

[E1]

Dear Kid, Meet Asylum.

Great project! But what I really wanted to say was Welcome, and that you are one heckuva writer!!!

Know this probably WILL take longer than you think... as most everything tends to. It's great the Old Man is involved, let him know over and over how lucky you are. You may well come out of this knowing more a year from now than many of us ever will (but don't let it go to your head, more than enough egotists are already out there).

When done, of course, the chicks will line up.

Seriously, this experience will serve you for life, and with some care, the van may as well!

Keep it coming, and let us know when it turns 9s at the dragway.
_________________
‘84 Westy, 2.1L with Digijet, 5.43 R+P, GT Gears
"Adding power makes you faster on the straights.
Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere."
— Colin Chapman

[pablum]

You've an early model door handle on a late model slider.

Have fun with your Dad!
_________________
The wise man learns from history, the fool from experience.
-
I see [a cat] in the street and i aim for the pest with my car. -- bluebus86

[Vanagon Nut]

[DanielStainkamp]

Thanks Neil! I'll be sure to double check for that.

[DanielStainkamp]

This weekend’s weather was cold and indifferent, like a husband sedimented in the catatonic bliss of codependency or the demeanor of an insurance adjustor determining fault. We bore the blasts of icy wind and enjoyed the brief washes of sun when they came, in touch with what was once nature only because of our relentless and unrepentant desire to mechanistically interact with a metal assemblage. We also got Bojangles biscuits for breakfast which was really delicious and makes me glad I live in the South again.

First the easy stuff: Rock Auto, that megalith of mechanical medicine, delivered once again, providing replacement hydraulic lift arms for the rear hatch (which we discovered was of a later model Vanagon, more on that later), three wiper blades for the front and rear windshields, a sideview mirror, and a set of bulbs to light the instrument panel, along with some other parts intended for repairs we never got to.

We managed to install each of these without incident, like a newly elected president quietly appointing pernicious supreme court judges whose discretion will determine the outcomes of participants in the vaudeville madness of our courts system in america.

I feel like mentioning here that a thing I spend a lot of time doing when I’m not working on my van is studying for the LSAT and I hope to become a lawyer. Logical reasoning skills comport well with van distemper forensics and it’s enjoyable to notice how the new ways I’m learning to think by studying law are interlocking with my fledgling abilities as a mechanic.

That being said, the above repairs were simple and straightforward, and took maybe two hours to complete. The remainder of the weekend was a bizarre showcase of the decisions, indecisions, and incisions made by something my dad told me are called DPOs. Where to begin…

Well, one thing I had hoped to accomplish but instead failed ruinously at was to remove the van’s front grills and replace the bulbs in the headlights, and assess the damage and presence of various materials inside them (water, glass, a skeleton). The grills came off gracefully just as the Bentley bible assured me they would.

I pored over the diagrams carefully after completing that step and began to remove the 4 screws that would allow the headlight enclosures to become free, not emotionally, but from their placement in the metal frames that held them in place. After about 20 minutes of screwdrivering with what I imagine to be about 30 or 40 foot-tons of torque from my arms, I began to wonder if I had gone wrong somewhere. Upon closer inspection in the bible, I learned that there were a lot of moral wrong turns I had made and I had a lot of penitence to catch up on. I referred to the Bentley Manual and found that the screws I had been so mercilessly twisting were not in fact the short, manageable sheetmetal screws that free the enclosures from their metal frame, but in fact were the screws which allow one to calibrate the level and direction of the headlights themselves.

So, perturbed but undeterred, I located the correct screws, removed them, and managed to break the majority of the white plastic connectors that hold the adjustors in place, and then both headlight sockets — all plastic, all thin and brittle, like my constitution after my most recent psychological breakdown.

But of course, as sagacious indie aural sculptors Frou Frou remind us, there’s beauty in the breakdown (a lyric I suspect I’ll be returning to for solace in many future endeavors with my van), and though some cheap plastic was snapped, I managed to remove all headlights, enclosures, frames, and discovered fascinating ephemera, some pieces left behind by the previous owners, and one piece of unique life that one must assume originated extraterrestrially (see the photograph and decide for yourself).

That creature is a wonder and we left it in place; my guess is the van only idles as long as it does due to some osmotic symbiotic relationship between the creature and van; moreover, I have an idle fear that if we attempted to remove it we would quickly be killed because it was the satellite spawn of one of those lovely aliens from Arrival. Contrastingly, I was happy to rip away the ribbons of tenacious duct tape that masked the intake (?) hole (?) on the nose of my van. And I was thrilled to excise the two tee shirts and one concomitant rats’ nest from the inside of that hole. I remembered being in middle school and first being prescribed flonase; I wondered what kind of olfactory sensations the van was having itself in this moment.

As an aside, I’m curious if anybody has input on naming/not-naming a van, and what they think of the names I’ve come up with so far for my van: 1. Rectangela 2. Raw Champagne 3. Wrecked Angel. Criticisms and suggestions welcome.

As a more important aside, I’d like to ask the community: 1. why would a vanagon owner stuff T-shirts in the van’s nose hole and then cover said hole with lots and lots of duct tape? 2. is there a part missing whose function they were attempting to replicate in some perverse sartorial mimesis? 3. What could Rectangela have done to deserve this?

But seriously I am curious about what in the world was going on with that. My dad mused that maybe cold air was coming in through the nose and that was their stopgap solution. And I’m even more curious about what the appropriate steps are to repair or replace any parts absent that may have caused whatever problem they were trying to solve. So, again, insights, suggestions, theories, and baseless recriminations welcome!

So, after relieving the passenger’s side headlight enclosure of a glittering avalanche of glass shards and pouring an improbable amount of plain water out of the driver’s side headlight enclosure, I gingerly collected the savaged optics of the van and set up a little operating table in the garage where they could lie comfortably until the replacement plastic arrives.

“It’s just like lasik,” I told the van, “except your eyeballs are smashed and pulled out of your head and you might have to wait a couple weeks until the right sized adaptors for your eyesockets arrive.” The van of course spoke no response because it is machine, and I, human. Desperate for semblances of myself, I arrogantly anthropomorphize the van with reckless disregard for its lack of emotions, or my own sanity. I reflect on failed relationships, the harm I’ve caused, the heartbreak I’ve endured and engendered. Why Rectangela and not Rectangelo? I wonder. I think about how sometimes it’s not so insane or disrespectful to feel love for a machine and is an effective placeholder, maybe better yet a sensitive act of measured emotional play, healthy and sufficient for balance in the lives of the people who companionize the machines. Still, perhaps I should not name the van. My mom came out with some cups of coffee and we chatted for awhile, then me and dad got back to work.

We investigated the rear hatch a little and came to find it was from a slightly later model van whose panel secreted a motor to activate the rear wiper and to actuate the fluid…squirting…thing. You can see the snipped wires from when the hatch was removed, and we wonder if it could be made compatible to this 1986 2.1 Van. I also wonder if my van is actually a GL, as the rear hatch advertises, what GL means, and why I care. Any input on the matter of wiring the motor for the rear wiper blade, replacing/modifying the stick on the steering column to make it function, and piping wiper fluid to the rear would be greatly appreciated!

Next was the matter of the instrument cluster. Initially I had popped off the cover to do a simple replacement of the bulbs that illuminate the meters in the panel, but, as has become a matter of course with this project, we found many strange things lurking beneath the vinyl shadows. The first thing I noticed was that disconnecting the odometer cable was one step mentioned in the Bentley manual that I didn’t have to bother with. That probably explains why the odo reads 49k, who knows how far this van has traveled. (You can't really even see the cable here, which stands to reason I guess. It's tucked away just underneath the metal paneling.)

I replaced the bulbs without incident, reconnected all the wires and reinstalled the instrument cluster to test them out. The lights were in working order, but the LEDs that should come on were unresponsive like a teenage son when asked to do literally one simple thing and how hard is it to just wash your own plate you are not a child and I am not your maid.

So I removed the cluster again and we tampered with the delicate blue ribbon of circuitry enough to access the points where the LEDs plug in to assess.

We found that 2 of 5 were present, and brought out a little battery of the correct voltage with positive and negative terminals to test them out, and after scrutinizing the manual diagrams to properly determine which of the very tiny pins on the LEDs was the positive and which was the negative, promptly managed burn them both out by guessing wrong both times.

So a full set of new LEDs is to be ordered, hopefully from someplace that will label the +/- more clearly than the sixteenth of a millimeter of width that the Bentley manual expects the mechanic to discern to make that determination.

While we were under the dash, we removed the blank for the stereo and the glovebox to take a look at what else was going on. What we found was grisly severance and suture of Rectangela’s nervous system.

The purpose and intention of the previous owners is cryptic, and an equal measure of resolve decrypting the recondite wiring diagrams of the van’s electrical is now another task added to the to-do list.

But drunkenly spliced wire wasn’t the only gift the previous owners left us. For one thing, the brake fluid reservoir had a significant enough crack in it that about a quarter of the fluid we’d added last weekend had made its way down to the pedals, and it was in attending to that glistening wound that we noticed another strange surgery. A metal clamp ring was secured to the steering column, again, as to what end, we must accept god’s mystery and make adapting to it our ministry.

Then, in need of a little morale boost, we thought we might return to a simpler task that might yield a discrete, satisfying success. Thinking about leaking reservoirs we decided to administer some bug-off windshield wiper fluid of the flaming-green mountain-dew-hue variety my dad had lying around the garage, to test out our pristine new wiper blades. He poured generously into the tank we discovered tucked elegantly behind the carpet to the left of the steering column, and the concrete just beneath the van accepted our generous offer.

There is a reservoir somewhere that is absent. There are droughts and people starved for water or else poisoned by it thanks to the remiss and callous coterie bureaucratic managers of the body’s most vital fluid. And on my van there seems to be a reservoir missing for the windshield wiper fluid. The pipe to nowhere was quickly located and puzzled over. And then! An even greater oddity nonplussed us. On our backs looking up into the rarer components of fine german engineering that comprised the van’s undercarriage, we discovered a reservoir, cracked, seemingly unrelated to anything we could find out, because the pipe that led upward toward the floor of the van was completely un-findable from inside.

Upon removing the side paneling nearest: nothing, and the carpet closest was glued to the floor, and there were no secrets to be revealed under the driver’s seat. The impossible reservoir hung proud and unknowable, confounding us, unrepentant.

Again I ask you venerable habitués of TheSamba: what is to be done? Any explanations would be greatly appreciated and likely subdue the recurring nightmares of the impossible reservoir and his grotesque countenance, him menacing over me, his cracked tank a grin, arch and vile, leaking some eldritch coolant over me as he casually disbars me from law and curses me to never be loved again.

[Alaskaberrys]

Hi DanielStainkamp. Great read! Aways gratifying to read about someone else's herculean (sisyphean?) efforts to correct a wronged Vanagon. Puts my struggling to figure out "just where to put that damn cupholder" into perspective.

[DanielStainkamp]

Mark thanks so much for the insight and links! The GoWesty schematic is especially helpful in demystifying the breather system and I'm glad to know the headlight removal routine is something I'll want to have practiced anyways.