Neighbors

What the snap--here're a couple Missoulian Volksies I spotted recently.

What is with some people? (He's referring to the customized license plates, in case you're wondering.) (also the third picture here) Air-cooled VWs are not, are not, any more death traps than any other cars in their class.
It's discouraging trying to dispel the myth (the myth) that the engine somehow protects you in a collision. Volvo, maker of some of the safest cars around, specifically designs their cars to get the engine the hell out of the way in a head-on (they're made to go under the passengers). Porsche, arguably the maker of the finest--and some of the fastest--cars in the world hasn't thought twice about strapping their drivers and passengers in front of the engine in almost all of their cars for over fifty years, and some of these are 600 horsepower beasts (typical passenger cars have less than 150hp; Ludwig has about 60 (!)). Indy cars race around in traffic with one another at speeds in excess of 200mph, and their engines are in back. The Bugatti Veyron develops a truly astounding 1001hp (that's a 250mph car; one-third the speed of sound), and guess where the engine is? That's right: in back, where it belongs. Give it up, people: engine in front≠safe, and engine in back≠dangerous. (I've elided over the distinction between mid-engined and rear-engined cars here, both of which situate the engine behind the people, but the point remains.)
Whew. I'm glad I got that off my chest.
We also discussed this topic in one of our earliest posts. You can read about VW front-end collision safety under FAQs & other snide remarks.

This handsome late bay looks so much like a candy bar that I'd almost expect him to be filled with nougat. Normally I think bays need a spare mounted on the nose to look "right", but this one looks just fine to me. Spotted in the Lower Rattlesnake.

Springtime Maintenance

Prepare for the boredom--if you're not even mildly interested in the innards of a vehicle, ignore this post altogether. This Wednesday we tried to give Ludwig a little going-over, including the replacement of the axle boot that got ripped on our Swan Valley trip.
For those who have never owned a vehicle they've maintained themselves, ownership of an ACVW can seem completely overwhelming. Really, unless you live, Uncle Scrooge-like, with a giant pile of money, you need to be your own mechanic, at least for all the little stuff (and for most of the middle-sized stuff, and for some of the big stuff). I mean, something always seems to be going wrong! It's ridiculous! And really, it's a good part of the fun of having an ACVW. Ever wonder why so many are ambivalent (or apathetic) toward, or even hate their cars? It's because they can't, or refuse to have an intimate relationship with it (mind out of the gutter, please; you know what I mean). Anyway.
Here goes.

I got together some tools, including my father in-law’s recently donated tach/dwell meter, a very useful addition. The book on top, John Muir’s (in)famous “Idiot Book”, is on top not because it’s the final word on ACVWs (it ain’t), but because the cover looks better than that of the more definitive (but bone-dry) Bentley underneath.

Ah, one thing I long for from our SoCal days is that nice garage and carport. A cardboard box will have to do for now. There was a live band playing in the yard next door while we worked, so that was nice, even if it was rotten hippy jam music.

There’s been oil on top of the engine lately, which is a little strange. I tracked down the leak to a poorly mated gasket under the crankcase oil breather, the black thingy just left of center. Replacement was a snap.

Doing the valves means looking at the distributor with the cap off. I was surprised to find both cap and rotor to be in awful shape; surprised because Ludwig was running pretty well. Replacement of the cap has always been a complete pain for me because one of the clips clipping it on is wedged in a real small space. Melissa popped it back on with much more ease than I have ever had.

Valve cover off, this is what confronts you, the very top (actually the side, since ACVWs are horizontally opposed) of the cylinder head. Here’s a nice mnemonic: intake valves are interior, exhaust valves are exterior. The valve springs for cylinders 2 and 1 are shown, left to right.

None of the valves were tight—a good sign. The tach/dwell also showed a proper point gap, so we moved on to the offending CV joint boot and the oceans of thick grease that accompany the job.
The socket head screws holding the CV joint to the transmission were put on with, uh, less than the appropriate care back in Goleta when we put the transmission in the bus. Thankfully, they came out with little trouble.
What was trouble was the CV joint itself. I was wrestling with it to get at the clip holding it on the driveshaft (the joint has to come off to get the boot off) and managed to tip it enough that the balls fell out. Not good. Reassembly of the CV joints is possible, but I wasn’t too excited at the prospect. But what’s done is done, so I thought I’d clean up the parts and see how they looked.

They didn’t look so good. That pitting was present to some degree on all the wear surfaces of the body, and there were plenty of grooves also. Thorough cleaning revealed that this CV joint at least has never been replaced: In the picture below, the “9” means September and the “73” means 1973.

Presumably Ludwig’s CV joints have all been on him since around the time of the Yom Kippur War. We’re hesitant to reinstall major assemblies with known internal wear and/or damage (e.g. our transmission), so the happy little ride the heater duct took on the CV joint boot has now earned Ludwig two brand-new CV joint assemblies and driveshaft, built by the same company that built the ones he has now (not as costly as one might think). I'll be putting it in probably sometime next week.

Piece-by-godforsaken-piece, Ludwig’s renaissance stumbles onward.

Post script

Our downstairs neighbor and former VW bus owner handed us this while we were working on the camper. Har de har har.

Swan Valley by Accident

The Winter camping season extends well into Spring in Montana, so we thought we'd try some camping up on Flathead Lake, the largest natural body of fresh water in the US West of the Mississippi.

The Mission Mountains pop into view along US 93 Northbound. The snow was pretty fresh.

Melissa liked the way the snow filled the crack in this mountain near St. Ignatius. Look at that giant drift of snow coming rightward off the peak.

When we got to our intended campground, we were ready for another weekend of free camping. What I'd failed to take into account is that the campgrounds around the lake are state parks, not the national forest campgrounds we'd been visiting gratis. The state charges year-round, and we didn't relish the thought of shelling out $30 for a spot, so we wandered Northward into the forestland that forms the Southwestern buttress of Glacier National Park.
A trip up a steadily-worsening mountain road near Creston convinced us to turn back and find a more suitable place to stay. We decided to head down Hwy 83 for the fun of it, and it was on the way home if we decided to just give up. Outside of Swan Lake our map showed a campground so we headed up the forest road.

These mule deer were guarding the entrance to the road. There were at least seven of them. Melissa says she likes mule deer more than whitetail deer, but to me they're all the same.

The road eventually petered out into a trail, and no campgroud was in sight. The natural conclusion was that the map was in error, so we headed back down the mountain.

This little stream came down along the forest road.

We got back on the highway and down the road just a bit was the campground. Being a Forest Service area, it was free. We were two of four people camping in the entire place. We have been assured that once Summer arrives this will not be the case.

Melissa really liked this ground squirrel.

We selected our site for two reasons: it was far from the other campers, and there was a huge pile of wood just laying there. We got a nice fire going, and this time didn't even use accelerants. Melissa built the little starter teepee and I splintered up the free wood. I had to resist the urge to chastise Melissa for putting ketchup on a hot dog, but since it's a fake hot dog anyway I decided I could stand it.

Come Summertime we'll be able to pop the top and I won't have to hunch over like this.

We heard some noise in the night and Melissa convinced herself that it was a bear, probably a Grizzly, coming to eat us and the rest of her fake hot dogs. The next morning we saw a big fresh pile of deer pellets in the road and an answer to what had made all the noise.

Approaching Ludwig, I noticed something dangling below him. I figured it was some brush or a thick twig so I went underneath to remove it. I saw that actually part of the heating system had rattled loose and had been riding on the axle, rubbing a shiny spot onto it and tearing the CV joint boot.

I wired it free of the axle and made a mental note to order a new boot when we got home (Bus Depot again--I love those guys.) This shot was taken by Melissa without even looking. Pretty good. Notice the Koni shock absorber; we're really trying to get our money's worth out of them.

After breaking camp we headed on down 83 toward Missoula. The highway lies smack in between the Mission Mountains to the West and the Swan Range of the Rockies to the East. Melissa said it reminded her of Alaska (and the Yukon and British Columbia, I assume) more than anything she'd seen since. She says that the Alcan Highway is much like the picture below, except the trees are bigger and closer to the road. And the road doesn't have lines and is generally suckier.

Montana Hwy 83 Southbound

The trees opened up in spots and gave us nice panoramic views of the mountains. We pulled over at one point to get some pictures and I saw immediately that it was kismet:

One of Melissa's favorite things

Melissa shot this video so the viewer could take in the scene. Listen to how nicely Ludwig is running in the background. Sounds like a sewing machine.

I like this picture because it looks like Melissa is hovering above Ludwig's bumper. Note the deer carcass in the lower right corner.

We kept on down the road to Holland Lake, which I'd wanted to visit earlier in the year but the campground was under a couple feet of snow. I knew that there was a hike that led to a waterfall, so we thought we'd stop for lunch and a walk through the woods.

The lake is truly lovely. It's that weird blue-green color that's associated with lakes that suspend a lot of rock flour. I want to canoe to that island in the middle ground sometime.

As we walked along, we became cognizant of a steady dull roar. Some other hikers headed the opposite way confirmed that it was the falls. Around a bend we could see the falls in the distance.

Holland Falls, the white smear at center

We got to the falls and were duly impressed. We each went up to it, seperately, so we could take pictures of one another. I was surprised at how windy it was right next to the falls. It was also really cold and loud.

Melissa took this video of me by the falls, and then panned around to the lake and Mission Mountains way across the valley. This is all about two hours from our doorstep.

We hiked back down to Ludwig and cooked up some sandwiches. The drive home was pleasant and Ludwig even got to pass someone. We reflected upon the trip and concluded that it was one of our favorites so far. Then we realized it had all been an accident; had the plan gone off as we'd intended, we'd've been on the other side of the Missions. In this spirit, I dedicate this trip to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, who once wrote that "peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."

Other VDubs

Yet another installment in the continuous chronicling of other ACVWs we've seen.

Later on in the bay window model's life they got fancy with the paint schemes. I have a soft spot for this paint job, and even the stripes aren't bad. I don't think this bus is currently operational.


My first air-cooled VW was a 1973 Type III Fastback, which was white with a blue diagonal stripe, and pink below the stripe. Though I smashed it up not long after getting it, and had untold troubles with it before that, I was forever enamored with these cars. This is a 1969 or older Fastback.


Even dudes on crotch-rockets can't deny the irresistable charm of a VW-powered buggy.

The daughter of one of Melissa's knitting buddies used to drive this early bay window around. While I am certainly sympathetic to the sentiment expressed, it most certainly is not true that there is some kind of necessity attached to any bus's going slow. That is, slow is not the way a van [sic] must go.

Found on Ludwig

Mitch found this on Ludwig last month.

Unlike Mitch, I haven't been driving a snappy vintage VW since my teens. For me, one thing that's taken some getting used to is random folks asking to buy our Ludwig.
Melissa got several tentative offers for the bus in various California parking lots. He's NFS, but it's nice that people like him enough to ask.