The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything

Ludwig turned 42 the other day. To honor him, E and I replaced his spark plugs and cleaned up his engine a little bit, out at the storage unit. After a good while E's interest in cleaning waned so I asked her to take as many pictures as she wanted. These are them.

She likes that in Late Bay Bus parlance this piece is referred to as 'the telephone'.

No, I've never read The Guide.

These are the Times that Try VW Families' Souls

The situation bears updating with a text-heavy post.

For a 41 year-old auto, Ludwig has been doing a lot of duty this Summer--about 400 miles a week (400 miles a week isn't all that much, you say? No 2014 Honda or Chevy or whatever will be doing that in the year 2055, I assure you with total confidence) and he's had his troubles but he's really been giving it his all. Then at the end of August he had to go rescue Sylvie, whose power steering pump had failed (above).
 

This extra duty proved too much for him, however. Leaving the campground for work the next morning, he would not come out of first gear. He's been stuck in gear before but that time it was in 2nd, a far more useful gear to be stuck in (for the record, the gears you want to be stuck in, from best to worst, are 3rd, 2nd, 1st, R, and 4th). He took a ride on the hook to the Library.

Suspecting trouble similar to the 2006 adventure, I puttered around town for a week before taking him to the local ex-ACVW guy (there are no current ACVW guys in the world anymore, except in SoCal) to confirm my suspicions. Unfortunately they were confirmed, so camping with a visiting Vanagon family wasn't in the cards for Labor Day weekend...but an engine-transaxle drop was. Everything out and the transaxle nosecone off, the problem revealed itself immediately.

The orange arrow thing is the thing that shifts gears. The yellow arrow thing is a pin holding the orange arrow thing in place on the blue arrow thing, a bracket. The red arrow thing is one of two bolts holding the bracket in place. The bolt had stripped its hole, so the bracket was no longer held in place, so the orange arrow thing could move all it wanted but was no longer doing any work--specifically, getting out of 1st gear.

We're waiting on a local machinist to get the proper sized insert to rethread that hole and then, knock on wood, we can put the whole thing together again. 

ACVWs of SoCentral Montana

This first one is actually from Iowa. The owner and I met on the Itinerant-Air-Cooled forum, and arranged a get-together when he and his family were visiting nearby.

Seen at Wheat Montana, Three Forks.

Up and Over

Ludwig and I slipped by this guy going over Homestake Pass, unquestionably the highest point on I-90 (despite the confusion a certain poorly-worded sign in Massachesetts has wrought).

Syncro Westfalia

This guy and I chatted for a while last week.
It's a Syncro (4wd) and a Westfalia, but not it's whole life it wasn't. Throwing all rational thought out along with a whole lot of money, the previous owner did it precisely backward.

that gas cap under the passenger-side door is a dead giveaway

Syncro Westies are a rare subtype of an already-rare vehicle; GoWesty claims of the 5,000 or so Syncros sold in the US, fewer than a third were campers. So usually when the itch for a Syncro Westy strikes the heart but the $60,000+ to buy one doesn't strike the wallet, what happens is some hapless, plain old 2wd Vanagon donates its camping outfit to its muscle-bound brother.
Not this previous owner.
He took a hapless, plain old 2wd Vanagon camper and wedged a Syncro drivetrain underneath. Much, much harder.
Everything seemed to be in order (viz., it wasn't a hack) and the present owner-operator pleased, so there's not much fault to find. Still, were it my time and money, I'd just've gone with the Porsche flat-6 engine swap.