The Maiden Voyage

To Chicot State Park, near Ville Platte, LA.

So I Put On A New Door Handle

The handle on my driver's side door looked like mice had been chewing on it. The cheapest replacement I could find on the Internets was $50, which seemed a little steep to me so I had decided to just live with the old one for a while. But then I won a $100 credit on van parts in an online raffle that I didn't even know I was entered in. Thanks, Van Cafe! Van Cafe is a great source for new Vanagon parts, plus they always send you a little bag of Famous Amos cookies with every order. And I've been ordering from them a lot.

Here's the new handle. Total install time, less than five minutes. But now seeing this new handle on the door makes me want to replace the crumbling old seals around the door openers...

So I've replaced the pop-up tent.

This is the biggest job I've done on the Rusty Trombone so far. I didn't find a whole lot of information on the Internets about doing this particular bit of renovation (apart from a YouTube video about how not to do it that was actually pretty helpful) so I'm going to get kind of in-depth here and hope it helps someone else getting ready to do the same job.

Here's a shot of the original tent, which as you can see had a pretty large hole in one side from not being closed properly.
Aside from the hole, the old tent was also pretty moldy and musty/stinky. The old leaky skylight had been letting moisture in for years. The inside of the fiberglass roof was also pretty nearly black from all the mold and crap that was growing up there, but that's all been scrubbed off and unfortunately that happened before I started this blog so I didn't think to get any dramatic before/after pictures.

The two biggest pieces of advice I would give to someone who wants to replace their tent are: Take the roof completely off, and get a friend to help you. I got three friends to help me, which might have been too many since most of the time at least two of us were just standing around drinking wine, but it did take all four of us to lift the roof back onto the van.

Here's Bud starting to unscrew the brackets that hold down the bottom of the tent. This part of the job was actually pretty easy. My van is a 1984 so the tent is screwed in, as opposed to the earlier models that used staples, so I kind of lucked out there I guess.

Here's the van with the tent and roof removed. Again, pretty easy so far, just a matter of removing the bolts on the lifter mechanism and the two big hinges in back, but here's something I wish I had known to do beforehand: tie down the spring-loaded lifter arms so they don't pop up and hurt somebody when the weight of the roof comes off of them. We used zip ties to hold them closed when we put the roof back on.

So now the roof is on the ground. I can't even imagine what a pain in the ass it would be to try to do this with the roof still on the van. We put a tarp and some cardboard down to protect the roof and skylight from scratching.

The old tent is off! Just a matter of removing a whole bunch of screws. This is pretty much where this project stopped being easy.

Attaching the new tent to the roof. There are no screw holes in the new tent so we just had to make our own. We also had to make sure the fabric was pulled tight enough that it would reach all the way around the roof. We may have had to remove some screws once or twice and start over.

With the roof back on and reattached (I went ahead and replaced the old rusty lifter mechanism bolts while we were at it and added some rubber washers for extra water tightness) all that was left to do was screw those bottom brackets back in. This is where the job got a little tricky. Okay, a lot tricky.

Jeff and the box of wine supervising. Screwing down those brackets was really tough in the corners. We had to sort of tag-team it.

Aaaannnd... me supervising. I swear, Bud's not the only one that worked on this thing, he just happened to be the only one we got any pictures of.

And here's the new tent. It's blue! And it has two side windows instead of just one in the front like the old tent. I think it looks awesome on my orange van. The instructions that came with the tent said installing it would take 4-8 hours. We did it in just under five, so I guess we did pretty good. Any questions?

Brutus wants to go camping too!

So here are some other things I've done to the van that aren't exciting enough by themselves to make an entire post:

1. Replaced the rusted-over rearview mirrors.
2. Replaced the ashtray. I don't even smoke, so I think this might be a sign of just how obsessed with this van I have become. The old one was cracked, and I found one on eBay in better condition, and...
3. Replaced the missing fusebox cover.
4. Cleaned the interior within an inch of its life.
5. Reattached the sliding door handle, which I found in the glove compartment.
6. Sanded down and painted the rusty windshield-wiper arms.
7. Sanded and painted the all the door handles.
8. Replaced a broken sun visor clip (I swear, you can find almost anything on the Internets.)
9. Replaced the cracked, leaky skylight.
10. Oh, and I got new keys made. Do you know how hard it is to get duplicate keys made for a 1984 Vanagon? I had to specially order Vanagon key blanks, and then I still had to go three different places before I found someone who would do it. (Thanks, Star Lock!)

So I've replaced the seals around the camper top and luggage rack.

This is what was under the luggage rack when I took it off. Gah.

25 years of mud, leaves, dead bugs and bird crap. Once again, this should have been a fairly easy job, but the bolts holding on the luggage rack were so rusted that I just couldn't unscrew them from the top. So I had to remove the inner roof panel (which was kind of a gigantic pain in the ass) and hope that the brackets inside were still intact enough to be re-used since I couldn't find replacements for them anywhere. Then I drilled out the rivets on the old tie-down hardware and replaced it, scrubbed the whole thing down with Brillo pads, put on the new rubber seal, and...

Shiny new tie-down cleats. On the left, you can also see the new skylight I put in earlier. Did I mention I put in a new skylight? Because I put in a new skylight. The old one was cracked.

Brand new rubber seals, front, and... back.

So I've fixed the front turn signals.

Because the old ones didn't work. Because the wiring was all corroded. Which is probably because when I took the lenses off, they were full of water.

See? Water. Nasty, wire-eating water.

Eeeeww.

Spanking new signals.

When your turn signals work, you can get an inspection sticker. Or "brake tag" as we call it here in Louisiana.