1981 Volkswagen T25 camper... The BERYL

The next day I didn't have a chance to do much more than faff about with speakers. I'd totally missed the fact that to get the speaker wire from the defunct ventilation duct through the door down to where the actual speaker was mounted near the step would require a hole to be drilled. And I wished I had twigged, because to drill the hole with the door in place was really awkward and would have been much easier to do if it'd still been on the bench. However, obstinacy prevailed and then it was the Chinese puzzle of threading the wire through, which was basically achieved by going in from underneath (oooer, missus) with some scrap wire and then taping it to the speaker cable and pulling it back through


cable threading by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

and unlike the original door setup, I even pushed the boat out and put on a grommet to stop the wire chafing through. Because why wouldn't you? I don't know the answer, I'm genuinely asking. Why didn't they?


Grommet luxury by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Anyway, I got to thinking... always a dangerous activity. I'd had the stereo (head unit, I believe they're called) replaced with a spanky new one by Huets Car Audio (whose weapons-grade ICE builds used to be A Thing back in the M*x P*wer days and are now living hand-to-mouth adding Dynamat to work vans and stereos to crusty old T25s). I'd had to punch the old stereo to death when it went rogue, remember? The new one was cool, all bluetooth gzimotronic USB everything. And it sounded great. But the doorspeakers were a bit... well, small. And feeble. So I got to tihniking... size matters. So if I took the substantially larger speakers out of the base of the rock'n'roll bed and put them in the door then my chooons would sound that much more epic. So that's what I did. Only, this meant there wasn't enough hole in the door to hold the speaker. And so I had to cut back perfectly good freshly painted steel


size matters by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Good plan, I hear you cry, but what about these chooons of which you speak in the back? Haven't you just robbed off the rear speakers out of the van? Aha, yes, well spotted. And you're right. But because I never throw anything away, ever, I just happened to have some speakers in a box in the garage that I'd bought secondhand to replace the knackered ones in the back of my old RX-7 about ten years ago. Turns out, being Mazda and thus famous for their sense of humour, the rear speakers in an FD RX-7 aren't the ubiquitous 6"x9" size but the rather less used 4"x7" that literally no-one has ever used, ever, and no-one even manufactures. So, short version, I had some extraneous 6x9s on a shelf just waiting for a home. And like I say, if you keep something long enough, it'll find it's own use.


robbing peter to pay by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

so that was the rear sorted then. They didn't have any grilles to protect them from kicking kid's feets, but I ordered up some generic steel ones from a caravan fittings shop on eBay which seemed to fit OK


yep size matters by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

So back to the front, and with the steel trimmed back and re-painted to stop rust getting in, I drilled out some mounting holes and rivnutted some threaded inserts in, rather than using self-tappers like had been done previously.


new speaker mounts by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

and then all that remained was to summon up some BRAVE and cut a massive hole into a perfectly good brand new doorcard


doorcard marked out by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

This was a bottle or man up moment, but I raised up my mighty Holy Sword Of Exacto* and once the first cut (which is always the deepest) was over, it was easy after that

* Lego Movie joke. If you haven't seen it, why not? It's bloody brilliant


cutting up new things by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

There followed a right old faff trying to get the vinyl to sit right in the reverse of the card; my proper staplegun was more than man enough to fire a staple right into the hardboard, but unfortunately it was a bit too lusty and the staples came right through the vinyl side with their prongs. So I had to do it with a normal desk stapler and about four out of every five staples just bent out of shape (rather like my temper) instead of penetrating the card. And then the stapler snapped in half and that made it even more awkward. I was particularly upset by that; it was a proper old Ofrex one that had belonged to my old man so was probably some kind of antique


many staples later by Nick Liassides, on Flickr


But the main thing was, it looked OK from the correct side, and in a years' time no-one will remember how frustrating a job it was to do. Except I just reminded myself of it.


speaker holed by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

On a household stereo... which I'm guessing most people don't have nowadays... you just wind the speaker wire round a terminal on the back of the speaker cabinet and screw down a little thumbwheel to crimp it in place. Automotive speakers of course use normal automotive spade crimps and even have one small and one large one so you can't get the + and the - wires on the wrong terminals... that is, assuming they're correctly wired into the back of the head unit, of course. I assumed mine were as Huets had just wired it in, so took their word for it. Of course, I had insulating boots for the normal 1/4 spades, but not for the tiny ones so had to make do with a bit of heatshrink. At least I insulated them, the PO hadn't. Unsurprisingly...


more luxury by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

All that was left was to pop the doorcard on and add the door furniture. VW had really moved into the 20th century with T25 doorcards; gone were the rusty metal prongs and torn rubber grommets of the Beetle setup and instead, a nice plastic conical prong with a flange (ooooh flange) to grip the inside of the card just popped neatly into a hole cut directly into the door webbing. Simples. Except for the fact they grip a bit too well to the doorcard and I spent ages levering them out of the old one to transfer them. Literally months later, when I took the last trim panel out of the massive Newton Commercial box, I found a huge bag of a couple of hundred trim clips, enough to do the entire van and more. And all those times I'd spent re-using the cruddy old ones . There's a lesson; always unpack your toys before you start playing with them...


door furniture on by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

But, it looks OK, doesn't it? Certainly a lot better than the old manky dark dingy cruddy nasty one. Other adjectives are available. I fiddled about a bit with the hinge bolts and got the door sitting a little better and even the colour seemed to match a little better than it had as the door got dirty and blended in with the rest of the van. I suspect a good mop now, months later, would blend the two together pretty well


the morning after by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Good. Done. On to the next one. All that's left is everything else.

Tune in to the next thrilling installment for... errrm. Stuff. Seats. T'other door. Carpet. Rust. Welding. Ooooh, just loads of, well... stuff

Dragging it off topic again, that sounded good some definite Robert Plant influences there will have to listen to more.

and now back to VW's (which I don't actually like although I can see the attraction).

Happy to hear I amuse you [/Joe Pesci voice].

Yeah. the cab step (shudders). I dealt with it by not dealing with it...

But first, I had a matching doorcard to errrmmm... match. I made a much neater job of cutting the speaker hole this time round, mainly by the simple expedient of not slicing the little fillets all the way to the edge of the hole before stretching and stapling them to the reverse side. This meant it actually made a round hole rather than an almost round hole with lots of little flat edges


Neater second time by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

So then it was time to strip of all the dark, nasty old door card and furniture


tother door by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

The drivers' side had even less zombieskin liner left than the passenger one had, and what there was left had been simply painted over


completely different by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

It's almost as if whoever did the respray on poor old Beryl worked for the same RestoChimp Garage as the clowns who'd done the Beetle. They certainly didn't give a four-X about masking off or anything as tedious as that. Anyway, once that curse word was all stripped off and the door cleaned down with thinners to get rid of all the crud and residue


shed skin by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

I could stick on my butyl tape stuff, a new plastic waterproof liner, and then on with the doorcard


drivers door done by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Lovely?


welll...........not exactly. We'll get on to why in a moment. But first, an oddity that's worth pointing out. Did you notice anything weird about that photo of the door with the doorcard removed? No? well, you weren't looking very closely then, were you? Try again, and this time do try to pay attention


completely different by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Yep. It's internal structure is markedly different not only to the new passenger door (which I'm willing to forgive/understand as that came off a different, much later bus. But it's different also to the passenger door that came off Beryl!


insane membrane by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

See that big triangular hole next to the winder mechanism? See the small, oblong hole on the other door? Now, is it me, or is that a little weird, even for VW?

Nothing significant about it, just mentioning it. Mostly because the other way in which it was different is those two really large depressions that merge into the hole where the speaker goes and made it a truly humongous PITA getting the speaker mounting bolts to sit in the right place


Anyway, why isn't my new doorcard lovely? *sigh* you haven't been paying attention again, have you? Go on, go back and look at the picture of the new doorcard fitted. No, I'm not putting it up again because you're too lazy to scroll up and look at it. It's only two photos back. Go on, we'll wait for you here, those of us who were paying attention.

You back? See it? What do you mean, no? OK, OK, I'll explain for the terminally unobservant in the audience. See that big shiny screwhead sticking out of the outside end of the pull-handle? That's not meant to be like that. It's supposed to be within the body of the handle, neatly covered by a little plastic err... cover that clips into the handle and hides the fixings. The reason it doesn't is because the mounting points to screw the handle into are in the wrong place, which is presumably why an previous owner had screwed the handles themselves in the wrong place and just drilled it into the door steel with self tappers Jesus, what is it with the self-tappers‽ Yay, got to use my interrobang again

So look, right. The handle ought to screw into two little nylon inserts that pop into a purpose-made square hole in the steel of the door. You can see them circled here


the wrong pegs Grommit by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

There are also two others (painted over, of course : in that pic so if you want you can mount the handle at a 45° angle. But the odd thing is, they are flat and the mounting hole is dead central in the nylon bung. And the holes in the door obviously can't be moved around, so there is no leeway at all in where the hole in the centre of each bung ends up. And they're out

They're out by a lot, at least half an inch... far too much to explain by tolerances or slight distortion of the door metal or any reason I could easily conceive of. And what's even weirder is that the Caravelle door that I painted to fit to the passenger door has the same holes in the same places, but it has completely different nylon bungs that are offset from their mounting peg and so come closer to each other by the extra half inch that the handle needs for its mounting holes to line up with the bungs


offset pegs by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Now, unless VW went to all the trouble (for some mysterious, arcane reason no-one can possibly fathom) of making two almost-identical doorhandles that differ only by being a half-inch shorter in length, I'm at a loss with that one. If they did, I haven't found any. There are two other handles in the van; grabhandles on the widescreen pillar but they're identical to the doorhandles. So it left me with a choice of basically having a handle barely held on at one end, with a gurt ugly screwhead sticking out, or... well, something else. I needed a solution.

While I cogitated, I got on with an easy one, changing the tailgate doorcard for one of the new Newton Commercial ones


Dark boot by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Cos with the old scratchy dark blue panels, the boot sure was a dingy gloomy place to be. I used the very last bit of waterproof liner and the last of the butyl tape (which had to stretch very thin to make it all the way round the aperture)


Jailbars and more membrane by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

and while I had the thing stripped down (again) fitted some jailbars that were an eBay find for about £25 posted. Bargain. Jailbars are basically flimsy alloy tubes that go around the bottom edge of the rear windows of a bus and stop any luggage or camping tables, whatever, from sliding around and banging into the windows with possibly disastrous consequences. And when they're so cheap and add a little bit of bling, why not?


Bright boot by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Made the rear of the bus a much brighter, more pleasant place. Next job was to take out the "short wall" (the sliding door side) trim panels, which oddly were self-tappered to the metal of the van. I couldn't really work out why, when the steel has holes punched out to accept the little plastic trim clip things just like the doors. However, it was pleasing and perhaps a bit surprising to find that at least the internal structure of the van was rust-free and in really good shape


rustfree side structure by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

I waxoyled the living bejaysus out of it anyway because why not? and got on with swapping the trim panels. The one that came out was a huge, floppy hardbooard thing, with the bespoke nasty scratchy dark blue smegma material


Massive sidepanel by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

the Newton Commercial replacements came in two pieces, which went together to make up the same shape


split sidepanels by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...and now I discovered why the original was self-tappered on. None of the trim clip holes matched up to any of the holes in the van side! More weirdness. You can only really fit the panels in one location due to the shape of the wall/floor join and the holes, like the doorhandle, were well out, not an amount that could be gained by a bit of adjustment here and there. I was really left with no choice but to self-tapper the new ones on, even though it stuck in the throat a little. Sometime, a screw is the only solution. If only Mrs L7 saw it that way.

Anyhoo, at least I got to throw away the original, non-matching and often rusty screws in favour of nice new stainless ones with big shiny washers. Meanwhile, the kids "helped"


Niah-cat non-help by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

usually with mockery and by treating the van as a climbing frame, but sometimes lowered themselves to hold panels for me so I could line up with the "original" screw holes and at least avoid turning the wall of the bus into a Swiss cheese. Well, one of them did. The other just sat on its phone and ignored everything around it. And it's not even a teenager yet, quite


tweenage help by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

so what's the solution to my doorhandle problem? Aha. You'll have to wait and find out in the next thrilling installment. I've literally only been typing this waiting for paint to dry and it's time for another coat. I'll be back in a bit to extol the virtues of baconwood

For the full indie band random name generator effect, you'd need at least one more word, preferably totally unrelated. Like Baconwood Shuriken or something. And then a suffix to indicate fellowship. Like Collective. Hmmm. Baconwood Shuriken Collective. There ya go

Now the doorcards were all bright and cream, the doorfurniture looked terrible; 80s VW de rigeur black plastic and not even very nice-to-touch plastic.


drivers door done by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

I thought it needed a bit of fluffing up to match. Window winders were easy, as Beetle ones fit and there are eleventy hundred different styles available off the shelf


New winders by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

I also got some matching wood-capped door lock pins, but of course, Beetle ones are a different thread size to T25 ones. Why? Because they just are, that's why Anyway, all I managed to achieve was to shear off the tip of my M3 tap in one of them, so I gave that up as a bad idea and lived with the black plastic ones. But what about the doorhandles? I mean, they were the real problem anyway due to the weird not-fitting-between-the-holes problem. And there was a solution, but it seemed a lot of faffing around.

When my dear silver-haired old ma had her kitchen re-done, I snaffled some of the old worktops the builders tore out, because they were damned great big chunks of thick wood and ...well, y'know, wood's always useful for stuff. One of them I'd used as a table to do stuff on in the garage, where the distinctive aroma it had acquired from being used in a kitchen for decades had attracted comment from Ada. Mostly because it smelt of bacon. Yeah, I explained. It's cos it comes from a bacon tree. And ever after, baconwood it has been. So all it needed was to draw round one of the original handles...


Baconwood slab by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...add a bit to allow for the holes in the door being in wrong place, cut it out...


Handleish by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...spend absolutely ages roughing it out with eveything from hand files to finger grinder to angle grinder with a flap disc...


Getting the idea by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

....measure really carefully, twice, the distance between the holes in the door. Then measure again. Then drill, which wasn't that easy given the bit hit the wood on a 45° slope and wanted to skate off, even in the pillar drill. This was needed so that the screw head had a step to do up to inside the hole; basically a dual-diameter hole. So the narrow diameter hole came through from the other side, the wider one from the slopey side. Clear as mud?...


drilling a slope by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...and then much more filing, to make the holes look like they were supposed to be there...


hole shaped by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...then sanding, with successively finer grades of paper, all the way down to 1500 to get the baconwood lovely and smooth...


shaped by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...then a couple of coats of varnish, a pair of alloy tubes inserted so that the screws aren't crushing directly into the wood when it's mounted, and we'll call that a handle


on to the next one by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...and on to the next one. Having cut slightly too far on the first version and not been able to sand deep enough to lose the nick, I used a hole saw chisel bit this time...


baconwood whittling by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...and still managed to cock it up slightly...


embryo v adult by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

...but after much more of the same, I had a pair of almost matched, bespoke, one-off baconwood doorhandles


matching pair by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And what do you know? They only actually fitted, didn't they?


Norwegian baconwood by Nick Liassides, on Flickr


I was rather pleased with that, and though I still think they look distinctly home-made (I mean, it's hardly @johnnybravo levels of engineering , is it?) they're one of the things that everyone who gets in The Beryl comments on how nice they are, so I must've done something right

Sadly they don't . I guess the varnish has sealed the bacony goodness in

Hi Beryl

I do love an "L7" thread - Nick you have such a way with words I can almost imagine myself there for you childhood experiences

Love it. We’ve got a 1980 t25 aircooled 2.0cu auto

Just how much time can someone spend on a "duck" thank you for that - very cool

As long. AS IT TAKES