1981 Volkswagen T25 camper... The BERYL

They were missing from mine but had been recreated in thin ply covered with carpet.
Until I read Nick's post I wasn't aware they were a thing either, and someone had just made them to tidy up the interior.

So, as georgeb spoiled the surprise, yes, the Beryl did indeed make it to the wilds of Surrey and back for the VolksWorld Show. You can read about the show itself in this here thread, starting on Page 8 forum.retro-rides.org/thread/207697/l7s-flabby-thread-volksworld-show?page=8 but y'know, why stop there? There's plenty of other show reports in there too, some of them even good. Anyway, the Beryl performed surprisingly faultlessly, the only downside being that the windscreen washer packed up. Which was especially annoying because I'd had it all apart and cleaned it up and knew it was working when I put it back together. Hmmm. maybe a loose connection or something?

The bus was rather chilly, but then it always had been. It was also noticeably noisier in the front because of the complete lack of any floor covering or sound deadening. This made it tricky to work out if all the sound-deadening I'd added to the back had made any difference at all. *sigh* And the vent window was still noisy and draughty and annoying. But the main thing was, she made it. And as I pointed out in a spoiler of my own, we came back with one of the nicest, most beautifully constructed, downright sexual pieces of metal tubing known to Man. In other words, a fully stainless Vintage Speed exhaust for a Type 4 engine. Which is basically what propels the Beryl along (albeit slowly). Mrs L7 had worked some kind of voodoo magic charm on the guy on the VS stand to get a truly too-good-to-refuse show discount, possibly helped by the lack of punters at the show and the bloke wanting to thin his stock out a little. Dunno. Let's put it down to Mrs L7s undeniable charms.


vintage speed by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

eveyr single thing about a VS product is amazing, even the packaging is a work of art, surrounding the item in a nest of vacuum-formed fits-like-a-glove loveliness. And you get all the fixings and fittings you might need to get the thing on, which is more than you can say about a lot of exhausts... or even not exhausts I've bought over the years.


reclaiming made in Taiwan by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

So it ought to be a piece of proverbial to fit then, yeah? Pretty much just chuck it at the bus and it'll fall into place as though steered by invisible Bus Fettling Fairies. Which sounds a bit like one of those educational films from the adult corners of the net, now I come to actually write it down. Ahem. The only snag was having to remove this horrible, rusty, leaking piece of old pig-iron first;


START by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Note big dent in the bumper put there by a combination of Fool and Brighton Council at the Breeze last year. As you can see, the old exhaust really was not a nice thing in any way, shape or form. As far as I could tell, it'd been there hanging off the Beryl's gusset like the world's most gruesome winnet since she was a young girl frolicking off the line in Hanover. The rear valance looked like it could do with a bit of rust treatment too. Good job I'd bought a LOT of Bilt Hamber, innit


ugly underside by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

It was a bit of a worry... some of the six nuts/studs holding the exhaust on had the look of being one of those nightmares to get off having fused themselves into little stubs of ferrous oxide. No trace of what could realistically be considered a six-sided arrangement remained.


no nuts by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And if you look at the top of that flange (oooooh, flange) in that photo, you'll see the third nut that holds each union together. In the best aircooled VW tradition, it's completely inaccessible to anyone other than a hyper-mobile super-dexterous anthropoid. With an S-spanner. And a lot of patience. All these three things are things that I don't possess, so I was just going to have to go with good old-fashioned aggression and a big hammer. A slight bonus was that at least two of the studs had disappeared completely over the years


no studs by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

although it was hard to tell whether they'd rusted through and sheared off or released themselves from the backbox via vibration and sheer old age. It did make me hopeful that if all else failed, a big pry bar and enough leverage might persuade the remaining ones to simply snap off. This would have been fine; the studs are captive in the backbox flange, come through forwards (as you look at the bus) and are secured against the front face of the heat exchanger by the nuts. So any version of breaking the stud would result in the backbox being free to be pulled off the back (oooer. f'narr, etc)


powerfile murder by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Errrrrrm, nope One actually came undone, amazingly. One sheared off... result. The last two... nope. Days of soaking in penetrating oil, heat, hammering on a slightly smaller sacrificial spanner, a big hammer....none of these had any effect except to shower rust into my eyes and round off the last remaining traces of nut flats. I was forced to resort to the trusty Black'n'Decker Powerfile. Until it proved to not be all that trusty after all, went really hot, all the magic smoke escaped from the wiring and motor and everything ground to a halt. Pressing the "work" button only resulted in a horrible noise and some acrid burny smells. I took it apart to reveal a lot of burnt armature wiring, melted plastic casing and power wiring with a lot less insulation than it had left the factory with.

I ordered a replacement powerfile (Silverline this time, which when it finally arrived proved to be rather smaller, better designed and much more wieldy than the B&D one had been so might be a blessing in disguise). However, in the meanwhile I was stuck with this;


nut grinding by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

The last thing holding the backbox on. Fortunately I'd ground through the inaccessible top nut before this one and the demise of my powerfile. Equally fortunately, there was now enough give in that the other five fixings were a thing of the past that I could get a hacksaw blade in the gap and cut through what remained. Very slowly. While lying on my back under the bus on cold concrete. Lovely. It took as long as you'd expect it to, and was even less fun than you'd think. But eventually I got the hideous excrescence of an exhaust off without mutilating the flanges of the heat exchangers irredeemably in the process. Two hundred quid per side, those are and I'd just blown a few hundred on the backbox itself. I really didn't need to be springing for new heat exchangers on top of that


heat exchanger survived by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

As you can see, the old backbox was really a quite horrid thing; rusty, knackered, leaky, pugged-up by POs with rotten exhaust gum, one flange (oooh, flange) almost completely unattached... it was long past time it went to the tip metal skip in the sky.


the offending article by Nick Liassides, on Flickr


gruesome flange by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

All that remained to bear testament to the previous existence of such a hideous blight was a pile of rust, broken gaskets and washers scattered like sycamore seeds


debris by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

So that was easy then. All an easy downhill freewheel from here on then, yes? W...e...e...l...l...l...

the cavity left by evicting the zorst proved to be in a fairly bad way. The stonechip gunge had all dried up and started coming away from the steel in big lumpy chunks. Rust streaks were everywhere, the inside of the rear valance looked extremely suspect... it seemed like madness to not give it a bit of a spit'n'polish while I was under here and it was accessible


ugly spots underneath by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And that bumper... well, the bumper could come off quite easily by the look of it, and that'd give me a chance to treat the rust that was starting out around the bolt holes. And fix the dent that some cretin had put in it *ahem*.

Oh no, that's not right, is it? The part about if coming off easily, of course


coach bolt madness by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

There was no way some of the rusted (and random... don't think there were two the same) bolts holding the bumper to the bumper irons were going to come off without access to both sides, a lot of WD40 and possibly an angle grinder. Some genius had used a lot of nyloc nuts, which I can't imagine were factory-fit. Nor indeed was the fact that every single bolt seemed a different size and length to every other one. The combination of nyloc grip and rust meant all I was doing was revolving the bolts without loosening the nut from the rear side. Fortunately, the bumper irons insert into a big square hole in the rear valance (actually the end of a chassis member) and are held in place by two chunky M12 bolts each side (you can see these two photos ago). And these bolts would undo.

What wouldn't undo were the bolts holding the plastic endcaps to the bottom side corner of the bus. They were long bolts and only M5. One came out OK, but the other side one had been replaced with a coachbolt that had a smooth, round head with no means of gripping it at all. No slot for a screwdriver, no flats for a socket. And it's recessed a couple of inches into the endcap so you can't cut the head off or get to it in any way without destroying the endcap. Which I couldn't get off the bumper because of aforementioned rust-welded nylocs. Trying to undo the nyloc from the end of the long M5 coachbolt just had it turning as one, reaming out a nice hole in the plastic.



only one left by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Eventually though, it was the only thing holding the entire bumper on and by puling the whole assembly diagonally away from the bus, I managed to put enough strain on the bolt to keep it from rotating while I undid the final nut. Sounds easy, but look at the thing! That bumper weighs a fair bit with the irons attached, and it's not the easiest thing to support it, pull it away from the bus and still reach the nut on the inside of the bottom corner without resorting to go-go-gadget arms

BUT eventually, it was free and I could asess the state of the valance now it was exposed.


start small by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Oh dear. This doesn't look good. Maybe I ought just bodge the bumper back on and pretend I never saw it?


end big by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Nope. well, that's Pandora's Box well and truly open then, isn't it?

Thanks for the continued updates - my dad has been using a twin-slider Caravelle for almost 15 years now. It's been used for everything from family holidays to moving Beetle chassis. I can't recall it ever leaving him stranded and aside from general maintenance along with a few rust repairs it hasn't needed much. One thing though, the engine always seemed quite noisy but having had a reconditioned one just before purchase we figured that's just how it was. Not so! Servicing it he found the valve timing to be way out, corrected that it's been much better on fuel and capable of over 50mph uphill!

That exhaust is a bit of porn for sure.

Continue to enjoy this thread mate.

Thanks for sharing.

This was about the point my mojo was at its most broken, Ian. It was really a case of just keeping my head down and plodding on. Like, if you never lift your eyes from the ground you never notice you can't see the horizon

So now I knew that one day I could just chuck money at a new panel it seemed perfectly fine just to bodge it all back together again "for now". But that was still a fair amount of work. The pug extended round to the side panels of the bus as well as the back


still more hidden bog by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And here as well there was evidence of steel having been repaired with new sheet welded in. Though not, apparently, an actual repair panel. Like the valance, it looked a lot like home-made panel work to me. In addition, the inner corner flitches were a bit scabby. These take a right pounding because they're cooked by engine heat but also directly underneath the intake vents on the rear quarters of the van. So rain and oomska drops down right onto these boxes. Pooling water and heat... can't get a much better recipe for rust!


cleaning up the underside by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

They don't even really serve any purpose. They look a lot like VW intended them as battery trays and then thought better of it and stuck the battery under the seat (I believe diesel models have the battery on one of these trays but I may have invented that). It was not my most favourite thing ever, lying under the van stripping these back with the angle grinder and a wire brush. It's one of those throwaway sentences you read in threads like this that completely fail to convey the true horror. This was March, so it was cold, usually wet and dark half the time. There's not much room to manoeuvre, every time you move you bang an elbow or your head or knee on an unyielding concrete or metal surface. You have to keep your arms raised above your heart so they tire and lactic acid builds and the grinder numbs your fingers and tinitus builds in your ears. And the debris has nowhere to go but fall onto you; dust and rust flakes that grit in your mouth and scratch in your eyes, and the little bullets of wire flung off the brush that ping and stick into your face and arms and gloves and clothes and everygoddamnwhere...it's just horrible and unpleasant and uncomfortable and just downright bloody tedious.

No wonder I was bloody miserable.

Finally, though, I could start the shameful task of bogging it all back up again


bog it back up by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And then much sanding later ...maybe it'd have needed less sanding if I was a bit better at laying on filler smoothly but it's a skill I never seem to grasp and it was lumpy as Aunt Mabel's porridge. I ran out, too, and refused to buy any more. In fact, it was lucky I had this tin. I can't remember what the hell I bought it for in the first place it'd been in the garage so long, and it had gone weird so that a sort of greenish liquor had come out of the putty and it needed mixing back in. Before mixing again with the active agent. So yeah, it ran out because there was a LOT of filler needed to get back to the surface level my archaelogical dig had started at. This left a few low spots but mostly hidden by the bumper. And I didn't care too much because it's only temporary, right? Till I can afford a new panel. I have to keep telling myself that or I'll chicken out and pretend it's fine as it is. And it's not fine. Primer made it seem a bit better though


primered by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

although it did also serve to make all the low spots in the filler that much more obvious. There was nothing I could do with the frilly edges to the exhaust cooling holes of the valance. Life's too short to try recreating them out of bondo alone, and you can't see them when the bumper's mounted


primer side by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

the underside of the Beryl's gusset looked much more presentable now it was stonechipped over at least


underside done by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

the last few bits of tidying up before paint involved stripping off metres of sleek tape (the stuff medical types use to fix dressings with) that some weirdo had inexplicably edge the entire tailgate aperture with. It had been there forever and the glue had gone greasy and really hard to get off.


cleaning the bootfloor by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

In fact, there was a lot of glue residue all over the boot area and engine lid. I don't know if it had carpet stuck down once; the carpet is currently stuck to a large hardboard sheet which at least made it easy to lift out of the way to paint. The tailgate latch is one of those hilarious VW catches that bolts through holes much larger than the bolt diameter to allow it to be adjusted slightly for a good latching action. If you don't realise that this means the bolts go into a floating threaded plate the other side of the sheetmetal, it's easy to remove all the bolts... and then cry and scream in rage as you hear the fateful metallic ting of the previously-captive plate becoming free and dropping down into some inaccessible structure of the van's metalwork. That legendary German sense of humour again


boot catch before by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And so masked up at last, after what seemed like months of tedious slog, I was ready to start throwing paint on it. Which meant only one thing could happen next.


hail by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

The sky turned black like a special effect from The Omen, it started hissing with rain ad within a minute or so, this turned into hail. Oh come on

I must have been someone really bad in another life...

That like wasn't a like for the rolling around in crud covered in grot, by the way. It was more a , well, sort of story well told type of like. Maybe.

Keep going I did . As soon as the hailstorm passed over, I got out the microfibre towels and the heat gun and dried off the primer. I know primer absorbs moisture but I don't think it's like a sponge. I just didn't want it getting damp any more than was strictly necessary. I had visions of it all seeming fine and then a week later the moisture works its way out and the paint falls off like a sheet With this in mind, as soon as it all seemed dry, I chucked paint at it


despite all paint by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

There didn't seem much point in painting the boot floor and engine lid as they're in that VW off-beige base layer stuff. I don't know why they don't paint entire vehicles in it, it seems capable of shrugging off any wear and tear up to and including a B-52 Arclight mission. But I did mask up to a point that would be part hidden under the carpet board thing but be visible along the edge of the tailgate opening


bootfloor unmasked by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Once it was unmasked and the seal stuck back in (where there was actually still channel to stick it into) ...and more importantly, the sun came out ... it actually looked half-decent. Well, better than it had done anyway


sunshine on the righteous by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Quite an improvement, although I do say so myself.


boot catch after by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

While that was drying (which wasn't quick because despite the sunlight it was still only about five degrees out there), I got on with trying to straighten the dent some utter gimp* put into the bumper. Which as I know the square root of cockall about panel beating, involved basically twatting the bejaysus out of it with a big hammer.

* OK, OK, it was me


amateur panel beating by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

Given how damned thick the steel of the bumper is, it's amazing it had dented at all. Must have given it much more of a whack than I'd thought. It was a hell of a job to get it back, and there were some witness marks left from my enthusiastic battering, but at least there was no humoungous dent when it was done. Then I slathered on a load of the POR15 prep fluid and left it to etch. As far as I can tell it's basically a weak acid with some stuff added to make it smell nice(ish) and become purple. I'm sure the same prep effect could be achieved by leaving it in a citric acid solution for a day or so, but I've got five litres of the stuff so figured I may as well use it. It definitely does make the POR15 paint stick a lot better to bare metal if you do prep first


bumper soaking by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

And while that was working, and in between chucking lacquer on the buses' rear end, I got on with some other little bench jobs. Such as cleaning up overspray... a recurring theme with the Beryl


cleaning buffers by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

These are just little rubber buffers that screw into the large hole above the tail-lights and stop the tailgate slamming too hard. The y simply screw out with a 17mm spanner, so why the PO who sprayed the Beryl couldn't be arsed to take them out before painting is a bit of a mystery. See if you can guess which one I'd already cleaned up in the pic above

The next job was to fit up a seatbelt so that someone could travel in the rear part of the bus. There were seatblet mounts in the side structure metal, so the belt would be anchored properly. I know it's not exactly a seat as such but the end part of the bed when it's folded flat and I wouldn't carry live cargo in there for any distance, but it was quite annoying that the Beryl could only carry four people maximum. We were planning to go up and stay with Mrs L7s mother for a few days, and thus needed to be able to carry five people for shopping excursions and stuff. So the easy way was t6o fit a seatbelt and one of the kids could then go in the boot, travelling backwards but at least securely strapped in.

I had some brand new Securon parts from doing he Beetle (and leftover from fitting the RX-7 rear belts years ago) but the hole in the Newton trim panel didn't match the hole in the van side. If you remember, none of the holes lined up in those panels. I took off the panel, screwed a bolt into the seatbelt mounting hole, put the panel back on and hit it with a really big hammer where I thought the bolt was.


moving holes by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

This left a witness mark I could use to make my new hole in the correct location. As you can see, it's out of alignment by a half inch, yet the panel fits fine in the space it's supposed to fit. Weird. anyway, that was 50% of the seatbelt mounted


seat belt latch in by Nick Liassides, on Flickr

The I hit the wall. To mount the other end of the belt, I needed to remove one of the bolts holding the original belts to the floor. These are long M10 bolts that go right through the floor in front of the engine and have a nut on the underside of the van. And that was welded with rust. It came undone about 5mm and then stuck fast on the rust and paint and old scunge. The whole thing just turned round and round without undoing.

Obviously, I couldn't be in the van holding the bolt head and underneath it turning the nut at the same time so I enlisted the Boy's help. Now, he's large for his age but still small for a human and not as strong as a grown-up. So I thought it might just be that when he said he couldn't stop the bolt from just spinning round. When it got to the point that I was turning him by turning the nut, I realised it was properly stuck



Smeg

Haha!

I'm only laughing because I've got to weld up my wife's T25.

When I can get the muddy funster to start, that is, and get it to school where the welding gear is.

The more you get into old Volkswagens, the more you learn to hate them, but you'd never be without one...

^^^^ Like wise!

Provided some great reading on tonight's nightshift.