Vanagon trip, 4000 mile tour of the American Southwest.

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Jivermo
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Vanagon trip, 4000 mile tour of the American Southwest.

Post by Jivermo » Sun Apr 30, 2017 11:54 am

:shaking2: I'm at the final week of a nearly 6 week camping trip of the Southwest, starting with 9 days in Death Valley. Although I'm an air-cooled fan, with my '78 Westy, I have really enjoyed piloting my buddy Zeke's '87 Vanagon around the countryside. It shows 305,000 miles, and he thinks it has about 80,000 on the current rebuild. He's put about 60,000 of those miles in it. We have had two problems along the way, a coil gone bad, which stopped us at about the most gawdawful remote spot in Death Valley, with the foreboding name of Crankshaft Junction, and, a weird problem with the blue cap overflow tank in the cooling system. We are still messing about with that, every 500 or so miles. We'll sort it out one day. All in all, the way this thing is running, I don't understand the fuss about replacing these engines with Subarus or others. A little underpowered in headwinds, but, so what? Who's in a hurry?

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Bleyseng
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Re: Vanagon trip, 4000 mile tour of the American Southwest.

Post by Bleyseng » Mon May 01, 2017 6:26 am

Well at rebuild time people look at $5000 for a 95hp engine vs a used 130hp Subie with only 60k on it for $1000 and go Sh*t let's Subie it.
Geoff
77 Sage Green Westy- CS 2.0L-160,000 miles
70 Ghia vert, black, stock 1600SP,- 139,000 miles,
76 914 2.1L-Nepal Orange- 160,000+ miles
http://bleysengaway.blogspot.com/

Jivermo
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Re: Vanagon trip, 4000 mile tour of the American Southwest.

Post by Jivermo » Mon May 01, 2017 2:57 pm

Cooling system and installation costs?

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