Western Pennsylvania visit
Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2017 6:10 pm
Took me a while to post but....
It was an excellent first visit by Colin to my 78 tintop westy this past Saturday.
I can't say enough about what a great resource Colin is to the air-cooled VW community.
Back story-
I've owned this bus for 20 years and have been working on its second major “refresh” for…...well…...a while.
End back story.
The day started with some routine re-indexing of the distributor drive gear because my wonky plug wire orientation offended Colin's sensibilities.
Bentley procedures now relevant...cool.
My brain still aches a bit from some of the theoretical portions of the lesson, but I think I'll recover and I know I will be better for it.
I often work on the bus in a self imposed vacuum, so having the maestro present was a bit intimidating and jostling to my fragile psyche at first but I think I recovered.
I bet the 3 extra cups of coffee I had while listening to my 11 year old son Max's regular pronouncements of "Dad, the bus guy is X minutes late, is he gonna come?" may have contributed some brain scatter.
I could (will) go into more detail about procedures tackled and lessons learned, but I digress…
At some point later in the day Colin asked if any of my kids showed interest in working on the bus. I think I responded with something like “A little, I'm working on them."
To which he said (gross paraphrasation) "Have them ride on your lap and steer the bus....to lure them into the hideous air-cooled vw vortex."
So on Sunday my five-year-old daughter Lila got her first bus driving lesson.
Great Fun.
Then I moved onto the boys who are 9 and 11.
I ....they're entirely too big to ride on my lap (11-year-old goes about 5' 6"/150….(why yes, I agree, a lap drive would look bad) so I decided its time for them both to learn to drive the bus for real.
Naturally they loved it and did drive and….
…unknowing wife and clutch both survived.
I actually have a brief imovie of the episode that I’ll share later.
Saturday and Sunday were both great days.
Thanks
……………
Is it cliche to say that because of Colin's visit my bus is running better than it ever has?
-Dan
It was an excellent first visit by Colin to my 78 tintop westy this past Saturday.
I can't say enough about what a great resource Colin is to the air-cooled VW community.
Back story-
I've owned this bus for 20 years and have been working on its second major “refresh” for…...well…...a while.
End back story.
The day started with some routine re-indexing of the distributor drive gear because my wonky plug wire orientation offended Colin's sensibilities.
Bentley procedures now relevant...cool.
My brain still aches a bit from some of the theoretical portions of the lesson, but I think I'll recover and I know I will be better for it.
I often work on the bus in a self imposed vacuum, so having the maestro present was a bit intimidating and jostling to my fragile psyche at first but I think I recovered.
I bet the 3 extra cups of coffee I had while listening to my 11 year old son Max's regular pronouncements of "Dad, the bus guy is X minutes late, is he gonna come?" may have contributed some brain scatter.
I could (will) go into more detail about procedures tackled and lessons learned, but I digress…
At some point later in the day Colin asked if any of my kids showed interest in working on the bus. I think I responded with something like “A little, I'm working on them."
To which he said (gross paraphrasation) "Have them ride on your lap and steer the bus....to lure them into the hideous air-cooled vw vortex."
So on Sunday my five-year-old daughter Lila got her first bus driving lesson.
Great Fun.
Then I moved onto the boys who are 9 and 11.
I ....they're entirely too big to ride on my lap (11-year-old goes about 5' 6"/150….(why yes, I agree, a lap drive would look bad) so I decided its time for them both to learn to drive the bus for real.
Naturally they loved it and did drive and….
…unknowing wife and clutch both survived.
I actually have a brief imovie of the episode that I’ll share later.
Saturday and Sunday were both great days.
Thanks
……………
Is it cliche to say that because of Colin's visit my bus is running better than it ever has?
-Dan