Now seating

Today's post continues on the theme from the last few: getting the bus re-assembled in time for the Hoot. We have the glass in. We have the lights and bumpers working. Next, it's seating, seat belts, carpeting and the shifter.

Front Seats

Scat shifter, seats in

During the demo, I removed the seat pedestal carpet. I wanted to see how bad the rust had gotten in the hidden places. I'm glad I did. There was lots of surface rust starting both directly under the carpet as well as in the dry well between the seat pedestal and the top of the wheel wells. This rust has been hard to address, and I mostly left the dry well alone other than some cleaning. I didn't paint it, and I didn't recover it with carpet. I'll come back around as time and the mood strikes. Getting a small grinding wheel in there is virtually impossible, so attacking that rust may need to be a combination of muscle power and chem.

The actual seat install is very simple. The passenger seat locks in at the rear first. Fold the seat and push the back rail into the 'C'-shaped brackets. Keeping the front edge raised, set the hook on the rear of the seat into the bracket on the mid-wall. Easy. The driver seat slides in from the front. Once on the rails, It slides back by lifting the lever and pushing with your feet (when you're sitting in it). I've toyed with the idea of applying lithium grease to the rails, but decided it would just increase the gunk longer term.

Seat Belts
I dug through all of my old posts, but it doesn't look like I ever posted when I changed my seat belts. way back when I bought the '74 seats, I also got some old retractable seat belts from the rear of an old Mercedes. These were the only non-VW parts on the bus besides some random non-metric fasteners. Well, on one of our multiple road trips, the driver's belt simply stopped locking into the clicky thing. So, I was effectively driving without a belt. In other countries, that's not a big deal, but here in the United Police-States of America, that's a ticketing offense. Add in the profiling standard of a VW bus, and that's some measurable risk. So, I ordered this pair from CIP1 that have chrome clicky things. They bolt right in with 16mm and 17mm sockets, look great and don't cost $200 for the pair (more like $140).

Pedestal Carpet

fancy CIP1 belts, no carpet

I decided to not re-install carpet over the front seat pedestals. Instead, I chose to leave the rust access, and consider what I could do with the dry wells. I could cut one of the supports, weld in a cross-bar along the top and create a little hidey-hole for books or something. Maybe a place to put CD's? I dunno. Either way, I left the dry well exposed and the pedestal uncovered. I was unable to discern a notable difference in the noise during my recent drives, so I'm not inclined to rush to changing it.

Shifty
Finally, I got the shifter and cab carpet in. The cab carpet is really easy... once the shifter is in. So, I'm not going to go into that. The shifter, though, can be tricky. On the bottom, there's a ball with a little spring'd shaft on it. The ball fits through the floor into a cup that connects back to the tranny. In the front of the cup is a cut-away for the spring'd shaft. The spring, though, wants the shaft to go the other way. This makes for one of those spots where you need more hands than you have and eyes that can see through steel to make it work. Assuming your equipment isn't so old that it just stopped acting properly. After 4 hours of wrestling with that shifter, I gave up and grabbed the old chrome short-shifter I bought shortly after buying the bus. Much to my surprise, I was able to get that chrome shifter in with very little effort.

Like any shifter, set the ball into the cup and tighten the 2 13mm bolts until the shifter doesn't move around when you move it. The tranny should have been in 2nd gear when you started, but in case it wasn't, get it into 2nd now. Without the engine running, test moving from gear to gear. Any 2 harder to get to than the others? If 1&3 are harder, the shifter (or adjust plate if you're going stock shifter) needs to slide forwards. tap with a rubber mallet and re-try. If 1&2 are harder than 3&4, it needs to move left. Tap with a rubber mallet. For moving the stock plate, you'll need to get a bladed screw-driver against the plate so you only tap it and not the whole operation. You'll need to test it out with the engine running as well, and possibly repeat the adjustment process. When I did this, I didn't need to adjust the shifter again. I just torqued the bolts down.

That's it for today. Thanks, as always, for following along.