87 wedge

Arr

2008-01-18T11:29:00.000-08:00

Relaunch date came and went, as did Christmas 07 and the New Year! The new site is more popular than ever. Average hit rate has risen from 1 to 4 hits a day to this week (week ending18th Jan 08) not having less than 21 hits a day, that makes me feel all the hard work was worth it! The idea to have a web site paid for by Google ads has also paid off as the small earnings that came in covered the hosting and domain name.

The blog however fell by the wayside, as did my bonsai blog. 2008 both these will get resurrected.

New on 87wedgie... Well been siting in the car park since the start of Dec07 unused! Started it 2nd week of Jan to take it for a spin. Once the petrol had been drawn up to the engine (a long way and thank heavens for a good battery, it fired 1st time. The resulting 8 mile drive was 'sweet'.

More shortly.
Happy New Year readers (are there any? please leave a comment?)

re-launch date almost here...

2007-08-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

The bags under the eyes are getting bigger, it's getting harder to get up in the morning no mention the human effort I have to put into staying awake in the traffic queues on the A27 at Beddingham each evening on my trip home from work.

The reason...

Checking the pages for the re-launch on Sat. Today is Wed and I only have two days, make that evenings. I should be able to scrape a bit of Sat morning but not to much as I need to do a bit to the van in prep for the SVWOC summer show on Sunday.

Back to (web) work...

2007-07-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

It's taken about 6 weeks (including holiday's etc.) to get to today. Our old 'free' (I do\like this word!) hosts bandwidth was exceeded due to increasing hits on the site. Have bitten the bullet and now purchased hosting after doing a bit of research with 'siteHQ'. Impressed with speed of service and prorogation of domain within about 4 hours, this got the site back on line 2 days sooner than if I'd stayed with the old hosts.

Planned launch date for the new site is 11th July, why? well on the 12th is the SVWOC's summer festival and we're planning to distribute a whole load of fliers, so need to be prepared. More work will go into extending the services on the site (planning a 'for sale' section for personal submission - but I've got to learn MySQL and Pearl first! as well as a shop for all things VW T25 plus put a whole load of work into getting recognized by search engines.

Happy days... and a good way to pass a 'crappy' summer by not sitting in front of the TV!
Paul

re-branding of volkswagent25.co.uk...

2007-06-24T14:40:00.000-07:00

Work started in ernest in re-designing the web site today. There's a lot to do... having spent about 4 weeks playing with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and a different menu system (suposidly simpler!), I'm ready to go. Plan is to try and launch it for the end of July.

Loads of new content, reviews and... Drop by (p l e a s e?)
Paul

and that's another LEAK sorted...

2007-04-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

Well Air Cooled Workshop sorted the rot and I'm 'well' pleased with the work, the cost and the fact I can now get the van in for its MOT without worrying, too much (that's a sure failure then!). So all rot dealt with so to sort the cause.

The root of the floor rot was the side air/fridge vent. The van was built in 87 and it's my guess its leaked since then! The van (an AutoSleeper conversion) is well laid out and a good build quality (IMHO) but the slipped up big time on the vent. They made it follow the contour of the van (1st error) then the black fibre glass vent is fixed without any gasket (2nd error) but then the design of the thing is pretty c***! Take a look at the rain coming in in the image on the right.. Even if they could have included a gasket the way the thing's made precludes there being anything for it to seat against (on the vent...) . In due course I'll be adding pictures and words on www.volkswagent25.co.uk so you can see what I mean and how I resolved the problem from reoccurring.

Well that was the 1st and biggest leak.

About a week or so ago I was in the van looking for something on the high bunk with a torch (yes, it was dark). 'Hang on what was that? Something just dropped through the beam cast by the torch' Well it transpired the dam roof light had a leak. Closer inspection, in daylight, reveled that there was moss growing, bit of a damp problem then!

Now the 'high top' is insulated fibreglass construction so no rot was expected, and non found... However I did find that AutoSleeper had come up with the really brilliant idea of securing the roof light by screwing the cover and internal trim to the expanded foam insulation, that'll be secure then! In all only about half a dozen screws were holding the thing in place out of about 25! Today was lovely so decided to have a break from doing the inside refit and sort the last (for now) leak. It took all of 30mins to 'unstick' it - remember hardly any fixings. then a further 2 hours cleaning the roof and light up so I could sick it back down, refix the screws (so it looked as though it was secure!). Looks good now it's all cleaned up and fixed back.

So that's another leak sorted...

Now that looks better...

2007-03-02T13:36:00.000-08:00

Went and collected the van last night and what a difference. Expected it to look patchy until I got it painted but never thought it would come back with a respray over 1/3rd the offside! While this is only temp to stop it all going rusty it makes a massive difference to before it went in. Will post a couple of pictures over the weekend if weather holds off raining long enough for me to get a picture or two, so take a look at the web site for the 'wrecking' process plus the repair.

Back to work this week ;-(

2007-02-09T13:45:00.000-08:00

This means less 'free' time, for all sorts of things...

No further developments on the seat covers other than tomorrow we start round 2 of trying to find a suitable fabric. More on this in due course... On Sunday I need to make a start on stripping the interior units out as now only have 11 days till it's in for welding. If time permits I'll be posting pictures on the web site over the next week or two.

...and finally (for now)
Over a glass of cold water in the kitchen at work discovered one of my colleagues has a 'bay'. He's had it some 10 yrs and reckons on three months a year off the road, glad we've got a T25 or what? Even he thinks we've mad a wise move! Their more reliable, he says. Then I tell him about our first two outings ending on the back of breakdown wagons and just over a 50% success rate of going out and back under our own steam! Conversations on all things VW will I've no doubt occur from time to time as our paths cross.

Happy days, summers just round the corner...
happy VW'ing.

Quote in...

2007-02-01T13:59:00.000-08:00

OK so we'll have some nice comfy seats and bed next year! No more tired derrières after dinner squishing the foam to the board! Cost not bad (going to cost less than £400 all in) and will take a couple of days to do. We're going to finalize the fabric next week and get our order in (currently a five week plus wait so we should just get this sorted before first 'hopeful' outing at Easter. Details and pictures will be on our web site in due course.

Happy VW'ing
Paul

Can I keep this up?

2007-01-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

Unlikely me thinks...

Still signed off from work (stress just in case your wondering) but I reckon as soon as I go back it'll be back to normal and nothing will get done! However... I have given myself a deadline. I went and had a chat with my local VW garage (The Air-Cooled Workshop, Ninfield) to have a chat about a'bit' of welding I need to get done before the MOT in April. Follow this story on the web site (will be starting this story shortly and posting it tonight) but the long and short of it is I've got it booked in for the 19th Feb.

Not the quote on the seat covers and new foam yet but 24hrs is probably asking a bit much.

happy renovations...
paul

referb work started today, sort of!

2007-01-29T09:33:00.000-08:00

Sun was out all morning and on one of my daily walks with Sally (trying to do as my stress manager (Thriving on stress...) tells me i.e. get myself fit and chilled out!) we spotted that the local upholsterer was in his workshop, so... I grabbed a couple of the cushions from the van and took them round to him to get a price for replacing the foam and recovering. His workmanship looks good, based on what he had on the bench. I'll post how the quote goes FYI. What was interesting was that he was completing a set for a 'splittie' or 'bay' in white leatherette with blue piping - looked smart, someone's going to be pleased.
Paul...

Ok so I'm tight!

2007-01-27T10:39:00.000-08:00

I've spent significant chunks of the last couple of days (sad!) writing a web template. This was done for two reasons 1) it's too bloody cold to do any work on my bonsai (see my other blog), and 2) in my drive to save money for the camper I've resorted to doing most it the hard way (not spending money on the likes of Dreamweaver et al... Call me a masochist but it's actually been interesting getting some of my (very) old html knowledge back and extending it (somewhat). The bottom line is the template's just about done so watch out... Over the next week stuff should start appearing!

FYI... I started using Evrsoft's First Page 2006, which was quite good but kept freezing my laptop so moved on to Archrophila. First Page was, is good... It's free has lots of code snippets and can be registered (for a fee of about £30) but I didn't need the extras that came with this (yes, I'm tight!), so.. thought lets look out a simple text editor. I remembered, from work (University of Sussex) that they put Archrophila on the 'student' PCs so went off in search. Now it's quick and very simple (like you my better half would say!) to pick up and use.

With the list I have of tasks on the van needing sorting before its first outing I'm going to need to get my focus off all things web and onto the van!

See you...

we have a www presence!

2007-01-24T09:56:00.000-08:00

OK just registered a domain name volkswagent25.co.uk (may not be up for 72hrs though - so patience please) and have a provider (Heart Internet), all at a vast cost (£6.09 - all in for 2yrs!). Have to rush off to yoga now so will add more later, got to get over the shock of my investment somehow!

Happy days
Paul
P.S. only managed a paltry 25mm or so of snow over night here.

In the begining...

2007-01-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

OK so I'm into bonsai, see my bonsai blog for more on this, but...

My wife and I purchased a VW camper van last year (April 06), seemed like a good idea (my wifes not mine, honest) at the time. While not 100% keen on the idea initially, as I knew it would be me doing any of the restoration/repair work, I'm now fully hooked. We started looking at Type 2 'bays' but these were out of our price range, the ones we saw were, to put it simply, a joke. One frightened the hell out of me on the test run not to mention gas my poor wife sitting in the back and they wanted £5K plus for it - I'll tell you one day, maybe, so... We settled for the next best thing (from a looks point of view), a brick, a wedge or as Volkswagen named them a T25.

We had in mind from the start to try and look like cool parents (the boys thought it cool anyway), '50 somethings' in our nice shiny 'bay'. As noted above this image vanished when reality struck. We needed space, comfort, heat (got a bay or split? you know what I mean) and reasonable reliability (it's an age thing you know - or so my work colleagues tell me!). We found this and more in the T25. So far we've had two days out (both times returning on the back of a breakdown truck!), two Isle of Wight breaks and a couple of long weekends away. Not bad in our six months!

This blog has been set up to track the work we need and plan to do improving and keeping it tip top... Mind you it was pretty good when we purchased it. So watch this space...

Oh and when you get bored you can read about my bonsai!

happy camping.
Paul