Take one rusted out cargo door rocker, cut out the old mess and weld in some nice new sheetmetal to make a strong VW Camper again. Here we show you how we did a replacement on a 1965 Bus. Read the rest of this entry »

Next in line after the nose was the mess that used to be a front floor – not much was left to go on and the usual 1/4 floor repairs wont cut it. The whole floor has to come out. Read the rest of this entry »

Lenoir, our 1965 vw Bus is in desperate need of replacement panels up front and low, here we’re going to take a look at how the repairs were done.. Read the rest of this entry »

Sampling the delights of a Joker Hightop – a very practical T25 campervan. Looking down the barrel of a 1500 mile roundtrip to the south of France we definitely wanted a diesel powered VW camper to make us fall in love with these campers – oh so practical. Read the rest of this entry »

So transaction made we take Lenoir to our welding guru and here we blog about what he found up the front of the Bus as this appeared to be the worst area. Not for the feint hearted this project.. Read the rest of this entry »

Introducing Lenoir – a standard 11 window Volkswagen Bus or Kombi. Lenoir is in desperate need of metalwork magic having suffered the ravages of rust for too many years. In this first blog we’ll show her warts and all as we bought her in the US. Read the rest of this entry »

Bought in 2009 from ebay with a short description and 3 photos. Quite the gamble but the right ingredients were there – seating for up to 6 people and a covered load area for moving stuff around. Diesel powered so what could possibly go wrong.. Read the rest of this entry »

Want a primer paintjob but also want something waterproof – Epoxy primer is a perfect solution. Here we put DragBus through a bodyshop to get flatted back, skimmed and painted with Sherwin Williams E2A933 Primer Gray. Read the rest of this entry »

With the bumper off and a cut off wheel we strip away the old rusted out panels and show the typical new replacement panels we used. EarlyBay to later Bays had slight changes to the front of the Vans – early bays have low indicators, larger badge sitting on a flat panel, wider air intake and a flat non ribbed front valence. Add to this no-one makes a complete early front panel and you see why some restorations have later noses on earlier Buses. Read the rest of this entry »

A pair of quite unusual places to rust and a challenge to repair as no normal panels are made for these areas, here we discover some corrosion inside the door track and inside the rear quarter below the air intake. How did that happen and how can we stop that happening again in another 40 years. Read the rest of this entry »