At the moment, I am waiting for the workshop owner to return back to the country. He is expected on the first of Feb as mentioned earlier. Frankly, this waiting is very frustrating.
In this intervening period, I have already fixed the paint scheme and the colour codes.
As far as the exterior is concerned, I already have brand new headlights, both front grills, the little clips that allow the grill to be fixed, the front VW emblem, indicators, door mirrors (hard to find). windscreen and its rubber seal, its chrome/plastic insert and the tool to insert it into the rubber screen seal. Four new hub caps, the rear light clusters, the rear door hatch seal, the rear glass window seal, the rear bumper and its rubber strip with its clips, the rear "Volkswagen" script and the "transporter" script and their fixing clips. There is also the front A pillar plastic moulding and another plastic moulding that runs along the joint of the roof to body from the front to back. With all this new stuff fitted, The van should look as good as OEM.
The interior is where I am in a bit of trouble. The van I have is called a "tin top" meaning that the roof is low and not opening. The other variants are called "hi top" and "pop top" - more about that below.
Here is the thing. I am TORN between keeping the original look or modifying it.
If the van's interior was all messed up, the decision would have been easy. I would go far a interior conversion. to get a better understanding of my problem here are a few pictures.
All the interior has been put away in the store of the house and there is more stuff on top of that. So the only interior item I could photograph was this front chair
As can be seen it is in pretty good shape. All the other seats are in the same condition. That is the middle row for two passengers and the third row for three passengers and the carpets. Note the blue/grey colour combo of the seats. Hence my reluctance to go for other colours than blue
The middle row seat. This pic is from the net. I am amazed at how similar it is to my seat. It could be a picture of my seat.
This pic is from the net. The layout of the interior is 100% like my van. Only I don't have the rear seat headrests
Another view of the rear setup also off the net
I had discussed the beige interior earlier. I thought to share the picture of beige here. With this interior, one can go for reds, greens, browns or shades of orange. Basically beige more versatile IMO
An image of a period factory catalogue. We can see the interior layout of passenger area etc. (click to see full image)
As opposed to this, we have a completely opposite interior offered by others including Westfalia. Westfalia is a German company working with VW to transform the interior space into a camper. The most attractive feature was the rising roof called the "pop top". Here is a picture I took during a car event in Bahria a few years ago before I even thought of ever owning a van.
The white van in the foreground is a T25 like mine with a European number plate. Probably a foreigner passing through, the one behind is a T2 Wesfalia belonging to one of the VW club members. Note the raised roof. It allows one to stand in the van.
This is not a Westfalia interior but a WV factory camper interior. The two rear facing seats are removable and the table folds flat against the fixed wall. Nice and very attractive to me. But those removable seats are not available with me.
This rear seat is called a "rock and roll" bed. It has a special mechanism that moves the bottom cushion forward has the back cushion to fall into the space created by moving the bottom cushion forward.
The Westfalia interior. Super nice, Gas cooking stove, sink, fridge that makes ice cubes. WOW
Another Westfalia camper but without the pop top. It is called the "hi top". Note the additional sleeping bed on the top. It sleeps four
As you can see, the campers are VERY desirable. As a mater of interest I looked at a price comparison of these T25s in minibus and camper forms. The campers are around 10,000 UK Pounds while the minibus is just around 1400 Pounds.
So my dilemma is should I destroy an excellent original bus to get a camper that's locally built?
Wife is not much help!!
