I can see the speedo clearly in my wife's '84, which uses a lightly larger
diameter and smaller cross section steering wheel.  When power steering was
installed in '85, VW went to a smaller diameter and lightly cushier wheel,
which blocks my view of about half of the speedo.  You might try using a
wheel from an '84 and see if there's an improvement.

Karl Wolz
----- Original Message -----
From: "Max/Joyce Wellhouse" <maxjoyce@IPA.NET>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 4:26 AM
Subject: Re: 81 steering wheel height

> I would like a different diameter steering wheel for another reason.
> Also being , in the 6'3-4" range,  trying to quickly see how fast I'm
going
> while driving usually results in an exercise in head bobbing to spy the
> speedo needle and resultant marking on the speedo dial.  Anybody ever
dealt
> with this successfully.  It's right up there with the head leaking
syndrome
> on my list of Vanagon pet peeves.  I'm thinking a smaller diameter wheel
> would just shift the blockage to another mph range.
>
> DM&FS