In a message dated 12/10/2003 9:43:25 PM Eastern Standard Time, JordanVw writes:

> all i know is it did not take long at all for karl and i to do the conversion..we did it in the driveway of his townhouse complex in one weekend, with minimal hand tools, a drill and a jigsaw...  when the top was popped up or down it looked like a genuine westy from outside. we reinforced the sheetmetal where the raise bar in the front was with simple angle iron on each side.  the luggage rack and rear hinges we bolted right thru the roof as do in a real westy.  he was quite pleased with the end result, and it added value to his otherwise plain '87 GL.   the only drawback about the whole project was not having the "factory" flip out bed, tho a custom bed
> platform did the trick fine.

Chris,

That's two people times two days, times X amount of hours per day. Even with that simpler conversion, that was big money lost for some of these guys. I work weekends. I know this is neither here nor there. But if ask Warren Chapman, a lost weekend can amount to tens of thousand of lost income in his line of of work. (BTW, we both thought "we" were both insane for doing much of our work but do it anyway for the same reason Jeff mentioned.)

I am not knocking what you and Karl Bloss and others have done. As always, I want to bring the other side's perspective on this. I have inherited several abandoned poptop projects from guys who had no idea what they were getting into.

BenT