Hello,

I agree.  I was bit miffed at first, but my '86 Syncro is every bit (and
more) a piece of my '71.

Lon T.
Wished I Owned More.

Malcolm Holser wrote:
> 
> > I was going out to my Westy Vanagon this morning, and thinking that, the
> > Vanagons really don't have the same spirit as the old type II. I mean, they
> > seem sanitized and spiffied up almost to the point that you forget their
> > origins.
> >
> > Well, I was brought back to reality when my Westy would not start, and a few
> > whacks on the solenoid was all it took to get things going again. Reminded me
> > of the many times I would crawl under my '71 van to short the solenoid
> > terminals with a screwdriver to start it.
> >
> > I guess this is one design issue that the German engineers passed on from the
> > old type II's. Deep in the soul of the Vanagon, the type II lives.
> >
> I drove a '57 singlecab for 20 years, and I miss it dearly.  Not that it was
> a great vehicle -- it really was not, but love of VW busses is not a rational
> thing.  When I finally wrecked the truck, I already had my '80 Westy, but it
> did not seem really like a VW so much.  We eventually bought two more VW's,
> both '86's with the 2L waterboxer.  I finally got back onto familiar ground
> when I needed to replace the valve covers on the Syncro, and gave it the
> covers from my '57.  The spirit not only lives on, even some parts have never
> really changed.  The transporter may have gone through several evolutions,
> but until the T4/EuroVan, the evolutions were really fairly gradual, and the
> model has some true continuity.  Each of the major body changes was not
> accompanied by any major mechaincal change -- a '70 has much more in common
> with a late splitty than it does with a '79, and the '79 is mechanically
> quite the same as an early T3/Vanagon.
> 
> The spirit lives on, although many splitty owners deny it, some of us do not.
> Perhaps I've become a bit of a Yuppie, but I doubt that I'd really love a
> split as anything other than a collector's item now -- VW made way too many
> improvments over time.
> 
> malcolm