I bought my '74 Westfalia from California in Summer '04 and after much red tape, faxes, phone calls etc the van arrived in Dublin port in September '04, was unloaded from the container and driven home. On the way home I filled the tank but upon arrival it became evident that the tank had developed a serious leak. I don't know if it was the flavour of the Irish petrol that finally broke through the last little bit of metal sealing the tank or just an unfortunate coincidence but either way it dropped the contents of the tank and remained where it stopped until I could pull the tank and get it sealed. I had never sat in a VW bus before this and knew nothing about how they worked but with the help of the nice folk on www.type2ireland.org I got the tank out, sealed up and back in. Unfortunately it wasn't until February 2005 before I could actually get insurance to drive it. In the interim I set to locating and collecting the bits of the Westfalia original equipment that were missing after 30 years and researching the optional accessories available at the time of manufacture. Between Westfalia equipment, VW factory accessories and VW dealer accessories the van has been reinstated to as close to original as possible with a couple of concessions to modernity but all in the name of practicality.

The van came with a thick sheaf of paperwork with both the VW and Westfalia manuals, receipts for parts and work done to the van and even a notebook from somewhere back in the '70s recording fuel consumption on a weekly basis! From the receipts, I could see that the van had received a lot of attention in recent years, with bills for the replacement of the stock carbs with Weber 34ICTs, installation of an external oil cooler and mechanical maintenance work including shocks and brakes.

Original Westfalia equipment:

After 30 years in the hands of a string of owners in the US, some of the original Westfalia equipment the van left the factory with had gone by the wayside. While all the original cabinets, sink, cool box, rock'n'roll bed and all the original upholstery and carpets were still there and in great condition, the removable things like the cab area hammock, the Westy stool and the storage box that goes between the front seats were all missing. Scouring www.thesamba.com, Ebay and other sources turned up most of the bits and pieces, I found the stool and storage box in the USA and the hammock from a nice lady in Wales. Once found and delivered, the stool and storage box had to be reupholstered in the orange plaid fabric to match the rest of the interior. This was my first foray into the world of upholstery ;-)

The original spare wheel for this model Westfalia was a collapsible tyre on a standard bus rim. However, the collapsible tyre had been replaced by a full size tyre and fixed to the front of the van on a home-brewed aluminium bracket. Luckily, the previous owners hadn't drilled the front panel to fit the spare there so I didn't have to weld up any holes. After searching for an original collapsible spare wheel from a Westy turned up nothing I had to do a spot of lateral thinking to find the correct style tyre. I knew that some Porsches also had collapsible spare tyres as space-savers but as far as I knew, only the Porsche 924 came from the factory with 14" wheels, like the van has. I found a 14" collapsible spare wheel from a 924 on www.ebay.de and transferred the tyre onto the spare van rim. Once that was sorted I could then reinstall it in the bottom of the sink cabinet where it belonged. Incidentally, the door of that cabinet actually comes clean off its hinges to get the spare out. At first I thought it was broken but once I got the wheel in there it made perfect sense! Since the collapsible spare had gone missing in the past, so too had the original equipment compressor used to inflate it. Another search of the usual online spots turned up nothing so I resorted to a cheap 12V compressor from Argos.

Other standard Westfalia equipment that was still with the van were the louvered windows on both sides, the flip-up dining table with slide-out leaf and the fly-screen for inside the tailgate. Little things like the cabinet handles, tap for the sink and knobs for the louvered windows were all replaced as the originals were either missing or broken.

The original orange pop-top canvas is still in the van. It is rough in spots, namely the front panel where it has been trapped in the latch before and the rear corners where it has been chewed a bit by the hinge mechanisms. The fly screens were perished and made the canvas look worse than it actually is so I trimmed those off. Getting rid of them smartened up its appearance no end! I'm still between two minds whether to replace it with an off-the shelf tan or yellow coloured replacement or to hold out until I can locate a correct, orange one. Until then, it's in serviceable condition and isn't a huge priority.

Additional Westfalia equipment:

Once all the original equipment was reinstated to factory specification, I started looking at other Westfalia models for useful additions to supplement the stock equipment. The ones I decided were most suitable were the one-legged cab table, the late Westy rear ceiling cabinet and the Westfalia Continental 2-burner hob. The hob and the top of the cab table were sourced from the nice Welsh lady and the leg and brackets for the table from Westy Frank in the UK. The ceiling cabinet was again found on www.thesamba.com and shipped over to Ireland. Another useful addition was the Westfalia towbar. This is the type that replaces the original bumper brackets and was sourced from a hippy in Co. Clare. It needed a bit of work to one of the bumper brackets to make it fit well. I also had to ditch the 4-into-1 aftermarket exhaust the van came with in favour of a stock exhaust to get it to fit.

Genuine VW accessories:

Since the van is a US sourced model, it was upgraded with VW of America (VWoA) dealer-fit bumper over-riders. These are pressed steel over riders with thick rubber buffers attached. Unfortunately, of the 4, only 3 were present with the van so I had to buy a pair to get the one I wanted at Vanfest '05. With a quick rub and some fresh paint, they smartened up nicely.

All bay window vans have three "holes" in the stock dash binnacle. One for the fuel gauge and idiot lights, one for the speedo and a third one that is left blank in 99% of vans. This spot is reserved for the factory option VDO time clock. Since these weren't usually specified as extras when ordering a van back in the '70s they are a pretty rare accessory these days. I sourced mine from that nice Welsh lady (again!) but unfortunatley it needed to be reconditioned to get it to work. I happened across the solution by a stroke of luck. I pulled a VDO clock from an '80s Opel Ascona hoping to see if the mechanism was anything similar. As luck would have it, the mechanism from the Opel was almost identical to the VW one. The Opel mechanism needed only minor modification to fit the VW clock, it's amazing that almost 20 years later, VDO hadn't changed much of the mechanism! Another unusual feature of the dash binnacle is that teh coloured markings beside the heater and fresh air levers are illuminated and come on with the dash lights. These are dimmed with the dash lights from the headlight switch on the dash.

I think it was because it was a US market van and not destined for the European market that it came as standard with opening quarterlights in the cab doors and an opening quarterlight in the rear left window. More basic models had fixed quarterlights in the doors. The door ones especially are great when cruising, just open them a chink and you've got a great blast of cooling air :-) I broke the driver's side quarterlight one day after locking the doors with the keys in the ignition. I tried to jimmy the window open from outside but the latch was just too good and the glass shattered before the latch let go. D'oh!!

The window in the rear hatch is a heated window with factory-fitted demisting elements in it. The green illuminated knob on the right hand side of the dash controls the demister.

Another rare factory-fit option that I sourced for my van are the fresh air (or "ambulance") fans fitted to the air ducts in the cab. These were sourced from a friend in Cork and were fitted and wired up in about an hour. They're noisy buggers but ensure a good blast of air when the van is standing still or crawling in traffic. At speed they're no more useful than just opening the front fresh air vent but they're a nice accessory to have. Incidentally, they're called "ambulance" fans as they were standard equipment on factory ambulance converted bay window vans.

One small thing that mightn't be noticed straight away but is a very useful accessory is the rear inner handle on the sliding door. Ordinarily it is a white plastic handle and fixes to the inner rear end of the sliding door by a special bracket. It was only fitted to Westfalia converted vans as far as I know but after breaking two 30 year old handles I replaced the plastic handle with a chromed steel one from a split-screen bus. The handle helps to close the sliding door from inside the van as the front handle is hard to reach with the fridge cabinet in the way.

Ambulance fans in ducting covers	Ambulance fans, switch and loom	VWoA bumper overriders	Bumper overriders fitted

Deluxe dashboard clock (right) (NB: not a pic of my van)	I discovered there's more ways to open the quarterlights than the factory intended!!