The Cal-look Lounge

Saw a nice 21 window Microbus on the 118 freeway, done up much like the DKP "Mother" bus from the late Sixties, big fat tires, mags, and rear fenders cut out to clear the fat rear tires. From every angle it looked super cool. Wish I had a camera in the car this morning!
So this begs the question.... would you build one? In this era of "preserving our resources" and the blasphemy of doing cosmetic surgery on an early Bus, could you raise the kinfe and make a Bus like this? I wish I had a picture to convey how cool it looked.
Personally, as much as I dislike early T2's and swimming downstream, I'd take great pleasure in upsetting all the purists. Those Firestone Wide Ovals would look great on some Ansen mags stuffed in the (cut) rear wells.
Light the flames.  8)

Jim, I've got a Muntz 8track in the garage and a sawzall........................There's a bad moon on the rise............................

With ALL of the retro and nostalgia builds people do nowadays, its hard to believe someone somewhere hasn't exploited an example found behind some old, abandoned fuel station half buried in a field of tall grass just off the main highway where it dropped a valve and was never recovered.
They intended to return and retrieve it, but the hitch they caught took them beyond their intended destination where perhaps an even higher state of mind repeatedly pushed the transporter farther and farther back in the list of to-dos until finally it simply became a memory fondly recounted when old friends assemble.
 ;)
TxT

 ;)


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The '67 and earlier T2's I've owned/worked on/driven have all been (with one notable exception!) been a bit death trappy to drive. The exception was Dave Galassi's crew cab, the white one with BMW rack/pinion and FI motor. It drove like a fast Vanagon.
My dad and I had a very very nice (more so mechanically than cosmetically) '59 pickup that we bought from original owner, I built a 94 x 74 with Denham 40 x 35 VW heads, small Scat cam (C35) and Weber44's ............ to haul furniture, recycling, parts of other VW's..etc. It was fast, if you could get it to hook up. Traction wasn't a wrod in it's vocabulary. Ever seen 150hp at work through reduction boxes and swingaxle?
But it sure was refreshing to see this 21 window rolling nice and high and proud, not the usual slammed sled skateboarding and pogo-sticking along. The wide tires sealed the deal. It was an early bus I actually liked.

I say go for it... it would be totally worth it to watch the bus guys' heads explode. lol.  My thought: "It's just a VW."

Hey Jim,
Would be a fun project except: Have you seen the prices on split window buses. A P.O.S. is going for no less than $4.500. WTF !

Kinda funny, Thanks to the guys that cut them up, Turned into a pretty good product for me . Funny part, My good friend randy about had to force me to make them ! Who knew. If ya want to see some die hard guy's restore'n old cars, Look at the barndoor forum' on The Samba. Guy's are pull'n up stuff that had been in the bottom of a lake for 30 years and restore'n them. Gotta love the VW hobbie !!

Well this small grainy pic is me in the process of shortying a 58 combi less than 10 years ago .  I'll admit , I kind of regret doing this now , but chopping the arches out is small fry in comparison . I would do it , you've got to be brave to be different !

Rob

aww hellz yes I would! It's funny how we used to think that cut wells and vents were the end of the world but man that's nothing compared to what I see people do to slam a bus. New wells and vents are a weekend repair if you know how to bang tin.

The first shot in the wreckabus theme: to do the job justice you'd have to start with a panel. Do an early ball beam with late discs redrilled for 4 1/2 pattern. Late rear drums redrilled for 4 1/2 pattern. As-cast 15x5 and 15x8.5 Torq Thrusts. Hurst 5.60-15 recaps on 165 carcasses and grooved 28 3/4 X7 1/2-15s pie crusts (radials that look just like better looking bias-ply tires? What's not to love about that?). The taller tire would make the bus actually decent to drive on the freeway and let you decamber the rear to about 2 degrees negative to kill some of the death trappiness. Find yosef a pair of Miller Havens fiberglass flairs and scoops and feel good about whacking the wells.

Build a thick-wall 2180 with a 110 cam and a single Zenith on a plenum manifold. Get a Thunderbird standard header (1 1/2) and run a single 1 3/4" pipe with a glasspack.

Spray bomb the wheel centers gold and lay up the body in Corvette Ontario Orange. Then have someone like Steve Stanford (who lives to see the day vans come back) hand-letter Orange Sunshine down the side in gold leaf with a flake-brown border.   

Man, that would put all those faggy straight-axle jobs to serious shame. Hang in the right circles and a bus like that could get one of these.

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Come on man, what are you thinking.
Then all you'd hear is, "Does this have aircon, it's hot in here", and "Does my bum look big in this?".

Truth...lol.

I have seen these styled busses reffered to as "Jersey Look".
 ;D

Oh is it? This is what my wife drives:

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Well, I should say that's what she HAS. It's been in paint jail for the past few years. Tip: Never ever paint a car. She's actually quite steamed that she doesn't get to drive it.

And no, it's not something I wanted her to have. In fact she's done a ton of the work to it.
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You suckers just don't know how to pick wimmens. Sorry for the thread hijack but I couldn't help it. :)

John tell us about Rick Meissner's Bus from the golden era.....

Were the vans typically hot rodded too?

Couldn't do it. Just because it was done "back in the day" doesn't mean it was a good idea.

If that cools your crotch then, well...you might be battin' for the wrong team.  ;D

It's definitely a camper because it has a flip seat.

Uhhh...John that's what I'm talking about too. If she 'cools' your crotch then you're probably batting for the wrong team. You might have to break the news to Christie. And so on. Make more sense?  ;)

Oh, I'm well aware there's always an exception to the rule... but in every cliche' generality there's a modicum of truth, that was the point of my "Truth" comment. lol.

You mean like skinny fronts that have no grip, loud exhausts that attract attention, that sorta thing?

The best fun I ever had driving around was in my old Bay panelvan. It had JUST BARELY enough grunt, so when you went around a corner at an intersection and dumped it, the auto (yes, it gets even worse! HAHAHA!) would kick it back to 1st, light it up a bit, and swing the back out AT LEAST 2ft.
 ;D

Taste is a subjective thing, but I'd say since people are still using the big & little treatment on many types of builds that it doesn't fit into that category.
Custom vans are like disco music. Dead. And for good reason.

Dude, aren't you too young to be that far out of the loop?

When 'traditional' hot rods got trendy 10 years ago the pioneers started building trad choppers. Now that the trad choppers have gotten trendy they've jumped ship to custom vans. Trust me when I say that custom vans are seriously rebounding hard.

Coby Gewertz (Church magazine) at Grand National Roadster Show '11
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Colby Martin's (SEMA) brother's at '11 and '12 GNRS:
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Matt Davis, owner of DicE magazine from about five years ago:
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Even customizer Gene Winfield recreated the Econoline he built for the Ford Custom Car Caravan (GNRS '13):
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More from the DicE site from three years ago:
http://dicemagazine.blogspot.com/2010/10/van-creeps-van-in.html (http://dicemagazine.blogspot.com/2010/10/van-creeps-van-in.html) 
 
And guys are fully building vans again.
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Remember, even Cal Look--as 'cool' as it is right now--was once out of fashion. I caught flak for having a shaved bug with black window rubber...IN 1991!

So remember, be careful Of the words you say; keep them soft and sweet. Because you never know from day to day which ones you'll have to eat.

Hell yeah I'd build an early bus done that way. Back in high school (early 70's) a girl friend of mine had a mustard Yellow Westy (think it was a 60-61) with the rear wheel wells cut, White Spoke Jackmans all around and a stout 1835 with a Zenith. Surf racks on top (the original Aloha ones, which I still have a set) and we were off to the beach regularly. That thing was the balls and used to love gassing it and doing the rear wheel hop!
Her dad drove an Oval Window Baja!

And JohnL, you may remember that we had a girl that worked at the San Berdoo Auto Haus that had a two tone green early westy with big's and little's as well. She was a surfer chick but I'll be damned if I can remember her name, which is really sad since we dated for a bit. In fact one Saturday I came into Costa Mesa to work and a couple of people had called in sick, you were a little panicked about staff and I said "no problem ______ is at my house on Balboa Island sleeping in. I'll call her to come in". She came and worked at CM that day. Damn I wish I could remember her name.......

My point was that big & little tires on old hot rodded cars (VW or otherwise) haven't gone out of style since they were first tried. Other styling elements have come and gone, but bigs and littles are just as fundamental as a big motor.

I have seen the trend come back towards custom vans, some of the new builds are actually done tastefully. However I've yet to see one van that was built in a pure 70's style (orginal build or new) that ticks any of my boxes.

So maybe my comment was more hopeful than accurate :)

Oh yes they have. Anyone who remembers when low-profile tires came out in the mid '60s will tell you that you just weren't at all cool if you ran bigs-'n'-littles. That was '50s greaser stuff, man! You don't see very many cars with skinny tires in magazines for years. Guys like Bud Bryan, Pete Chapouris, Jim "Jake" Jacobs, and Peter Eastwood stood out in the early '70s by embracing skinny tires of yore. That's what made the cal-look thing such a big deal--they were running Pirelli when everything else went Polyglas. Those cars were the exception to the rule after a period of skinny-tire exile.


Okay, there's no such thing as a tasteful custom van. You have to consider the intent of the original builders. Taste had no place in vanning. I mean this was the era of shirts that advertised mustache rides for a nickel. Vanning was about debauchery--you had your own boudoir on wheels after all. Get a girl in your van, light a joint, and cue Frampton Comes Alive and you were gonna get laid, dude. It was 100-percent excess and the van had to promote that image just as fast car have to promote the image of power.

I mean if this doesn't say it all I don't know what does:
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I can understand that it's not your bag. But you can't just make a blanket statement that it's dead. Hell, I hate disco and it came back too.

I think what we need to understand is the importance of variety. Right now there are two acceptable ways to build a bus: as a full restoration (yawn) and as some straight-axle thing that forbids you to change the rear wheels on the side of the road in less than three hours (yawn and ouch). It's not much of a stretch to think that they could come back big. I mean look at flake paint, Bellflower pipes, and Supreme wheels. 15 years ago that stuff was just goofy '60s crap and now it's super hot.

Forget Frampton Chris ; When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, put on side one of Led Zeppelin IV.

As for 70's style van, this is pretty damn close, maybe a little more back tire and a little more rake and it would be like the one I drove in High School and would do so again today
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Then again this pretty much sums it up too
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Okay Damone.  ::)


Yeah, but I wouldn't go hanging around any high schools nowadays. Yeah, tire and rake would do it. People are all uptight about gaposis but these things benefit from some quirky proportions.


Man, when that movie came out the first thing I did was go to Desert Surf (Las Vegas) and order a pair of checkerboard slip-ons. I still think they are the coolest things I ever owned.

recently the wife and I were at a car show and there was this dude crusin around in a beat up Corvair van and my wife said "that guy looks like a Child Molester". We called him Chester the rest of the day.

The old man that drove the school bus when I was in sixth grade was named Chester. No joke.

What happened to Jim? I think we I scared him away from his own thread.  ;D

Yep that's what keeps this hobby interesting. There's lots about the current "cool kid Cal Look rule book" I find as not all that cool, myself personally. But there must be a reason most everybody else does things the way they do. I don't like the tinsel look (accesories on top of accessories on top of acccessories), I don't care much for the "replace every bit of VW anything with something from the Jeg's Catalog" look either. Narrowed (excessively) beams look cartoonish to me. The really low Bus thing makes no sense to me. But the Bus I saw on the 118 struck a nice chord with me, simply because it had (and I have used this word before here) "presence." It was clean enough to look as if it had recently been either built, or at least freshend up and I liked that. It was way outside the norm of today, yet it was obviously loved by somebody (with enough balls to be different) enough to go thru the expense and hours to give this Bus its Presence. It pretty much looked like this Bus below, except it was like a Kalahari Beige with dark root beer brown roof. The slot mags suited it perfectly.

Just a littleoff topic : i definitely think that Slot mags are the only way to go if you want to build a pre cal era bus or bug... The offset of those rims is just perfect for that look...

Slot mags? Yep, I agree. I hated them when new, still do, even have a set of ugly 14" alloys with wide low profiles on the Superbug I have waiting..........but I still hate them, HAHAHA, so I won't be running them personally.

I just realised, not van-related though, a bit OT.
In my shed I have a deep heavy metalflake and shades of silver through gunmetal to black. I also have an old Japanese inline 4, ready for a few degrees extra rake and a few extra inches of arm length before I slam it, and I also have 4 open megs from Cone Engineering to build an exhaust. I have a large chrome rectangular headlight off Ebay coming for it too.

Just goes to show that age is no boundary whatsoever where bad taste is concerned!  ;D

I refuse to like Disco though, ever..........