Project2tone on the road

I can safely say, that after several months of rebuilding, rewiring and refitting parts to the Type 25, to replace those that had been poached off it whilst it lay abandoned, I had given it my all. It was time to pass the bus onto the experts at Volkspares (www.volkspares.co.uk) to see if they could breath that final bit of life into it that was so much needed

Worried about what they might find and more importantly what the bill might be in order for them to spend as much time as I had in order to source and rectify that problem, I arranged a recovery vehicle to collect and drop off at their Sydenham base.

Before the bus was even unloaded to Volkspares the boys had diagnosed the problem from the symptoms I had given them, and worked out the timescale needed to fix it. The gearbox was going to have to come out again though for the flexiplate to be bedded in correctly before refitting back in the va. Note us trying out the ZCW Angel wheels as a compare and contrast to the front steel wheels.

As you may have read in previous posts because of the rariety of air-cooled auto gearboxes we elected to try and successfully get a watercooled box to mate with our 2.0litre lump. This all worked fine and dandy except for the clearance of the oil cooler on the back of the unit.

Here you see here the original oil cooler off the vehicle. Again, becoming very rare and despite being a VW part, it is prone to failure. So we've had to look further afield to the good people at GoWesty (www.Gowesty.com) who have developed a replacement for this original part. Their cooler retails at $299 not including delivery, and they say the entire kit can be fitted to a Type 25 Auto gearbox in 30 minutes.

We blocked off the outlets in order to temporarily refit the gearbox just for MoT, but will be fitting a similar unit soon.

I'm glad to say that an hour later, we were street legal and ready to roll in the bus we have been working on throughout the past year. Yes there were a couple of advisory cautions but nothing that couldn't be sorted over the next couple of weeks quite easily...

...And because the roots of our Type 25 stemmed back to Volkspares in the past I think they were as happy as us to see it back on the road once more.