RHD 52 Kombi

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by Scotty » Fri Jul 31, 2009 12:27 pm

Thought a few of you guys might be interested in the story of my 52 kombi:

It all started when a friend (and lodger) of mine bought a barndoor and was browsing the net for every web site with barndoors on it. He stumbled upon an advert on the eurobox web site and called me over to check out this bus. These are the photos from that ad:

Now I had no intention of selling the 58 samba I had owned for years which was still in a stripped down state, but seeing this rhd bus with piano hinge quarter lights in front of me got me thinking. Wow, that is one rare bus....... I gotta have it! I checked the date on the photos and they were a year old. I emailed the contact (a friend of the owner) but days passed and nothing. I tried to get a phoner number and succeded but still no response.

Skip forward a month or so and I get a phone call from a friend telling me he's bought the bus! I want that bus was my response.

I found out when the bus was coming into the country and just had to go and visit. I ended up looking at the bus in a lay-by whilst it was en-route to it's resting point. This is what I saw:

Needs a little bit of welding then, but I was more excited than I have ever been and it wasn't even mine.....

After I had seen the bus I made it my mission to persuade my friend that I should own the bus with a barrage of phone calls (almost daily) for months until he couldn't take it anymore and he sold me the bus!

Skip forward some more months and Paul Wisk gets stuck into the welding. I don't have many photos from this process, but as you can see pretty much the whole underneath was replaced:

Once Paul was finished I had the bus back home to finish it off. Here are some pics from the day it came back:

I then proceeded to remove the gearbox and clean up the bodywork at the back end which wasn't very pretty:

Once this was all done I could get the wheels back on and roll it out of the garage:

Then it was off to my friend Tim's to sort the front end. I took a week off work to help out. Due to the fact you can't buy narrowed beams for barndoors off the shelf we had to make one using a late beam (64-67 style). This meant cutting all the shock towers off until I was left with 2 tubes which were narrowed and had adjusters fitted:

I didn't want to cut the og beam at all so we had to fabricate the steering idler pin mount from scratch also which was the most fiddly thing to do because there are no flat edges to measure to on the og beam, it's all curves.

Tim also raised the steering box for me. I had to leave Tim to finish off the front end and put it together. I then went back over once it was on it's wheels, put my sprints on and rolled it outside:

Steveo sorted the brake lines at Tim's then it was back to mine for the final push. I had about 2 months or so before I was due to drive to camberg (2007) and it was getting tight! I still had a long list of small jobs to do and got stuck in with lots of help from steveo.

Front brakes on: