How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive
The illustrator for How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive has passed away. I read about this on the Dead Bus Diaries, which links to an nice obituary.
I've used this book many times in my VW career - which started way back in high school. I had a friend who was into VWs and he convinced me that my first car should be a VW Bug. I bought a '69 bug, and after driving it for 2 months, the generator went out and I decided it was time to start restoring it. I took a belt sander to it the next day, and used this book to remove the engine. Days later I was ripping out all the wiring getting ready to head to the paint shop. Needless to say, I had no idea what I was doing and the car suffered quite heavily for it. When I tried to put things back together, hardly anything worked and I had large waves in the body from grinding parts of the car down to bare metal.
I've re-built 5 VW engines in my lifetime, and I've always had this book by my side. It took me 4 times to get it right, but this was largely due to my lack of experience. Furthermore, I'd often get the engine finished and then head out on a road trip instead of waiting 500 miles for the initial settling in. Since I'm about to start rebuilding my Bus's engine, it's about time I bought a new copy of this book, so I just did that on Amazon. I haven't taken the engine out of the bus yet, but that sounds like a fun activity for next week when my Dad is in town.