The Storm, and what came after

Those of you faithful enough to follow this blog have surely wondered if I'd ever post again, having gone silent for a year. Don't wonder any more: the worst of my crises have passed (my father passed, too, which was one of the crises.) I want this project rolling down the road, or at least the engine running in the driveway while I put the rest of the chassis back together.

By sheer providence, I was offered a way out of the job that has been slowly grinding me into paste for the last 13 years. I kissed off that hell-hole and my commute is now 24 feet from my bedroom to my office where I work from home for more money than when I commuted 24 miles through downtown stop-and-go to be beaten like a rented mule, verbally abused, and came home through a gawd-awful commute to merely collapse and do it again tomorrow. My new gig provides me easy sleep, a happy outlook, interesting work, and 14 hours a week LESS in commuting time and severe wear on my daily driver.
Frankly, I don't know what to do with myself, there's all of this extra time on my hands. I've got a 'honey-do' list my wife has taken pity on me and not dropped on my head and that needs work, but being back working on the Bus is on my own list. So I'm back in the saddle.

There are going to be four challenges to meet in the short term that will probably slow things down, one of which I never imagined.

1. It is winter, and my garage is unheated. Not to mention as drafty as a wicker basket. So progress is going to be slow while the weather warms up.

2. Garage: The dumping ground. My garage being mostly full of Bus has meant that my wife has used it as a dumping ground for everything that needs to be out of the house but can't go into cold storage in the shed (because that's full, too. Also on the honey-do list.) So a lot of stuff is going to have to shift, tools be regathered and re-sorted, and my working area put in order so that I can use it as a shop...instead of as dumpster style storage. Now that work has changed, I'll have the opportunity to put things right.

3. Um...I forgot. I work in High Performance Computing. (It pays, but not as much as you'd think.) One of the techniques for surviving this environment is to purge from your memory anything that you are not actively working on, so you can have all of the details of what you are working on fully at the mental tips of your fingers (to mix a metaphor.) That means that I've blown almost all of the ballast of everything that I have done for this project and actually have to re-read my own blog to re-acquaint myself with whatever cleverness or damn-foolishness I was planning. Even then, there will be a lot of lying under the Bus and scratching my head: "What the hell was I trying to do here....?" It is the only way to re-load the project so that it can be worked to completion.

4. The happy surprise, and how it changes things. When I started this, I presumed that I was going to be one of about 50 Type2s running around with Subie engines in the USA. Instead, the interest in Subaru conversions has absolutely shot through the stinking roof, no matter how the old tight-asses on thesamba.com have pooped on it. But it has spread far beyond Buses...Beetles, Ghias, pretty much anything that relied on the SoCal Aircooled scene to keep it supplied with running engine parts. Well, my predictions came true sooner that I ever expected: The low quality supply chain from China for parts has caught up with the Aircoolers and now many Vintage VW lovers are looking elsewhere for powertrains. I never expected to see things embraced so quickly. If anything, that means that I need to make VolksarU move forward faster than ever to head off hack-jobs. Again, I don't expect everyone to do things my way. "You can go to hell in your own way." Or you can follow where others have already broken ground. I intend to be breaking ground, not so much by just the choices that I make, but by COPIOUSLY documenting them for the benefit of everyone, and for the standardization of parts and processes.

So if you were wondering if I fell off the map and the project would never be finished, take heart. My wife demands that I finish it, and I don't mess with her. Her deal is: You start it, you finish it. So I'm very careful what I start.

I've also made a whole batch of friends online in the 24 months that this project languished while I took care of urgent family matters while trying not to die myself. Many groups have started on Facebook when thesamba.com made itself inhospitable. There are companies for conversion that didn't exist when I began. It is a very exciting time to be performing this conversion, but a lot of opportunities to be cheap and stupid and content with "It looks ok, let's go!" only to suffer catastrophe on the road. VolksarU is back in the game. Remember the motto: "Where U are part of the solution!"