Why I Decided to get a Campervan
My love of camper vans came about more out of necessity than trying to be cool. Back in the early naughties I was really into windsurfing down at Whitstable. I had a number of Mark II Golf GTI’s over the years and John Davis who runs Kent Volkswagen in Margate is a good friend of mine. So I was down the garage quite often with my Mark IIs and I got thinking that a camper van would be great for windsurfing. Somewhere to change, warm up, make a brew and carry loads of kit! I mentioned to John that I wanted a van and a while later I got the call, “We’ve got a great van in and the owner might sell it“. He wasn’t wrong either. It was a dark silver Devon Moonraker with a 2.0 ltr flat 4 air cooled engine in the rear! It was all original – even the rust! ha ha!
VW Campervan is Losing Power
I took her home and named her “Lady Jessica the First” or “Jess” for short. She had her problems like any van that age but overall she ran great. The main issue was she’d loose power once she’d warmed up. Turns out there was a tiny tear in the gasket between the carb and the engine. It wasn’t a standard carb, from what I recall, so John had an aluminium replacement machined (he only charged me about £20!), the guys a legend! That tear was opening up as the engine got hot and that meant that extra air was being sucked in so the mix was wrong. Once that was sorted then she prooved herself to be awesome. Cough cough obviously I NEVER went above the legal speed limit. But I am pretty sure that she would pull about 90+ miles per hour! Not your standard campervan! You could imagine the look on people’s faces when the vehicle overtaking them on a motorway was an old VW campervan!
I kept the van for about 3 years. In that time she was great! I took her to New Forest, windsurfing, regularly from Kent to West Yorkshire. One time I managed to get about 14 people from the pub to the night club (I don’t drink – so designated driver!). It was a bizarre scene with loads of men all dressed in black suits piling out of the back of this old van! I was renovating my house in Canterbury and she was also a beast of burdon. The rock and roll bed would go flat and I could carry loads of wood, cement bags, bricks, timber, doors. Having a campervan is really practical at times! I also went windsurfing most weeks down at Whitstable or at Sandwich Bay.
You’ll notice that the Devon Moonraker VW Camper Van conversion has a roof which pops the entire length. There are two large shelves which slide together in the roofspace to create a massive double bed up there. There’s also a double rock and roll bed at the back. In theory this van would sleep 4 people comfortably! I always used the rock and roll bed. The main reason for popping the top was so that I could actually stand up. VW campervans are not that tall inside and I’m 6 foot tall. If I wanted to cook, change or doing anything else back there I had to pop that big woobly plastic hat! Because it was plastic it also meant I couldn’t attach a roofrack so the windsurfing boards had to go on the inside and these bad boys were about 7 to 9 foot long.
Disaster Strikes
Life changes and the things we have either help us or become a problem. I was driving up to Leeds and got hit by a rather large stone somewhere near the bottom edge of the windscreen. I was doing about 70 cough cough at the time. I heard a loud dink! and then about 5 seconds later the entire screen just blew into tiny bits like glass gravel. It kind of stayed in position but started to fall inwards. It also instantly became difficult to see through! This was 3 decades old glass. Not modern safety-glass with a membrane etc. It shattered big style!
I pulled over on the motorway, about 200 miles to go and 50 miled behind me. This was back in about 2003, mobile phones were basic and the batteries were not great. I was running out of power! I called autoglass:
I put the phone down. I got my thick welding gloves out the toolkit and pulled the rest of the glass out the frame and put it into carrier bags to bin later. There’s no point in leaving glass on the hard shoulder to cause problems for the next person who breaks down. Slowly I drove with hazzards on and came off at the next junction. Using “The Force” (no satnav or Google maps back then) I managed to find a DIY shop (B&Q).
You Can Solve Most Emergencies With Duck Tape!
There I purchased enough duck tape to make a tape duck, a roll of heavy duty plastic and a large sheet of perspex. 30 mins later I had a windscreen in place. It would be alright so long as it didn’t rain because the perspex was resting on the windscreen wiper pivots and the blades wouldn’t touch the perspex anyway because their profile didn’t match. 5 mins later I’m back on the road and 6 mins later it started to rain! It’s dark by now. I made the journey, which involved stopping regularly to tape down lose bits of duck tape and to give my arm a rest from pushing against the perspex to stop it bowing inwards under the force of wind hitting it at 60+ mph.
The True Extent of the Damage
OK long story short time now, I managed to pull an old windscreen out of one of the vans that John was breaking at Kent VW but when I pulled away the rubber on my van I realised that the entire front panel was rotten and the duck tape pulled away the paint which was basically holding the rust together. I patched her up but she wasn’t going to make it through the next MOT like that. The thing with these old girls is that when you start doing work on them it’s like a can of worms. You might as well do a full restoration and for that you’re looking at anything up to £7k!!! especially if like me, you want a job done well or not at all.
So she ended up relaxing on my parents driveway while I decided what to do. Round about that time I also quit my job to setup my own business and one day a friend offered me a bit of money for the van. I said yes as it meant I could invest in a new laptop and so Jess’ final act of support was to enable me and my business by funding hardware. She went to a good home though as the guy was an enthusiast and a professional welder. He spent a lot of time on her and got her back on the road for him and his family to enjoy! Bye bye Jess, gone but not forgotten!
