VW Combis

Good friends from Colac shared the recent Car show with tall tales and true of these Vans that NOW create so much interest . Many of these vehicles are now sold in the tens of thousands of dollars and parts are hard to come by .

Geoff's not only decked his outwith with all mod cons for a holiday he built a trailer to match using old set of VW sedan windows on each side. As we said on the day he could pay for every trip he goes on with a dollar for all the photos taken along the way .

"Ron" from the top of the Otways on the other hand has long left the old rust buckets but remembers fondly their unique contribution to his adventures.
Our experience with these plain but efficient machines started when we were kids.  Dad used to use the car to take plums to the Victoria market. Sometimes he would come back with more than he bargained for ; at least we valued the produce as jams , stewed and preserved - nearly everyday and in every way.






For holidays all 8 of us would pile in . Uncle Max made a fold back bench seat and put in windows and off we would go . A rack up top would take all the extras. Fond memories of Dad teaching us to sing in there on the long trip to Warracknabeal on Boxing Day.  Here we are at Uncle Johns at Kimba .Caramut in Western Victoria .
No 2 I can remember Dad in my youth trying to revive an old blue shell Combi out in the block where top end of Carter ave is now. Max being given , presumably, the uneviable task of getting a new  engine going in it . One had already done its day by the 1960's but I think it was one of the German ones and it had better steel than the Aussie blue one shown here .( that shell made it up the farm to play host to very little with its axles finally removed by keen buggy enthusiasts in the 1990's .I have a picture somewhere of Maher family riding the shell sled being taken to its final resting place in the scrap bin before sale .

On the road somewhere .





Not only did we possess 3 or 4 of the beasts we wrecked plenty , me cutting out roofs out of old ones in the wrecking yard to make sleds ( what a waste ! worth hundreds of dollars today ) I would cut just below the gutter line all around as that made it very strong and the edge wasn't sharp so you could jump on and off it ( great fun) .
Heres' one young lad helping me load up the many logs we cleared to create open pasture . The sleds were particularly useful for shifting sick stock and with upward edges could easily be used to load and shift heavy objects , Towing the sled around behind the tractor was the way we cleared the block and burnt the many remaining timber piles  , Photo taken looking east where Handasydes have their house ( one of the best views)

When we grew trees in The Otways for chaplaincy I killed another perfectly good shell out of Hutch's Colac wreckers yard ( Its a wonder I am not in jail today for such crimes ) to make a sled to cart Christmas trees to the top of the hill with the 3 or 4 wheel bikes . Again we enjoyed the ride through the long grass,  getting on and off at will . Cliff Youngs brother could cut the trees faster than we could deliver them to the semi.

Batteries were a big and unreliable expense  for starting the tractors,  so we learnt to start the old Fordson  6 cylinder diesel by tying a rope around the pulley on the LHS to the front crash bar and tearing backwards in reverse . You had to do it that way to make sure the rope stayed on the pulley . So much more reliable than batteries . Broke a few ropes though when they came off too early off its convex curves.

The brakes were bad with the hand brake cable too long and stretching easily along the whole body. The large steering wheel belies the fact that it wasn't hard to get " play " in the centrally located pin that controlled the steering. ( renewed the bushes in there a few times) With no stabilizer bars( at either end )  the vehicle would easily tip over and I can remember it lying on its side in the paddock one day after the driver side front wheel fell into a deep hole at low speed ( enough angular momentum to be exceedingly dangerous !!!!) Maybe it was my brothers driving ?
( whole back section above the engine ) had a barrier in it to hold all the tools ( in big wooden boxes . Won't tell you where we stored the explosives for removing stumps .

You may not make any money out of farming - but it was good fun trying and the place was cleaned up using them.
Took the young people on trips once down Logging tracks to the snow . The beasts with there reduction gearboxes and very high clearance would go anywhere . At various risky times all the passengers would be ordered to sit right up the back above the engine so the front was in no risk of going down ( the normal problem with 4WD and front wheel drives ) Getting out of bogs is good fun and there was always plenty of that ( the creek road was not made and often flooded )







On this trip to Adelaide and back I managed at some point on the trip home to leave /pull the vacuum line off the distributor/Carburetor . After a few hundred kilometers of less than satisfactory performance I discovered I had cracked both heads  and she was " no go " .All 6 of us stayed at a farmers shed for a few days at Mt Gambier while I took the heads off and got them welded ( nothing to those amazing engines which you can take out anywhere . The cracks between the valves were only short but quite enough) The girls were keen to get home even though our stay with the dairying farming couple we met at church was very pleasant.
That's probably enough indulgence for one day . Please add your story here