Category: Articles

What can we say about this most venerable of all campers that hasn’t been said already? Reliability is about as good as it gets for any van as some of these engines are good for 200,000 miles without major rebuilds.

With about as much ‘street-cred’ as you can get in a camper, high residual value, an abundance of spare parts and rock solid build quality they remain an excellent choice.

Building your own motorhome or motorcaravan used to be the preserve of specialist coachbuilding companies. Well, surprisingly people are doing this more and more as DIY projects. The availability of good tools and bespoke fitments means that DIY motorcaravans and campers are a distinct possibility now.

With the help of a good book you can source parts, get ideas and generally inspire yourself to create your own, unique van with the minimum of problems.

Here’s a few decent books, for the price of a few beers!

Winnebago was founded in 1958 and with the first production machine rolling out in 1966, the company has become synonymous with luxurious motorhomes. I had my first one about 15 years ago. It was a 70’s “Minnie Winnie” (which some purists might argue wasn’t a real one) but I thought it was great and it did several thousand miles in my ownership. If you can afford one, my advice is to go for it. You won’t look back and resale values are very, very good! Here are a few currently available at auction:

Old magazines are always nice to read, especially when they contain campers. In my collection I have hundreds of reference articles which really give you a feel for what the camper was all about way back in the day, some which I even authored.

Notably good quality articles can be found in Practical Classics and Volks World

The only places left where you can pick up these magazines are at autojumbles, car boot sales, garage sales and by auction. I can’t bring the former to you but I’ve done my best to collect the best magazines for sale at auction which contain stuff on the vw camper.

Despite their relatively cheap price, I think the magazines bring incredible amounts of pleasure and truly offer a ‘snapshot’ of time.

The venerable T1.  So what is the history of this van that started it all?

Nicknamed the “Splittie”, “Bulli” or “Microbus” this van was to be a revolution just like its then stablemate the early Beetle.  It had an enviable production run from 1950 right up to 1967.  The “Splittie” name comes from its distinctive split front windscreen.  “Bulli” is German for Ox and this is widely rumoured to be the name VW strongly considered before luckily dropping it in favour of the blander “T1”.

Using the VW 1131cc air cooled engine from the ultra-reliable Beetle for the first 3 years of production and then later on a 1192cc air cooled unit, it showed a natural progression and people were quick to jump on board the “people’s camper”  (please don’t make reference to that expression by the way, it’s one I made up and I’d hate it to be used anywhere!).

For the first 6 years it was built in Wolfsburg, Germany and production was quite slow to start with (about 10 a day!).  In 1956 production moved to a brand new factory in Hanover which had about 4,500 employees.  Production reached somewhere around 250 vehicles per day before VW shut it all down and transferred to Brazil.  This happened in 1967 and Brazilian models are sometimes unofficially known as “T1.5”.

Cruelly nicknamed the “Barndoor”, campers made until 1955 had a huge cover over the engine.  Officially these were called the T1A.  The T1B models don’t have this beast of a cover and look nicer if you are a design purist.  The barndoor models are very sought after so some people incorrectly call post 1955 models by this name to inflate their prices.

T1C models started in 1963 and have a wider door at the rear.  Importantly, they also increased the cargo capacity from 750kg to a (metric) ton and dropped in a better 1.5 litre engine.

The T1 has a huge VW logo at the front, one that even a Beastie Boy might think twice about wearing round his neck…..

Production stopped in late 1967 in Germany but carried on in Brazil right up to the mid seventies.  The quality of these vans is often considered to be lower than the German-built variants by many people.  They can command high prices though and I have noticed the trend over recent years to refer to these buses by the number of windows they have.  A customer of mine has a “23 window Samba” which is valued higher than I paid for my last house…..

If you’re looking at one of these T1 vans, they can carry up to 8 people but the engines can be relatively underpowered.  Handling and fuel consumption are pretty poor too but at the end of the day, that’s not what you’re buying into with one of these classics.

Rarely do these come up at auction but when they do they fetch astronomical prices. I owned one back in 1993 and, while it was a superb example, it was hard to live with compared to modern variants. When I sold it, it was a genuinely sad day, but the money went to buy a better camper that only lost out on character. It was way more capable everywhere else.